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Chuck Grassley Tag

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on October 07, 2016 44 Comments
As we are learning that the FBI files reveal "missing bankers' boxes filled with the former secretary of state’s emails.," veteran FBI agents are expressing their concern that Comey's approach to the Hillary case has "damaged the reputation" of the FBI due to his insistence that the agency politicize the investigation and its results. Fox News reports:
Buried in the 189 pages of heavily redacted FBI witness interviews from the Hillary Clinton email investigation are details of yet another mystery -- about two missing “bankers boxes” filled with the former secretary of state’s emails. The interviews released earlier this month, known as 302s, also reveal the serious allegation that senior State Department official Patrick Kennedy applied pressure to subordinates to change the classified email codes so they would be shielded from Congress and the public.

Posted by Mary Chastain on August 22, 2016 3 Comments
The House Oversight Committee recently received classified documents and notes from the FBI's untaped interview with Hillary Clinton in order to understand why Director James Comey didn't recommend charges against her. The FBI said it wants to remain as transparent as possible, but Chairman Jason Chaffetz said he has a few problems with the documents, especially since many are heavily redacted:
"Hillary Clinton is out there saying there's not very much sensitive information in there, that she didn't trade in sensitive classified information. It's so sensitive and so classified that even I as the chairman of the Oversight Committee don't have the high level of clearance to see what's in those materials," Chaffetz said. "I think the documents are overly classified. We're going to call on the FBI this week to give us a version where there's non-classified, the unclassified material and the classified material redacted so that that could be out there in the public. I think that's the right thing to do."

Posted by Mary Chastain on August 17, 2016 9 Comments
The FBI has sent over some of the classified documents and notes from their untaped interview for their Hillary Clinton investigation to the House Oversight Committee in order to understand why Director James Comey did not recommend charges against her. However, Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz said the FBI heavily redacted the majority of the documents:
“As the chairman of the chief investigative body in the House, it is significant I can’t even read these documents in their entirety,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah told Fox News. “This shows how dangerous it was to have this intelligence, highly classified to this day, on the former secretary’s unsecured personal server where it was vulnerable.”

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on June 21, 2016 16 Comments
Four gun control measures—two sponsored by Democrats, two by Republicans—failed in the Senate on Monday. USA Today provides a brief overview of each amendment (to a DOJ spending bill):
► An amendment by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., would allow the attorney general to deny a gun sale to anyone if she has a "reasonable belief" — a lesser standard than "probable cause" — that the buyer was likely to engage in terrorism. The proposal is popularly known as the "no-fly, no-buy" amendment, but wouldn't just apply to people on the "no fly" terrorist watch list. ► An Republican alternative by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, which would require that law enforcement be alerted when anyone on the terror watch list attempts to buy a weapon from a licensed dealer. If the buyer has been investigated for terrorism within the past five years, the attorney general could block a sale for up to three days while a court reviews the sale. ► An amendment by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, would make it more difficult to add mentally ill people to the background check database, giving people suspected of serious mental illness a process to challenge that determination.

Posted by Taryn O'Neill on May 05, 2016 44 Comments
As we've seen for months, the burning question thrown at Republican candidates around the nation has been, "Will you support Donald Trump if he's the nominee?" Democrats and media alike have worked to tie republican candidates to the newly declared presumptive GOP presidential nominee, who is arguably the most despised political candidate in modern U.S. history. Unfortunately, 24 GOP Senate seats are up for election in November, many of which the Democrats see as ripe for the plucking. Due in part to the Tea Party effect in 2010, the Democrats are only defending 10 seats. Even worse, as the Huffington Post points out, is the fact that 6 of the Republican senators are in states that President Obama won twice. The Democrat Senatorial Campaign Committee has wasted little time, launching its "Party of Trump" campaign back in March. The effort seeks to scorn vulnerable Senate Republicans with their prior remarks, including those promising that they would support the Republican presidential nominee, whoever he or she turns out to be.

Posted by Mike LaChance on April 24, 2016 13 Comments
In an appearance on FOX News Sunday today, DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schulz dismissed Hillary Clinton's email scandal and the ongoing FBI investigation as a non-issue. Host Chris Wallace called her out for innacurate comparisons to other officials. The Washington Free Beacon reports:
Schultz: Clinton Used Private Email The Same Way as Previous Secretaries of State … ‘Other Than the Private Server’ Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D., Fla.) stumbled while trying to defend Hillary Clinton’s private email troubles on Fox News Sunday, claiming Clinton used a private email the same way as previous secretaries of state “other than the private server.”

Posted by Mike LaChance on January 31, 2016 31 Comments
Liberals in politics and media love to talk about the so-called gun show loophole. You've heard it a thousand times from Obama, Hillary, Bernie and countless talking heads. If these people are to be believed, anyone can waltz into a gun show and buy an automatic or semi-automatic weapon with no background check. The Heritage Foundation's Daily Signal recently cleared up some of these myths.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 21, 2016 72 Comments
Anyone who a year ago picked Donald Trump and Ted Cruz to be the two leading Republican candidates heading into the Iowa Caucuses either (i) is a liar, or (ii) should invest heavily in the lottery because they are beyond lucky. Certainly, the powers that be in the Republican Party were not expecting it. Here's what a Fox News poll looked like in January 2015: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/interactive/2015/01/29/fox-news-poll-voters-believe-romney-clinton-remain-top-picks-for-2016-believe/ The pollster didn't even bother to ask about Trump. And Cruz was in low single digits. Now Trump is on top in the national polls and Cruz is in second place. In Iowa, three polls released today show Cruz leading, a dead heat, and Trump leading.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 16, 2015 23 Comments
There hasn't been much talk of Hillary's multi-level email problem because of the media attention to all things Trump. But here's a reminder that Hillary's email scandal may be in a Trump-induced hibernation, but it has not gone away. The Hill reports:
A pair of emails on Hillary Clinton’s private server was indeed “top secret” when they passed through her machine, intelligence officials have concluded, according to a pair of reports. The tentative finding comes despite opposition from the State Department, which had disputed the initial classification level handed down by the Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General. According to Fox News, one official called the decision to classify the messages at the highest level a “settled matter.”

Posted by Amy Miller on September 21, 2015 17 Comments
John Kerry said in a statement Sunday that President Obama plans to increase the number of refugees allowed into the United States. Currently, the United States grants 70,000 refugee visas per year. Under the new plan, 85,000 refugees will be granted access to the US in 2016, up to a grand total of 100,000 in 2017. Officials say that the bulk of those additional refugees will come from Syria, as well as troubled areas in Africa. More from the New York Times:
“This step is in keeping with America’s best tradition as a land of second chances and a beacon of hope,” Mr. Kerry said, adding that it “will be accompanied by additional financial contributions” for the relief effort. ... Four million Syrians have fled to other countries, and hundreds of thousands of others from the Middle East and Africa have been pouring into Europe. Mr. Kerry said the United States would explore ways to increase the overall limit of refugees beyond 100,000, while carrying out background checks to ensure that they are not infiltrated by terrorists. “We still need to do more, and we understand that,” Mr. Kerry said in a joint news conference with Mr. Steinmeier.

Posted by Mike LaChance on August 28, 2015 17 Comments
Hillary Clinton's trusted aide Huma Abedin was in the news earlier this month when it was alleged that she was overpaid while working at the State Department. A new report from Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger of the Washington Post sheds some light on how such a thing could happen. Abedin was working multiple jobs while at the State Department:
How Huma Abedin operated at the center of the Clinton universe As Hillary Rodham Clinton was preparing for her farewell international trip as secretary of state, her close aide and confidante Huma Abedin e-mailed a small number of longtime political allies to help arrange an intimate get-together at a private club in Dublin. “Maybe we can all gather for drinks/dinner and HRC can come join for as long as she can?” Abedin wrote. The December 2012 event showcased the unique position that Abedin occupied at the apex of the Clintons’ public and private worlds during the final six months of Hillary Clinton’s tenure heading the State Department. At the time, Abedin held four jobs with four different employers — an arrangement allowed by a special government designation she held permitting outside employment. And each job had a connection to the Dublin dinner.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 18, 2015 33 Comments
The Daily Mail is reporting an interesting twist in the Hillary email saga, EXCLUSIVE: Hillary's email firm was run from a loft apartment with its servers in the BATHROOM
The IT company Hilary Clinton chose to maintain her private email account was run from a loft apartment and its servers were housed in the bathroom closet, Daily Mail Online can reveal. Daily Mail Online tracked down ex-employees of Platte River Networks in Denver, Colorado, who revealed the outfit's strong links to the Democratic Party but expressed shock that the 2016 presidential candidate chose the small private company for such a sensitive job. One, Tera Dadiotis, called it 'a mom and pop shop' which was an excellent place to work, but hardly seemed likely to be used to secure state secrets. And Tom Welch, who helped found the company, confirmed the servers were in a bathroom closet. It can also be disclosed that the small number of employees who were aware of the Clinton contract were told to keep it secret. The way in which Clinton came to contract a company described as a 'mom and pop' operation remains unclear. However Daily Mail Online has established a series of connections between the firm and the Democratic Party.
This raises serious security concerns, as CNN reports over 300 emails located so far now require review for classified information:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 11, 2015 53 Comments
From day one we have been saying "get the server." On March 11, 2015, after Hillary's infamous UN press conference regarding the server, I wrote, Hillary’s consciousness of guilt:
Why volunteer that she deleted personal emails, and drag the red herring across the trail to lead the discussion towards Chelsea, her mother and yoga? Remember, Hillary said she would not turn over the server because it had personal emails on it, but then inconsistently said the personal emails were not on the server because she chose “not to keep” them. Hillary gave away the game at that point to me. Hillary showed a consciousness of guilt and deliberate misdirection. Get the server.
https://youtu.be/k5WZdyCI4Uc?t=2m31s Now the Feds will.

Posted by Bruce Carroll on June 25, 2014 22 Comments
FOX News' Chad Pergram tweeted some breaking developments late this afternoon regarding a new email dump from the ever-interesting Lois Lerner file.
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