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State Department Tag

Posted by Mary Chastain on August 18, 2016 17 Comments
The State Department has confirmed the U.S. used the $400 million payment to Iran as leverage for the prisoners they released in January. From The New York Post:
State Department spokesman John Kirby was asked at Thursday’s press briefing: “In basic English, you’re saying you wouldn’t give them $400 million in cash until the prisoners were released, correct?” “That’s correct,” Kirby replied.

Posted by Mary Chastain on July 01, 2016 9 Comments
The State Department has asked for a 27 month delay to release emails from Hillary Clinton when she served as secretary of state. That means the department would not release the emails until October 2018, over a year into Clinton's presidency if she should win in November.

Posted by Mary Chastain on June 28, 2016 11 Comments
Secretary of State John Kerry spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin about alleged harassment from Russian officers towards U.S. diplomats across Europe. From The Washington Post:
In Moscow, where the harassment is most pervasive, diplomats reported slashed tires and regular harassment by traffic police. Former ambassador Michael McFaul was hounded by government-paid protesters, and intelligence personnel followed his children to school. The harassment is not new; in the first term of the Obama administration, Russian intelligence personnel broke into the house of the U.S. defense attache in Moscow and killed his dog, according to multiple former officials who read the intelligence reports.

Posted by Mary Chastain on June 03, 2016 9 Comments
President Obama press advisor Jen Psaki attacked Fox News after reporter James Rosen asked for clarification over her statement about deleted footage from a 2013 press briefing about secret Iran and U.S. talks. Rosen asked then-State spokeswoman Psaki about the meeting in 2013, a year after the department denied such talks existed. Psaki admitted they took place, but Rosen found someone deleted his questions from the old video:
The department acknowledged Wednesday that several minutes of video from the 2013 briefing – at which then-State Department spokeswoman Psaki appeared to acknowledge misleading the press over the Iran nuclear deal – had been intentionally cut. The order apparently came from an official in the public affairs office, but that individual has not been identified.
Fox News published their complete email exchange, where Psaki berates Rosen for politely asking for an explanation after Psaki referred to the transcript and not the video.

Posted by Mike LaChance on April 16, 2016 20 Comments
President Obama is still pushing for the U.S. to accept more refugees from Syria, and his agenda is now being supported by the U.S. State Department. The Hill reports:
State seeks to pick up pace on bringing Syrian refugees to US The State Department is hoping to bring an average of nearly 1,500 Syrian refugees to the United States per month in order to meet President Obama's target of settling 10,000 refugees in the country by September.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 15, 2016 5 Comments
Judicial Watch has been fighting a years-long battle to obtain records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) regarding Huma Abedin's non-State Department employment arrangement. In the course of that fight, issues regarding Hillary Clinton's handling of email and her email server have become central. Judicial Watch has won many key procedural fights, the latest of which was the Court ruling that Judicial Watch could take discovery as to State Department practices with regard to obtaining Hillary's emails. The two sides have submitted their positions to the Court, but the Court may not need to rule because an agreement was just reached (full embed at bottom of post). The agreement, in the form of a Joint Proposed Order, gives Judicial Watch what it was seeking, but puts off limits discovery regarding Hillary's handling of classified information and the FBI investigation, which Judicial Watch was not seeking in any event. Here is the key paragraph:

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on April 09, 2016 14 Comments
A year after the House Select Committee on Benghazi made its initial request, the State Department finally handed over 1,100 pages of records. These records contain include files, "stored on network folders used by senior employees within the Office of the Secretary, and emails from Cheryl Mills, Jake Sullivan, Huma Abedin, Susan Rice, and Patrick Kennedy," according to the Select Committee. Records received Friday were in response to requests made by the committee in November of 2014. When the requests were unanswered, subpoena's were issued in March of 2015. Rep. Trey Gowdy, Committee Chairman said:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on March 15, 2016 13 Comments
In late February we reported that the court in the FOIA case seeking State Department records as to Huma Abedin granted Judicial Watch's motion for discovery, and required Judicial Watch to submit a discovery plan:
In a ruling sure to keep the Hillary Clinton email scandal alive through the summer, if not longer,  a federal just has granted Judicial Watch the right to take discovery as to whether Hillary’s home server was part of an effort to evade the Freedom of Information (FOIA) law by shifting federal records off-site and into the sole control of Hillary, her attorney’s and consultants.... Given the difficulty of obtaining records, particularly in light of the destruction of at least some records maintained on Hillary’s home server, led Judicial Watch to seek discovery, including depositions of key officials. Such discovery is not routine in FOIA cases, and good cause needs to be shown to obtain discovery.... The Court granted the motion today, via two Minute Orders (meaning orders reflected on the court docket sheet, not separate documents:

Posted by Mike LaChance on March 08, 2016 27 Comments
We've covered the speech squelching progressive concept of microaggressions at College Insurrection countless times as an impediment to free expression on campus. Now it seems this idea is entering parts of the government. Peter Hasson reports at the Daily Caller:
State Dept. Warns Employees: ‘Microaggressions’ May Count As Harassment Following the example set by elite liberal universities, the U.S. State Department has begun cracking down on “microaggressions” in the workplace. According to a newsletter from State Department chief diversity officer John Robinson, employees who commit “microaggressions” may risk violating harassment laws in doing so.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on February 14, 2016 10 Comments
In the latest batch of released emails, more than 15% had classified information. The Washington Times reports:
More than 15 percent of the latest batch of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails released Saturday contain classified information, with three of the messages being labeled “secret” — continuing to add to the questions surrounding her email use. The department released 551 messages Saturday in response to a federal judge’s order.
Apparently, the State Department had tried to delay the release of the emails due the Democrat primary schedule; however, a judge ordered their release.

Posted by Jonathan Levin on January 13, 2016 8 Comments
The US State Department is criticizing Israel's proposed "Transparency Law," suggesting that Israelis should not know when foreign governments are influencing their domestic politics. If enacted, the current version of the Transparency Law would deem an Israeli Non-Governmental Organization ("NGO") a foreign agent if it receives more than 50% of its budget from foreign government sources.  The NGO would then be required to disclose that it is a foreign agent in publications and political tracts, and to disclose foreign donors. The impetus behind the Transparency Law is Israel's increasingly hostile NGO community, such NGO's propaganda value to Israel's enemies, and their overwhelmingly non-Israeli financing.  Gerald Steinberg of Bar Ilan University and NGO Monitor has explained the problem:

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on January 07, 2016 10 Comments
Tardy for a court-ordered document dump deadline, the State Department will release more than 2,000 pages of emails from embattled former Secretary, Hillary Clinton Thursday evening. According to The Hill, forty-five of the newly published emails have been marked classified, bringing the total classified email tally to 1,319:
Thursday’s document dump is likely to be the second-to-last release of Clinton’s emails by the State Department, which has been ordered by a court to have the full 55,000 pages of emails to the public by the end of the month.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 31, 2015 18 Comments
The Hill reports:
The State Department on Thursday afternoon released a batch of 5,500 pages of Hillary Clinton's emails online, in its second-to-last tranche of the former secretary of State's messages. Thursday's dump — coming the afternoon of New Year's Eve — is the seventh of eight court-ordered releases.... The emails released Thursday do not have "fully completed data fields on the FOIA website," the State Department said earlier in the day. This means they can't be easily sorted by subject, sender or recipient — which had been an option in previous email dumps.
In other words, not only did the State Department dump the documents on New Year's Eve, it dumped documents many of which are not accessible. The rush to get something online appears to be due to the State Department having failed to comply with court-ordered deadlines. And, via Politico, the number of "classified" emails has skyrocketed:

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on December 08, 2015 10 Comments
The State Department's recent legacy of international embarrassment remains firmly intact. Daesh (ISIS or ISIL) has a formidable online presence which they use to spread propaganda, recruit new jihadis, and collect information. Called "Think Again Turn Away" (yeah, we have no clue how they came up with that either) the State Department launched its own overt-education initiative to combat ISIS on social media as part of an Integrated Strategic Counterterrorism Communications Initiative created by Executive Order in 2011. Coming from the same people who think an influx of jobs would deter jihadis from strapping bombs to their chests, the results are about what you'd expect. According to the Washington Post, "review by outside experts cast new doubt on the U.S. government’s ability to serve as a credible voice against the terrorist group’s propaganda, current and former U.S. officials said." You mean to tell me The ABCs of Daesh is not an effective way to combat radical Islamic terrorism? GTFOH.

Posted by David Gerstman on November 27, 2015 4 Comments
Rep. Mike Pompeo (R - Kan.) and Sen. Tom Cotton (R - Ark.) have a lot in common. Both are army veterans and both are graduates of Harvard Law School. And both have been doing a great job of exposing aspects of the nuclear deal with Iran that the administration would rather keep quiet. This week it was reported that an inquiry from Pompeo got the State Department to admit that the nuclear deal was never signed and is not "legally binding." Julia Frifield, the Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs, wrote in response to Pompeo's inquiry if he could see the signed agreement, in a letter reproduced at the congressman's website, that the nuclear deal was not binding and that it was not signed by any party. The key parts of the letter read:
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is not a treaty or an executive agreement, and is not a signed document ...

Posted by Amy Miller on November 04, 2015 3 Comments
Today the State Department informed TransCanada Corp. that the agency review of the Keystone XL pipeline and its associated permits will continue in spite of the corporation's request that the process be paused. TransCanada is currently in both a legal and logistical battle regarding the future pipeline’s route through Nebraska; the corporation submitted its original request for a pause to the State Department "out of respect for the process" of policy negotiations with lawmakers, activists, and property owners in Nebraska. More from the WSJ:
“We have communicated to them our intention to continue the review,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said. “We’re not required to pause it based on an applicant’s request, there’s no legal basis to do that.” Mr. Kirby added that a lot of interagency work has gone into reviewing the project.

Posted by Mirabelle Ward on October 06, 2015 23 Comments
The hypocrisy of this administration with respect to Israel can, at times, be stunning. One of those times was in August of 2014, in the middle of the Israeli military operation known as Operation Protective Edge, which was designed to stop rocket-fire emanating from Gaza. A school run by UNRWA, the UN agency that is supposed to provide humanitarian aid to Palestinian Arab refugees and their second, third, and fourth generation descendants, was hit by shelling. It was well-known at that time that Gaza's Hamas rulers were firing on Israel from positions within civilian areas, and that the UNRWA schools were basically doubling as rocket warehouses. Despite this knowledge, State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki said at the time that the US was "appalled" by the "disgraceful shelling," that Israel "must do more to meet its own standards," and that "the suspicion that militants are operating nearby does not justify strikes that put at risk the lives of so many innocent civilians."
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