Clinton again. It just keeps popping up in connection with questions concerning
crimes, classified information mishandling, secrecy, lies, and purloined
government documents.
And as new names pop up in connection with the
Hillary Clinton (and Obama administration) email scandal, Judicial Watch follows
the leads as only Judicial Watch can.
We have just filed yet another
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit seeking records concerning the
service and maintenance of former Secretary Hillary Clinton's email server.
Specifically, Judicial Watch seeks records that will show whether Bryan Pagliano
was hired or paid by the State Department to maintain the email server used by
Clinton and her aides to conduct official State Department business and whether
the State Department spent taxpayer money to manage the email server. (Pagliano,
Hillary Clinton's IT director during her 2008 run for the presidency, was hired
by her State Department in 2009.)
Our team filed a simple FOIA request on
August 5, the day after The
Washington Post reported Pagliano, while employed at the State
Department, "continued to act as the lead specialist responsible for [Clinton's
email system]...with Pagliano summoned at various times to fix problems.
Notably, the system crashed for days after New York was hit by Hurricane Sandy
in October 2012, while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state." Judicial Watch's
request seeks:
• Records concerning the hiring of Pagliano;
• Time
sheets, calendars, or similar records of Pagliano;
• Travel records to/from
Chappaqua, NY. Such records include, but are not limited to, expense reports,
reimbursement forms, and travel logs;
• Pagliano's records concerning,
regarding, or relating to the maintenance of former Secretary Clinton's email
server. Such records include, but are not limited to, expense reports,
reimbursement forms, and maintenance logs; and
• Records of communications
between Pagliano and any official, officer, or employee of the Office of the
Secretary concerning former Secretary Clinton's email server.
We
requested expedited processing (which is DC-speak for "hurry up"), which the
State Department agreed to on August 13:
[B]ecause a compelling need for the requested information exists. ... Specifically, Judicial Watch has at least 15 cases pending in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia related to Secretary Clinton's email practices while Secretary of State. The information at issue in this request will shed light on whether the State Department was involved in the operation of Secretary Clinton's email server.
Though the State Department
agreed with Judicial Watch to expedite this request, the agency has failed to
provide any documents or otherwise comply with the Freedom of Information
Act.
(Reports
state Pagliano plans to refuse to provide testimony to Congress by asserting his
Fifth Amendment rights. So much for the Clinton apologist claims that the
Justice Department/FBI investigation into her mishandling of classified material
on her alias email system is not criminal!)
Mrs. Clinton's argument that
her "server" was private fails on many levels, especially if Mr. Pagliano, a
State Department employee, was paid by taxpayers to take care of it. We must
wonder if Mr. Pagliano has emails from the Clinton server. The Obama State
Department is in cover-up mode, refusing to comply with federal law and honor
our request about whether its employee was responsible for the Clinton server
maintenance. This is yet another example of the Obama administration's
complicity in the Clinton email scandal.
Hillary Clinton, immediately
following our lawsuit, said that she personally
paid Pagliano to handle her server issues. This, if true (and that is a big
"if") raises all sorts of other issues. How many of other State Department
employees did she pay on the sly? Was the alleged income reported as required by
law? I'm sure you can think of a few more.
It was back
in March that the news initially broke that Hillary Clinton used a
non-government email during her four years as secretary of state. Let us not
lose sight that JW FOIA lawsuits forced Hillary Clinton's separate email system
into the light of day. And that it was our litigation that forced Mrs. Clinton
to do what no other congressional committee, FBI, or Justice Department
investigation has done - submit information, under penalty of perjury, about her
email system.
Judicial Watch's work on this scandal is now so vast that I
can't possibly tell you everything that's going on in all our twenty plus
lawsuits and countless investigations. Check our website, www.judicialwatch.org
every day for breaking news on this fast moving scandal. You can also track our
investigations on Facebook, Twitter, and now even Instagram.
As I
mentioned above, we will have big news next week, so stay tuned...
San Francisco Crime Records Highlight
Deadly Dangers of Sanctuary Cities
Kathryn Steinle was the 32 year-old woman who was
walking with her father on a pier in San Francisco on July 1 just before she was
gunned down by an illegal alien criminal knowingly released by San Francisco
authorities under that city's sanctuary policies.. We live in a cruel, dangerous
world riddled with crime. That's the hard reality. But certainly, elected
officials could move decisively if they wanted to against "Sanctuary Cities" and
the dangerous criminal aliens who fly under the law. Criminal illegal alien may
sound redundant; that's how your government describes illegal aliens who have
committed serious offenses on top of their immigration violation.
Juan
Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, the illegal alien charged with murder in Steinle's
death, had already been convicted
of seven felonies and deported five times. San Francisco, in pursuit of a policy
that flouts the rule of law, set in motion the chain of events that led to
Kathryn Steinle's murder.
We forced new records out of San Francisco that
strongly suggest that Steinle is but one of dozens of murder victims tied to San
Francisco's sanctuary policies. Documents
your JW obtained from the San Francisco County Sheriff's Department reveal that
violent crime has skyrocketed since 2011, with the number of arrests for murder
up 55%, and the number of arrests for rapes up 370%. Judicial Watch's
investigators uncovered these shocking, though not entirely surprising, numbers
through a July 9, 2015, California Public Records Act request that sought the
number of arrests for violations of the following crimes between 2011 and
2015:
Penal Code 187 - first and second degree murderPenal Code 240 - simple assaultPenal Code 243 - batteryPenal Code 261 - rape
According to the data provided by the Sheriff's
Department, arrests for violations of the most violent of the crimes listed -
murder and rape - have soared over the past four years:
Murder (Penal Code 187) | Simple Assault (Penal Code 240) | Battery (Penal Code 243) | Rape (Penal Code 261) | |
2011 | 87 | 99 | 1600 | 10 |
2012 | 101 | 76 | 1501 | 45 |
2013 | 128 | 95 | 1592 | 45 |
2014 | 135 | 93 | 1516 | 47 |
2015 | 78 | 54 | 908 | 23 |
Total | 529 | 417 | 7117 | 170 |
According
to the information provided to our team by Sheriff's Department Assistant Legal
Counsel Mark Nicco, "These numbers reflect the number of charges for arrests and
bookings (not just arrests)."
In response to a request for details on the
U.S. citizenship status of the offenders, Nicco informed Judicial Watch: "This
information is not tracked by the Jail Management System." But Kathryn Steinle's
murder shows that the number is at least "1."
It is disconcerting that SF
authorities don't want to track the crimes of the illegal aliens they
surreptitiously and illegally let loose on an innocent public.
As bad as
these numbers are, they are only the tip of the iceberg. Despite the increased
arrests for violent crimes, the overall arrest rate has plunged by 42 percent according
to Max Szabo, spokesman for the San Francisco District Attorney's Office.
More crimes, less arrests - thanks in no small measure directly to public
official lawlessness.
In 2013, the San Francisco Sheriff and City Council
expanded
San Francisco's infamous illegal alien sanctuary
policies. The City changed policies and passed an ordinance that required
San Francisco law enforcement to ignore most U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) detainers. These detainers required San Francisco authorities
to hold detained illegal alien criminals until federal authorities could
determine whether to take them into custody.
Citizens, and even some
politicians, understand that when San Francisco and other sanctuary cities
release illegal alien criminals onto the streets, crime is going to increase.
These new crime statistics suggest that there are more murders and an epidemic
of rape linked to San Francisco's releasing illegal alien criminals in violation
of law.
Your JW is a
long-time national leader in advocating for a rule-of-law approach to
illegal immigration. This work includes exposing and challenging dangerous
sanctuary policies in San Francisco, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, D.C.,
Maryland, Arizona, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and more.
In 2011,
because of Judicial Watch's work, San
Francisco was ordered to end its sanctuary policy that protected aliens
arrested for certain drug offenses from being reported to ICE. Our legal and
investigative teams are now investigating whether the city violated the law
again with its sanctuary policy that led to the release of Lopez-Sanchez. We
will keep fighting while the federal government continues to fall down on the
job.
Another lawsuit
pending before the Illinois Supreme Court challenges Chicago's Cook County
Sheriff Tom Dart's refusal to honor ICE immigration detainers or cooperate with
ICE in identifying deportable criminal aliens. Cook County jails had released
well over 1,000 criminal aliens sought by ICE in the 18 months prior to the
lawsuit's filing in 2013.
Recall that San Francisco is one of hundreds
of sanctuary cities. And certainly Obama's refusal to enforce (and violate)
immigration law has turned America into a sanctuary nation. For example, other
Judicial Watch litigation forced the release of documents that show the Obama
administration released 165,900
convicted criminal aliens throughout the United States, including many
convicted of such violent crimes as homicide, sexual assault, kidnapping, and
aggravated assault.
We will keep fighting to get and spread the truth and
challenging the lawless in courts where we can. But you can see there is urgency
to this issue - as lives are at stake.
9/11
We have not forgotten 9/11 and our
work exposing the truth about the threat of Islamic terrorism and how our
government ignores and worsens it is second to none. In fact, our work predates
9/11, as we represented FBI agents whose warnings about missed opportunities to
roll up al Qaeda-linked terrorist networks went unheeded in the year before the
2001 attacks. This 9/11 Weekly Update piece from 2011
nicely sums up our work to that date.
Then there is the work
since. Judicial Watch staff and volunteers travel to monitor
the terrorist legal proceedings in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
We've exposed
the terrorist Islamic threat on our unsecured border with Mexico.
And
we've single-handedly broken
open the scandal about the Benghazi terrorist attack. Please remember that
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton tried to
pretend 9/11 did not happen - on 9/11/12, the day of the Benghazi
attack.
And, as you can see from today's Corruption Chronicles piece,
"9/11 Comm. Chair 'Embarrassed' That U.S. Still Keeps Most Records Secret," our
work is far from done. There are still many 9/11 questions that remain
unresolved. Our Pulitzer Prize-worthy work
on Anwar Al-Aulaqi raises questions that could shake the very foundations of two
presidential administrations. (Al-Aulaqi was assassinated by President Obama
through a drone strike in Yemen on September 30, 2011, the first American ever
acknowledged to have been subject to a targeted killing.)
No comments:
Post a Comment