90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, November 28, 2017

'Blowback': Clinton campaign planned to fire me over email probe, Obama intel watchdog says

A government watchdog who played a central role in the Hillary Clinton email investigation during the Obama administration told Fox News that he, his family and his staffers faced an intense backlash at the time from Clinton allies – and that the campaign even put out word that it planned to fire him if the Democratic presidential nominee won the 2016 election.

“There was personal blowback. Personal blowback to me, to my family, to my office,” former Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough III said.

The Obama appointee discussed his role in the Clinton email probe for the first time on television, during an exclusive interview with Fox News. McCullough – who came to the inspector general position with more than two decades of experience at the FBI, Treasury and intelligence community – shed light on how quickly the probe was politicized and his office was marginalized by Democrats.

In January 2016, after McCullough told the Republican leadership on the Senate intelligence and foreign affairs committees that emails beyond the “Top Secret” level passed through the former secretary of state's unsecured personal server, the backlash intensified.

But the former inspector general, with responsibility for the 17 intelligence agencies, said the executive who recommended him to the Obama administration for the job – then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper – was also disturbed by the independent Clinton email findings.

“[Clapper] said, ‘This is extremely reckless.’ And he mentioned something about -- the campaign … will have heartburn about that,” McCullough said.

He said Clapper's Clinton email comments came during an in-person meeting about a year before the presidential election – in late December 2015 or early 2016. “[Clapper] was as off-put as the rest of us were.”

After the Clapper meeting, McCullough said his team was marginalized. “I was told by senior officials to keep [Clapper] out of it,” he said, while acknowledging he tried to keep his boss in the loop.

As one of the few people who viewed the 22 top secret Clinton emails deemed too classified to release under any circumstances, the former IG said, “There was a very good reason to withhold those emails ... there would have been harm to national security.” McCullough went further, telling Fox News that “sources and methods, lives and operations” could be put at risk.

Some of those email exchanges contained Special Access Program (SAP) information characterized by intel experts as “above top secret.” ...

On Monday, a Constitutional conflict broke loose in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau when Leanne English, supposed acting director of the agency, claimed that she had the authority to run CFPB despite the Trump administration’s appointment of Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney to run the agency. The short story is simple: English has no such authority. But she’s an acolyte of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), the political Left uses the CFPB as a cash machine, and they have no intention of giving up control of the agency without a fight.

Ronald Rubin, an enforcement attorney at the CFPB, has an article at National Review explaining the development of the CFPB into a Democratic goody-bag:

From 2014 to 2017, the bureau paid $11 million a year to rent office space in an Obama fundraiser’s building. The Dodd-Frank Act allowed the CFPB to send the civil money penalties collected in its enforcement actions to a trustee of its choice, who, after taking a healthy cut, distributed the funds to ostensible victims in unrelated matters. The maneuver both enriched Democratic trustees and transformed fines extracted from defenseless businesses based on their deep pockets rather than actual consumer harm into “over $12 billion in damages returned to 29 million injured consumers.” To spread such propaganda, the bureau paid over $43 million to GMMB, the liberal advocacy group that created ads for the Obama and Hillary Clinton presidential campaigns.

Cordray was on the chopping block from the Trump administration, but he resigned in order to avoid the axe. He then appointed his deputy, English, his successor. His goal? According to Rubin, a cover-up:

Cordray feared that Mulvaney would discover evidence the CFPB has been hiding for years, including the bureau’s failure to investigate the Wells Fargo fraud; data manipulation in its failed attempt to regulate car dealers by guessing buyers’ races and alleging discriminatory lending; inspector-general admonishments to stop obstructing congressional oversight; and some particularly explosive sexual-harassment claims against CFPB senior managers.

This led to a supposed legal conflict: under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998, Trump could appoint the acting director, but under Dodd-Frank, the deputy director becomes acting director in cases of “absence or unavailability.” That’s not really a conflict: absence and unavailability generally do not include resignation. And if they did, that would pose a serious separation of powers issue, since the new acting director wouldn’t be approved by the Senate or appointed by the president. But Cordray appointed English anyway, and English is now pretending that she runs the place.

This is partisan political hackery, not law. Cordray has no legal authority to appoint English, and English has no legal authority to take the job. Any court that rules otherwise is acting in similarly partisan fashion. This isn’t a Constitutional crisis. It’s just a venal bureaucrat trying to...

The former president of the Berkeley College Republicans has sued known Antifa activist Yvette Felarca after a “frivolous” restraining she had filed against him was dropped.

Troy Worden's lawsuit alleges that Felarca's restraining orders were solely intended to "make free speech expensive" and prevent Worden from exercising his First Amendment rights.

The former president of the Berkeley College Republicans has sued known Antifa activist Yvette Felarca after a “frivolous” restraining she had filed against him was dropped.

“Felarca’s frivolous legal actions were meant to intimidate me and hinder my political activism, but also prevented me from going to class on occasion. I can now go on with my main purpose at UC Berkeley, which is to get an education and exercise my free speech rights without interference,” Troy Worden told Campus Reform after both a temporary and permanent restraining order were dismissed.

Now, Worden and his attorney, Mark Meuser, have announced in a press release that they will be seeking more than $100,000 in damages from Felarca, noting that the restraining orders were an attempt to restrict Worden’s First Amendment rights.

“Felarca filed a frivolous restraining order that restricted Worden’s First and Second Amendment rights, and made it difficult for him to move around the campus to attend classes,” the press release contends, with Meuser suggesting that “Felarca and her attorney attempted to make free speech expensive and it is time that they pay for their misuse of the court system.”

“I am glad that we are no longer playing defense and that we are finally going after...