Weekly Update: Clinton Scandal Update
New Emails
Coming
September 30, 2016: This Week's
Headlines
Clinton Scandal
Update
The State
Department Continues Dragging Its
FeetCourt Rejects
Claim of Racial Distinctions in the Natural Texture of
Hair
Clinton
Scandal
UpdateHillary
Clinton’s use of an email server in the basement of her
home while she was secretary of state will leave a permanent
stain on our system of justice and on the public’s trust
in government.
This became abundantly clear during our “Clinton Scandal
Update – Emails and the Clinton Foundation” symposium
held here in Washington on September 29, 2016. The full
video is available
here – and is well worth
watching and sharing.Chris
Farrell, our director of investigations, and I were joined
by three distinguished experts: WND senior staff writer
Jerome Corsi, author of Partners in Crime: The
Clinton’s Scheme to Monetize the White House for Personal
Profit; Peter Schweizer, author of the New York
Times best-seller Clinton Cash
; and Joseph E. diGenova, former United States Attorney for
the District of Columbia.Peter
Schweizer pointed out that the Clintons’ pay-for-play
scandal sets “an extremely dangerous precedent. This is
about more than the Clintons,” he said. “If it is not
dealt with in a legal manner, it’s going to be
imitated.” He also noted that this scandal dwarfs anything
we have seen before in terms of efforts to hide what was
occurring and in the sheer amount of money
involved.
Chris Farrell spoke of the permanent damage done to the
reputation of the FBI by Director James Comey’s
negligence. “Mr. Comey is personally compromised,” he
said. “The institution won’t get over it.” As you
know, before joining Judicial Watch Chris worked in national
intelligence. He pointed out that we know of at least 22
emails crossing Clinton’s unsecure server that contained
“sensitive compartmented information,” a high level of
classification. “This puts the United States at grave
risk. Any first class intelligence organization would be
looking for that kind of information.”
Jerome Corsi described how enormous sums of money that
flowed into the Clinton Foundation cannot be accounted for.
“Tens of millions of dollars were diverted,” he
asserted. There is a discrepancy between what people gave
the foundation and what it reported. “The Clintons ended
up with net worths of 100 million dollars each.” And the
speaking engagements don’t begin to account for it, he
said.Joe diGenova came down hard on FBI
Director James Comey. “I do not believe Comey is fit to
continue in office. His arrogance and obfuscation should
disqualify anyone with the power the FBI has. He violated
his oath. It is very clear that from the moment he took
control of this investigation he decided he was not going to
recommend prosecution. It was a political
decision.”
I
added that Congress has refused to take any kind of
substantive action on the scandal. “Congress is refusing
to take steps to hold Mrs. Clinton accountable. Why isn’t
there a contempt citation pending now? Emails were destroyed
after they were subpoenaed. Congressmen don’t want
accountability to get in their way of retaining the
Congress. I’m talking about the
Republicans.”
I also noted that civil service employees stayed quiet even
though they knew what was going on with Clinton’s non-state.gov email
apparatus. “It’s a fundamental issue of government
transparency,” I said. “We depend on the good faith of
government when we file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
request. We rely on civil servants to do the job they’ve
been entrusted to do. Hillary Clinton tore that compact up.
If Mrs. Clinton gets away with it, if there’s no
institutional accountability for her conduct, FOIA may end
because you can’t rely on the law being
enforced.”
This, as you can see, is no longer just about Bill and
Hillary Clinton. It’s about the federal government
generally, the FBI, the Department of Justice, the rule of
law, national security, transparency and trust in
government. Again, the full video of the blockbuster
educational panel is available
here.
The
State Department Continues Dragging Its
Feet
U.S.
District Court Judge James E. Boasberg has ordered the
Department of State to begin processing at least 1,050 pages
of Hillary Clinton emails recovered by the FBI and to
provide Judicial Watch all non-exempt documents before
November 4.Here is what I said about
the ruling in a public statement:
The
State Department admitted that it has 5,600 Clinton emails
recovered by the FBI that were government documents and not
personal emails as she claimed. The public deserves to know
what is in those emails, well before November 8, and the
State Department should not continue dragging its feet on
producing them. The State Department admitted in court today
it pulled staff off of Clinton email Freedom of Information
Act requests. The American people need to pressure State to
stop sitting on these new Clinton emails for political
reasons and release them as the law requires. It is
outrageous the State Department has had these new Clinton
emails since late July, but has only released 5
records.
The court ordered State to process the first 350 pages of
documents by October 7, another 350 pages by October 21, and
another by November 4. (The State Department claims a
substantial number of the Clinton emails may be duplicative
or near duplicative of emails Hillary Clinton previously
turned over to the State Department.)(The State
Department confirmed that the FBI discovered 15,100 new
Clinton emails as a result of Judicial Watch’s litigation
seeking all of Mrs. Clinton’s work related emails (Judicial
Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of State (No.
1:15-cv-00687)).)
There was more good transparency news because
of litigation brought by Jason Leopold of Vice
News.
He separately negotiated with the Obama State Department
to process a few thousand more pages of these new Clinton
emails by Election Day. As Jason reports over at Vice
News:Hillary
Clinton’s damn emails will continue to be a campaign issue
leading right up into the presidential
election.
Late Wednesday, the State Department agreed to post to its
website by November 3 as many as 1,850 pages of emails that
Clinton failed to turn over originally. The FBI recovered
the emails during the bureau’s investigation into
Clinton’s email practices.So
Jason’s success brings the total of pages of email
material to be processed up to nearly 3,000. Imagine if
more media follow Jason Leopold’s and JW’s lead in
pressing the case for all of Clinton’s emails! To be
clear, just because an email is “processed” doesn’t
mean it will be released, so the final total of releasable
pages might be lower than 3,000.I’ll be
sure to brief you once we finally start getting the
emails.
Court
Rejects Claim of Racial Distinctions in the Natural Texture
of
Hair
Racial and radical insanity too often taints
the rule of law under the Obama administration. It can be
unnerving to see our federal government throw its massive
power into issues. Witness this case of a hairstyle, as reported in
our Corruption Chronicles blog. Thankfully the
courts haven’t been completely
compromised:
A federal appellate court has ruled against the Obama
administration’s claims that firing a black woman for
wearing dreadlocks constitutes racial discrimination, and
the government agency representing the employee poses an
interesting question: Would a woman wearing a hijab face the
same fate? The answer is no. Muslims have more rights in the
U.S. workplace than African Americans, it
seems.
In the aftermath of several rulings protecting Muslim rights
to wear religious head covers on the job, a black woman is
being prohibited from sporting a hairstyle that is
physiologically and culturally associated with people of
African descent. That constitutes racial discrimination,
according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
(EEOC), the federal agency that enforces the nation’s
workplace discrimination laws.
The agency filed the case in 2013 on behalf of an Alabama
woman, Chastity Jones, who was told by an insurance claims
processing company to cut her dreadlocks—long clumps of
ungroomed hair, symbolizing the mane of the Lion of
Judah—as part of its grooming policy. The EEOC argued that
the company, Catastrophe Management Solutions, committed
racial discrimination in violation of Title VII of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964.In announcing
the lawsuit, the agency’s regional attorney in
Birmingham said the litigation didn’t seek to attack
policies requiring employees to maintain hair in a
professional, neat or conservative manner but rather focus
“on the racial bias that may occur when specific hair
constructs and styles are singled out for different
treatment because they do not conform to normative standards
for other races.” The EEOC’s district director pointed
out that “generally, there are racial distinctions in the
natural texture of black and non-black hair. The EEOC will
not tolerate employment discrimination against
African-American employees because they choose to wear and
display the natural texture of their hair, manage and style
their hair in a manner amenable to it, or manage and style
their hair in a manner differently from
non-blacks.”
A
federal judge in Alabama didn’t buy the government’s
seemingly far-fetched argument and in 2014 dismissed the
race discrimination suit, finding that the company’s
hairstyle policy did not violate federal anti-discrimination
law. In his ruling the judge, Charles R. Butler, wrote that
since Title VII of the Civil Rights Act only prohibits
discrimination based on unchangeable characteristics, like
sex and race, the company didn’t violate the law by
banning the hairstyle. The Obama administration appealed and
this month the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals upheld
the Alabama judge’s decision, rejecting Jones’s right
to keep the dreadlocks. The appellate court found that
Catastrophe Management Solutions has a “race-neutral
grooming policy” and that hairstyles are not “immutable
physical characteristics,” though the court acknowledged
they could be “culturally associated with
race.”On the EEOC’s twitter account,
which is embedded in the agency’s official website, an
official comments on the Jones case: “I
wonder if a woman who wore a hijab would have been asked to
not wear that when coming to work?”
The EEOC post was written by a black official named
Michelle Adams, who also includes a clip from
a 1990s television comedy sitcom because it reminds her of
Jones’s “choice to fight” the dreadlock ban (the
reality is that taxpayers funded the fight because a federal
agency represented Jones). In the TV clip a black male
employee tells white managers that his hair is not just for
fashion. “It’s part of my heritage,” the actor says.
“It’s a statement of pride.”
The question comparing dreadlocks to hijabs was rhetorical
because the EEOC employee knows Muslims have a legal right
to wear religious head covers at work thanks to litigation
initiated by her agency. Judicial Watch has reported on some
of the cases, including a 2013 federal court ruling that
a Muslim
woman’s civil rights were violated
by an American clothing retailer that didn’t allow her
to wear a hijab at work. As it has in other instances, the
EEOC accused the retailer of religious discrimination under
the Civil Rights Act and a federal judge agreed. In the
ruling the judge wrote that the retailer acted with malice
and reckless indifference by forcing the Muslim woman to
remove her hijab, even though it had a company-wide policy
prohibiting all types head cover.The
religious rights argument has also been used by the EEOC on
behalf of dreadlocks. Over the summer the EEOC sued
a private business for religious discrimination after it
ordered a male employee to cut his dreadlocks. The man, a
prep cook in central Florida, is Rastafari and the
“Afrocentric” religion born in the slums of Jamaica
requires followers to have long, matted and knotted
hair.
Judicial Watch will monitor the outcome of the case, which
was filed in July. There is no formal, organized leadership
in Rastafarianism which makes it difficult to accept as an
official religion protected by federal law. Rastafarians
believe Haile Selassie, the former emperor of Ethiopia, is
God and that he’ll help blacks living in exile as a result
of the slave trade return to Africa. Jamaican reggae singer
Bob Marley, who died in Miami in 1981, was among the best
known Rastafarians and more recently a famous rapper known
as Snoop Dogg became Rastafari and changed his name to Snoop
Lion, according to a mainstream news
report.
“A key belief for Rastas is the notion of death to all
white and black oppressors,” the story says, adding that
“the most common outward expressions of Rastafari are
Rastas’ dreadlocks, penchant for smoking marijuana and
vegetarian diets.”With Obama
administration priorities so distorted, need anyone wonder
why crime is up and terrorism seems to be a monthly
occurrence? Until next
week...
Tom Fitton
President
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