Category: Secrecy

What a Surprise, The 911 Report on the House of Saud is Dumped on a Friday Evening

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The 28 pages on the potential connections between the House of Saud and the 911 hijackers has finally been released.

There are what appear to be connections between Saudi Officials and the 911 hijackers, though they are indirect:

Saudi nationals connected to the government in Riyadh may have aided some of the Sept. 11 hijackers in the U.S. before they carried out their attacks, according to a long-classified portion of a congressional inquiry.

“While in the United States, some of the September 11 hijackers were in contact with, and received support or assistance from, individuals who may be connected to the Saudi government,” according to the section released Friday by the House Intelligence Committee with some portions blacked out.

But top U.S. intelligence officials who approved releasing the report, as families of some of the 3,000 victims of the attacks have long demanded, emphasized that they didn’t consider it accurate or reliable. Saudi officials have long said the 28 pages from the report written in 2002 provide no evidence that the U.S. ally was involved in the attacks, and that conclusion was echoed by the lawmakers who released the document.

The 28 pages do “not put forward vetted conclusions, but rather unverified leads that were later fully investigated by the intelligence committee,” Representative Devin Nunes of California, the committee’s Republican chairman, said in a statement.

………

The release also was praised by former Democratic Senator Bob Graham of Florida, who has long differed with most fellow lawmakers about the significance of the 28 pages and the likelihood of Saudi involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks.

“We’re now at a point where the American people can read the 28 pages and form their own opinion,” Graham, a former Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, said in a telephone interview. “This makes a very compelling case that the Saudis were the source of assistance to the 9/11 hijackers.”

Rather unsurprisingly, there appear to be ties between the hijackers and Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan:

One of the individuals cited in the previously classified material is Osama Bassnan, who the FBI and CIA suspected may have been in contact in San Diego with two of the 19 hijackers — 15 of whom were Saudi nationals. The document states that the FBI “confirmed” that Bassnan’s wife received money directly from the wife of Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, then the ambassador to the United States.

Like a bad penny, we find Prince Bandar yet again.

I won’t go as far as the folks at New York Post, who flat out declare Saudi culpability, but the history of the Saudi regime, particularly when juxtaposed by efforts to suppress this information by the Saudis, does create the impression that the House of Saud is not the stalwart ally that the conventional wisdom in Washington, DC portrays them to be.

Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever

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Barack Obama just admitted that mishandling of classified data is OK for his friends:

In an interview Sunday with Fox News, President Obama indicated he doesn’t think Hillary Clinton really truly shared top secret government information on a private email server while she was secretary of state. “There’s classified, and then there’s classified,” Obama said.

This is another version of Nixon’s comment to David Frost, “If the President Does It, That Means It’s Not Illegal.”

He has gone after critics that has led to more prosecutions than every single president since the creation of the Republic, but when Hillary mishandles information, or when Leon Panetta leaks classified infomation to Kathryn Bigelow, the CIA’s version of Leni Riefenstahl, it’s OK, because it is his Evil Minions™.

The terms corrupt and hypocritical come to mind, and this is just repulsive.

This Reads Like Something from Joseph Heller’s Most Famous Novel*

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It appears that whistleblower protection legislation cannot apply to the FBI because there would be too many whistleblowers:

The Department of Justice is undercutting Chuck Grassley’s efforts to provide FBI employees whistleblower protection. That became clear in an exchange (2:42) on Wednesday.

The exchange disclosed two objections DOJ has raised to Grassley’s FBI Whistleblower Protect Act. First, as Attorney General Loretta Lynch revealed, DOJ is worried that permitting FBI Agents to report crimes or waste through their chain of command would risk exposing intelligence programs.

What I would say is that as we work through this issue, please know that, again, any concerns that the Department raises are not out of a disagreement with the point of view of the protection of whistleblowers but again, just making sure that the FBI’s intelligence are also protected at the same time

I suspect (though am looking for guidance) that the problem may be that the bill permits whistleblowers to go to any member of Congress, rather than just ones on the Intelligence Committees. It’s also possible that DOJ worries whistleblowers will be able to go to someone senior to them, but not read into a given program.

Still, coming from an agency that doesn’t adequately report things like its National Security Letter usage to Congress, which has changed its reporting to the Intelligence Oversight Board so as to exempt more activities, and can’t even count its usage of other intelligence programs, it seems like a tremendous problem that DOJ doesn’t want FBI whistleblowers to have protection because it might expose what FBI is doing on intelligence.

That’s sort of the point!

Especially given Grassley’s other point: apparently, DOJ is opposed to the bill because it will elicit too many complaints.

One of the issues that your department has raised is that allowing FBI employees to report wrong-doing to their chain of command could lead to too many complaints. You know? What’s wrong with too many complaints? … Seems to me you’d invite every wrong doing to get reported to somebody so it could get corrected.


Apparently, DOJ knows there are so many problems FBI employees would like to complain about that things would grind to a halt if they were actually permitted to complain.

We cannot protect whistleblowers, because they might whistleblow.

This does seem to be rather Helleresque, doesn’t it?

*Catch-22

Eric Arthur Blair Knows the Term for This

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Classification stupidity

The prosecutor for the military commission at Guantánamo is retroactively classifying pubic hearings:

The war court prosecutor is arguing that public disclosure of a transcript of a public hearing held at Guantánamo last year could endanger national security in response to a legal motion brought by 17 news organizations protesting pick-and-choose secrecy in the Sept. 11 pretrial hearings.

Army Brig. Gen Mark Martins makes the argument in a filing obtained by The Miami Herald that was still being reviewed for sensitive information on Thursday and not publicly released. At issue is the Pentagon’s decision to black out large portions of a 379-page transcript of an Oct. 30 hearing that included testimony from two soldiers who work at Guantánamo’s most clandestine prison, called Camp 7.

“That this information was uttered in a public session or is reported in news coverage does not render the information unprotected or vitiate the damage further disclosures would beget,” prosecutors wrote Jan. 29 in the 29-page filing in the war court case against Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other men accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

In defending the decision to censor what was public information, the prosecutors included a less-redacted transcript that showed previously blacked out sentences and in the same filing sealed up a declaration from the Guantánamo prison commander explaining what is at risk.

………

Reporters, Sept. 11 victim family members and other members of the public heard the testimony on Oct. 30 through a 40-second audio delay designed to let the judge or a court security officer mute the sound if anyone spilled national security secrets. No one ever pushed the button. But when the transcript came out weeks later, portions that the Miami Herald had reported in a routine Twitter stream were gone.

Now, a comparison of the two different censored transcripts of the same hearing offer a study in over-classification. Nearly every redaction is refined in the updated version.

The term to describe this sh%$ is “Orwellian”.

A Little Justice ……… Not Enough, but a Little Justice

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The Pentagon is considering retroactively demoting David Petraeus for his mishandling of classified data and lying to investigators:

The defense secretary is looking to clamp down on misbehaving generals. Pentagon insiders say Petraeus could be the next general to face the consequences.

The Pentagon is considering retroactively demoting retired Gen. David Petraeus after he admitted to giving classified information to his biographer and mistress while he was still in uniform, three people with knowledge of the matter told The Daily Beast.

The decision now rests with Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, who is said to be willing to consider overruling an earlier recommendation by the Army that Petraeus not have his rank reduced. Such a demotion could cost the storied general hundreds of thousands of dollars—and deal an additional blow to his once-pristine reputation.

“The secretary is considering going in a different direction” from the Army, a defense official told The Daily Beast, because he wants to be consistent in his treatment of senior officers who engage in misconduct and to send a message that even men of Petraeus’s fame and esteemed reputation are not immune to punishment.

Pentagon spokesperson Peter Cook told The Daily Beast that Carter had requested the information ex-Army Secretary John McHugh had when he made his recommendation on the matter, before reaching a final decision. McHugh had recommended taking no action against Petraeus.

“The Department of the Army is still in the process of providing the secretary with information relevant to former‎ Secretary McHugh’s recommendation,” Cook told The Daily Beast. “Once the secretary‎ has an opportunity to consider this information, he will make his decision about next steps, if any, in this matter.”

………

Reducing Petraeus’s rank, most likely to lieutenant general, could mean he’d have to pay back the difference in pension payments and other benefits that he received as a retired four-star general. That would amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars over his retirement. According to Pentagon figures, a four-star general with roughly the same years of experience as Petraeus was entitled to receive a yearly pension of nearly $220,000. A three-star officer would receive about $170,000.

Petraeus didn’t respond to a request for comment.

But the financial pain to Petraeus isn’t likely to be severe. He has confided to friends and acquaintances that he’s making a hefty sum from his job at a private equity firm and through speaking fees.

The demotion in rank would be a bigger, lasting blow, and take from Petraeus the rare achievement he’d set his eyes on many years ago.

This guy is getting a 6 figure pension, and what is likely a 7 figure gig at a private equity firm, and the most that can be done is to hurt his feelings.

He should be in jail, but absent that, dropping a star, or better dropping more than one stars, is quite literally the least that they can do.

The Good Guy’s Win

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A few days ago, I noted how law enforcement came down on a New Hampshire library for operating a TOR node.

Today, we earn that the West Lebanon library told the US state security apparatus to go pound sand:

The Kilton Public Library in West Lebanon will reactivate its piece of the anonymous internet browsing network Tor, despite law enforcement’s concerns that the network might be used for criminal activities.

The Lebanon Library Board of Trustees let stand its unanimous June decision to devote some of the library’s excess bandwidth to a node, or “relay,” for Tor, after a full room of about 50 residents and other interested members of the public expressed their support for Lebanon’s participation in the system at a meeting Tuesday night.

“With any freedom there is risk,” library board Chairman Francis Oscadal said. “It came to me that I could vote in favor of the good . . . or I could vote against the bad.

“I’d rather vote for the good because there is value to this.”

I haz a happy.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen

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A small library in Lebanon, New Hampshire decided set up TOR on its network.

This was just shut down as a result of threats from the Department of Homeland Security:

Since Edward Snowden exposed the extent of online surveillance by the U.S. government, there has been a surge of initiatives to protect users’ privacy.

But it hasn’t taken long for one of these efforts — a project to equip local libraries with technology supporting anonymous Internet surfing — to run up against opposition from law enforcement.

In July, the Kilton Public Library in Lebanon, New Hampshire, was the first library in the country to become part of the anonymous Web surfing service Tor. The library allowed Tor users around the world to bounce their Internet traffic through the library, thus masking users’ locations.

Soon after state authorities received an email about it from an agent at the Department of Homeland Security.

“The Department of Homeland Security got in touch with our Police Department,” said Sean Fleming, the library director of the Lebanon Public Libraries.

After a meeting at which local police and city officials discussed how Tor could be exploited by criminals, the library pulled the plug on the project.

“Right now we’re on pause,” said Fleming. “We really weren’t anticipating that there would be any controversy at all.”

………

After Macrina conducted a privacy training session at the Kilton library in May, she talked to the librarian about also setting up a Tor relay, the mechanism by which users across the Internet can hide their identity.

The library board of trustees unanimously approved the plan at its meeting in June, and the relay was set up in July. But after ArsTechnica wrote about the pilot project and Macrina’s plan to install Tor relays in libraries across the nation, law enforcement got involved.

A special agent in a Boston DHS office forwarded the article to the New Hampshire police, who forwarded it to a sergeant at the Lebanon Police Department.

DHS spokesman Shawn Neudauer said the agent was simply providing “visibility/situational awareness,” and did not have any direct contact with the Lebanon police or library. “The use of a Tor browser is not, in [or] of itself, illegal and there are legitimate purposes for its use,” Neudauer said, “However, the protections that Tor offers can be attractive to criminal enterprises or actors and HSI [Homeland Security Investigations] will continue to pursue those individuals who seek to use the anonymizing technology to further their illicit activity.”

When the DHS inquiry was brought to his attention, Lt. Matthew Isham of the Lebanon Police Department was concerned. “For all the good that a Tor may allow as far as speech, there is also the criminal side that would take advantage of that as well,” Isham said. “We felt we needed to make the city aware of it.”

For those who don’t speak the language of law enforcement threats, “Needed to make the city aware of it,” means, “Threatening to link public officials to child porn.”

The action taken by the library is legal, and is very much in the tradition of libraries promoting the free exchange of information, but the US state security apparatus cannot tolerate this, even though the US government is the largest single funder of this network.

Obama’s Lawless Behavior in Support of the Security State

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You may recall that the NSA bulk data collection of phone records were ruled by an Federal appellate court.

It not turns out that the Obama administration tried to get a ruling from the FISA court saying that they could ignore this ruling.

The interesting bit here is that the FISA court is technically a district court, and so is subordinate to an appellate court.

This shows a complete contempt for the rule of law:

The Obama administration has asked a secret surveillance court to ignore a federal court that found bulk surveillance illegal and to once again grant the National Security Agency the power to collect the phone records of millions of Americans for six months.

The legal request, filed nearly four hours after Barack Obama vowed to sign a new law banning precisely the bulk collection he asks the secret court to approve, also suggests that the administration may not necessarily comply with any potential court order demanding that the collection stop.

US officials confirmed last week that they would ask the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court – better known as the Fisa court, a panel that meets in secret as a step in the surveillance process and thus far has only ever had the government argue before it – to turn the domestic bulk collection spigot back on.

Justice Department national security chief John A Carlin cited a six-month transition period provided in the USA Freedom Act – passed by the Senate last week to ban the bulk collection – as a reason to permit an “orderly transition” of the NSA’s domestic dragnet. Carlin did not address whether the transition clause of the Freedom Act still applies now that a congressional deadlock meant the program shut down on 31 May.

But Carlin asked the Fisa court to set aside a landmark declaration by the second circuit court of appeals. Decided on 7 May, the appeals court ruled that the government had erroneously interpreted the Patriot Act’s authorization of data collection as “relevant” to an ongoing investigation to permit bulk collection.

Carlin, in his filing, wrote that the Patriot Act provision remained “in effect” during the transition period.

“This court may certainly consider ACLU v Clapper as part of its evaluation of the government’s application, but second circuit rulings do not constitute controlling precedent for this court,” Carlin wrote in the 2 June application. Instead, the government asked the court to rely on its own body of once-secret precedent stretching back to 2006, which Carlin called “the better interpretation of the statute”.

While it is true that  the FISA court is not technically under the 2nd court of appeals, which ruled the program illegal, because they are not in the 2nd district, (technically, they are not in any district) but blithely asking the court to overrule an appeals court shows a complete contempt for due process and the rule of law.

Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever!™

People Who Should Have Been Drowned at Birth

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The Los Angeles Times editorial board, who are calling for the prosecution of Edward Snowden:
They praise the fact that his leaks created some reforms in our state security apparatus, and then they say that he should go to jail, because, (I guess) confidential press sources and whistle blowers are bad people who should be tortured.

It is an incontrovertible fact that if Snowden returns, and if he is tried, he will be placed in solitary confinement for years, even if just while awaiting trial.  One need only look at the case of (innocent) Wen Ho Lee, who was held in solitary for over a year in an attempt to extort a confession.

It has been the universal conclusion of all civil society organization that have chosen to study this issue have declared extended solitary to be torture.

The LA Times which covered the Lee matter extensively knows this, but even knowing this, they are calling for Snowden to be prosecuted for under an archaic law, and tortured in the process, even if he is eventually found not guilty:

Yet there are serious arguments against a pardon. One is that, in a society of laws, someone who engages in civil disobedience in a higher cause should be prepared to accept the consequences. A stronger objection, in our view, is that Snowden didn’t limit his disclosures to information about violations of Americans’ privacy. He divulged other sensitive information about traditional foreign intelligence activities, including a document showing that the NSA had intercepted the communications of then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev during a Group of 20 summit in London in 2009. A government contractor who discloses details of U.S. spying on another country is not most Americans’ idea of a whistleblower.

A pardon for Snowden now would be premature. But if he were to return to this country to face the charges against him, the fact that he revealed the existence of a program that has now been repudiated by all three branches of government would constitute a strong argument for leniency. Snowden should come home and make that case.

Otis Chandler would be spinning in his brave.

Thank You Rand Paul*

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It turns out that, at least for the next few hours, some significant portions of the Patriot Act have expired:

The Senate failed to pass legislation late Sunday to extend three Patriot Act surveillance measures ahead of their midnight expiration. The National Security Agency’s bulk telephone metadata collection program—first exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013—is the most high profile of the three spy tools whose legal authorization expired.

President Barack Obama was set to sign the bill, the USA Freedom Act, ahead of the midnight Sunday deadline. But Senate lawmakers who convened in a special session at 4pm ET Sunday could not reach an accord. The Senate is to resume debate Monday at noon ET.

As expected, there was much banter back and forth on the Senate floor about whether the Constitution was being gutted or whether the country would come to ruins if the Senate did not quickly adopt the already approved House legislation ahead of the June 1 expiration deadline. (The three Patriot Act provisions that failed to pass the Senate were renewed days ago in the House through 2019.)

“Are we willing to trade liberty for security?” asked Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), perhaps the most vocal opponent of the legislation. Despite an apparent victory, Paul had no illusions that this fight for privacy would end after these specific extension talks. “The Patriot Act will expire tonight, but it will only be temporary,” he added.

………

The three Patriot Act provisions on the agenda would have been extended until 2019 if approved. The first concerns the so-called “business records” provision that enabled the NSA’s bulk telephone metadata program brought to light by the Snowden disclosures. This provision granted the government the power to seize all types of records—including those surrounding health and banking. The authorities must assert to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court (FISA Court) that they are “relevant” to a terrorism investigation before getting a warrant. The bulk metadata collection program was altered somewhat under the House and Senate legislation, however.

I expect this victory to be short lived, but even this temporary and largely symbolic setback for the overweening security state heartens me a bit.

*I f%$#ing cannot f%$#ing believe that I f%$#ing just f%$#ing said that non-ironically.

I Think That Someone Has Whispered the Words “Obstruction of Justice” in His Ear

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New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has backtracked on his 90 days and then delete email policy:

The emails of New York officials will no longer be automatically deleted after 90 days, aides to Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced last week in response to political pressure over the purge policy.

It’s been a slow burn leading to the policy shift. The purge policy was first reported by the Albany Times Union back in mid–2013, but didn’t stir much protest until more recently, following coverage by ProPublica and Capital New York.

At a public meeting Friday, aides to the governor said they had reviewed the policies of other states and, going forward, any email deletion would be manual. That means more communications should be retained and be accessible in response to public records requests or in the case of investigations of wrongdoing.

Good government groups welcomed the move, writing in an open letter that it “shows the power the governor has to lead by example to increase transparency” – rare praise for Cuomo, whose administration has generally been marked by secrecy.

Since the purge policy was in effect for about two years in some state agencies, it’s probable some public records have been lost.

The cynic in me thinks that Cuomo has already managed to delete records that he wanted deleted.

The optimist in me thinks that someone, perhaps his counsel, or perhaps someone from the US Attorney’s office told him that they would either take actions to protect the data, which would be profoundly embarrassing to Hizzoner.

In either case, this is good news, and I am hoping to see Cuomo indicted, because he is clearly corrupt, at least by the ordinary standards of decency, if not the letter of the law.

Some Other Folks Feel the Same Way about the Media’s Response as I Do

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There have been two cogent and well written critiques of the generally dismissive response of the mainstream media to Seymour Hersh’s story which claims to show that the official narrative of the Osama bin Laden killing was largely untrue.

The first, from the Columbia Journalism Review is likely to gain the most currency. It’s a fairly conventional analysis, and notes that Hersh’s critics have been lazy and knee jerk in their dismissal of his latest story:

Seymour Hersh has done the public a great service by breathing life into questions surrounding the official narrative of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Yet instead of trying to build off the details of his story, or to disprove his assertions with additional reporting, journalists have largely attempted to tear down the messenger.

Barrels of ink have been spilled ripping apart Hersh’s character, while barely any follow-up reporting has been done to corroborate or refute his claims—even though there’s no doubt that the Obama administration has repeatedly misinformed and misled the public about the incident. Even less attention has been paid to the little follow-up reporting that we did get, which revealed that the CIA likely lied about its role in finding bin Laden, which it used to justify torture to the public.

Hersh has attempted to force the media to ask questions about its role in covering a world-shaping event—but it’s clear the media has trouble asking such questions if the answers are not the ones they want to hear.

Hersh’s many critics, almost word-for-word, gave the same perfunctory two-sentence nod to his best-known achievements—breaking the My Lai massacre in 1969 (for which he won the Pulitzer) and exposing the Abu Ghraib torture scandal 35 years later—before going on to call him every name in the book: “conspiracy theorist,” “off the rails,” “crank.” Yet most of this criticism, over the thousands of words written about Hersh’s piece in the last week, has amounted to “That doesn’t make sense to me,” or “That’s not what government officials told me before,” or “How are we to believe his anonymous sources?”

………

Largely ignored in this is debate is the opinion of longtime New York Times Afghanistan and Pakistan correspondent Carlotta Gall, who has more knowledge of the region in one finger than most of Hersh’s critics put together. She wrote in the Times this week that she “would not necessarily dismiss [Hersh’s] claims immediately” and that “he is following up on a story that many of us assembled parts of.” Of his claim that an informant, rather than a courier, led the CIA to bin Laden, Gall wrote that “my own reporting tracks with Hersh’s.”

………

Within months, of course, Hersh’s stories would be on the front page of The New York Times. He soon started reporting on intelligence agencies. In 1974 he broke the story that the CIA was systematically spying on Americans in violation of federal law. The rest of the media ridiculed it. They questioned his sourcing while calling the story “exaggerated” and “overwritten and under-researched.” A year later, CIA director William Colby was forced to admit to Congress that it was all true.

Over at Pando, the redoubtable Mark Ames focuses more tightly on the 1970s CIA spying revalations, which to my mind makes for a more compelling critique of the recent press wank-fest, if just because the reaction seems identical to the last time:

………

Hersh has pissed off some very powerful people and institutions with this story, and that means the inevitable media pushback to discredit his reporting is already underway, with the attacks on Hersh led by Vox Media’s Max Fisher, CNN’s Peter Bergen, and even some on the left like Nation Institute reporter Matthieu Aikins. Yesterday Slate joined the pile-on, running a wildly entertaining, hostile interview with Hersh.

Such attacks by fellow journalists on a Sy Hersh bombshell are nothing new—in fact, he used to relish them, and probably still does. He got the same hostile reaction from his media colleagues when he broke his biggest story of his career: The 1974 exposé of the CIA’s massive, illegal domestic spying program, MH-CHAOS, which targeted tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of Americans, mostly antiwar and leftwing dissidents.

Hersh is better known today for his My Lai massacre and Abu Ghraib exposés, but it was his MH-CHAOS scoop, which the New York Times called “the son of Watergate,” that was his most consequential and controversial—from this one sensational exposé the entire intelligence apparatus was nearly taken down. Hersh’s exposés directly led to the famous Church Committee hearings into intelligence abuses, the Rockefeller Commission, and the less famous but more radical Pike Committee hearings in the House, which I wrote about in Pando last year. These hearings not only blew open all sorts of CIA abuses, assassination programs, drug programs and coups, but also massive intelligence failures and boondoggles.

………

And it was the Washington Post that led the attacks on Hersh’s reporting. In early January 1975, the WaPo ran an editorial, “The CIA’s ‘Illegal Domestic Spying,’” attacking Hersh for relying on anonymous sources—this from the same paper that relied on the most famous anonymous source in history, Deep Throat. The WaPo editorial went on:

“While almost any CIA activity can be fitted under the heading of ‘spying,’ and while CIA activities undertaken on American soil can be called ‘domestic spying,’ it remains to be determined which of these activities has been conducted in ‘violation’ of the agency’s congressional charter or are ‘illegal.’”

………

A common line of attack was to call Hersh’s series “overwritten and under-researched.” Gossip in the Washington press corps at the time claimed that WaPo’s famous editor Ben Bradlee denounced Hersh’s stories as “overwritten and under-researched”; and when Hersh was passed over for the Pulitzer that year, to everyone’s surprise, one columnist wrote Hersh didn’t deserve it anyway, calling his MH-CHAOS exposes “overwritten, overplayed, under-researched and under-proven.”

………

Hersh might’ve been buried by his own press colleagues, who were only interested in discrediting his reporting, if not for CIA director William Colby’s testimony before the Senate in mid-January, 1975. Hersh himself reported it for the Times, which led:

“William E. Colby, Director of Central Intelligence, acknowledged at a Senate hearing today that his agency had infiltrated undercover agents into antiwar and dissident political groups inside the United States as part of a counterintelligence program that led to the accumulation of files on 10,000 American citizens.”

After the CIA chief’s confirmation of Hersh’s story, his media detractors had no choice but to grudgingly walk back their criticism. Quoting again from Kathryn Olmsted’s book, after Colby’s admission,

“The Washington Post reported that Colby’s disclosure had ‘confirmed major elements’ of Hersh’s stories, and Newsweek agreed that Colby’s testimony had substantiated ‘many basic elements of the original story if not all the adjectives.’”

Today we’re seeing some of the same grudging, qualified acceptance of Hersh’s Bin Laden bombshell from the establishment press.

Later in 1975, the great Bill Greider—who was then an editor at the WaPo—summed up the attitude of the press to Hersh’s revelations:

“the press especially tugs back and forth at itself, alternately pursuing the adrenal instincts unleashed by Watergate, the rabid distrust bred by a decade of out-front official lies, then abruptly playing the cozy lapdog.”

My how we’ve grown so much in the 40 years since.

I don’t know how much of Hersh’s story is true, but the press response at this point seems to exquisitely lame.

Background, and underlying story here.

Sy Hersh’s Bin Laden Story Is Looking a Bit Less Fantastical

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I mentioned yesterday that Seymour Hersh’s account of the killing of Osama bin Laden, which is at siginficant variance with the official “Zero Dark Thirty” version was a potential bomb shell, but (at least initially) it was a bit light on sourcing.

Well, today, we have some more data points that seem to point to his story being accurate, at least in part.

First, we have a report from NBC saying that there was a Pakistani source inside the country’s state security apparatus:

Intelligence sources tell NBC News that in the year before the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden, a retired Pakistani military intelligence officer helped the CIA track him down.

 While the Pakistani intelligence asset provided vital information in the hunt for bin Laden, he did not provide the location of the al Qaeda leader’s Abottabad, Pakistan compound, sources said.

 Three sources also said that some officials in the Pakistani government knew where bin Laden was hiding all along.

 The asset was evacuated from Pakistan and paid reward money by the CIA, sources said. U.S. officials took pains to note he was one of many sources who provided help along the way, and said that the al Qaeda courier who unwittingly led them to bin Laden, Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, remained the linchpin of the operation.

 The U.S. government has always characterized the heroic raid by Seal Team Six that killed bin Laden as a unilateral U.S. operation, and has maintained that the CIA found him by tracking the courier.

 The new revelations do not cast doubt on the overall narrative that the White House began circulating within hours of the May 2011 operation. The official story about how bin Laden was found was constructed in a way that protected the identity and existence of the asset, who also knew who inside the Pakistani government was aware of the Pakistani intelligence agency’s operation to hide bin Laden, according to a special operations officer with prior knowledge of the bin Laden mission.

NBC qualifies as a reputable source, and this appears to be confirmation of a part of Hirsh’s story.

It should be noted though, that this omission from the official story might very well be an issue of “Sources and Methods” as well as diplomatic reality, both of which would mitigate against revealing the complicity of Pakistani security.

What’s more, this is precisely the sort of stuff that Hersh would uncover.

It’s significant, and embarrassing, and makes authorities look far less heroic, which history shows to be Hersh’s favorite kind of reporting.

Another interesting data point is that another reporter,  R. J. Hillhouse, is claiming that he took her story without attribution:

Seymour Hersh’s story, “The Killing of Bin Laden,” in the London Review of Books has a fundamental problem: it’s either plagiarism or unoriginal.

If it’s fiction–as some have implied, it’s plagiarism. If it’s true, it’s not original. The story was broken here on The Spy Who Billed Me four years ago, in August 2011:

“Bin Laden Turned in by Informant — Courier Was Cover Story”

“Questions Raised by Real Story of How US Found Bin Laden”

On August 7, 2011, I wrote, among other things:

………

I have had great respect for Seymour Hersh, arguably one of the greatest investigative journalists of our time. I do not believe his story is fiction. I trust my sources–which were clearly different than his. I am, however, profoundly disappointed that he has not given credit to the one who originally broke the story.

Hillhouse has writeen extensively on the US state security apparatus, including stories on outsourcing of intelligence activities that have drawn responses from the Director of National intelligence.

So, we have confirmation from NBC that someone inside Pakistan’s intelligence establishment came to the administration at least a year before the raid, and two very similar accounts of the events of May 2, 2011 which appear to have been derived from different sources.

What’s more, according to what appears to be an interview with Hillhouse in The Intercept, the account of SEALS throwing bin Laden’s body, or body parts, out of a helicopter because they believed that the official story was going to be a drone strike, was something that she had been told by one source, but could not confirm, which provides some additional credibility to both accounts:

Hillhouse also claims that one of her sources told her a particular detail that she did not include in 2011 because she could not confirm it: that the Navy SEALs threw bin Laden’s body out of the helicopter while traveling over the Hindu Kush mountains from Pakistan to Afghanistan. Hersh’s story includes an assertion from his main source that “during the helicopter flight back to Jalalabad, some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains.” While this seems bizarre in retrospect, it would be plausible if the SEALs had believed at the time that the Obama administration planned to say publicly that bin Laden had been killed in a drone strike.

Hillhouse believes that “Everything that [Hersh] has said has been spot on” but “You can’t help but notice that everything he is saying in the story, which is true, was first broken by me.”

So this account is definitely plausible.

The journalist “debunking” at this point seems to be loosely sourced accusations that Hersh has gone off the deep end.

The lesson here is that blithely dismissing reporting from Seymour Hersh is not a good idea.

His reporting, at the very least, merits serious due diligence by anyone following that event.

I Really Don’t Know What to Make of This

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But if Sy Hersh’s account of the killing of Osama bin Laden is even ¼ true, this is the biggest story that he’s ever broken:*

It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.

 The most blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders – General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI – were never informed of the US mission. This remains the White House position despite an array of reports that have raised questions, including one by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times Magazine of 19 March 2014. Gall, who spent 12 years as the Times correspondent in Afghanistan, wrote that she’d been told by a ‘Pakistani official’ that Pasha had known before the raid that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. The story was denied by US and Pakistani officials, and went no further. In his book Pakistan: Before and after Osama (2012), Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, a think tank in Islamabad, wrote that he’d spoken to four undercover intelligence officers who – reflecting a widely held local view – asserted that the Pakistani military must have had knowledge of the operation. The issue was raised again in February, when a retired general, Asad Durrani, who was head of the ISI in the early 1990s, told an al-Jazeera interviewer that it was ‘quite possible’ that the senior officers of the ISI did not know where bin Laden had been hiding, ‘but it was more probable that they did [know]. And the idea was that, at the right time, his location would be revealed. And the right time would have been when you can get the necessary quid pro quo – if you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not going to simply hand him over to the United States.’

 This spring I contacted Durrani and told him in detail what I had learned about the bin Laden assault from American sources: that bin Laden had been a prisoner of the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006; that Kayani and Pasha knew of the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms; that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration’s account were false.

The cliff notes version of this, courtesy of The Stranger, is:

  • Pakistani officials knew about the raid and even helped the US pull it off.
  • There never was a firefight, neither in the yard outside the house nor once the SEALs got inside.
  • The story of the courier whom the reportedly CIA traced, leading them to bin Laden, was a fabrication.
  • The story of the courier dying in the firefight was a cover-up “because he didn’t exist and we couldn’t produce him,” a retired senior intelligence official told Hersh.
  • The way the CIA actually found out where bin Laden was is that a “Pakistani walk-in” who wanted the $25 million reward came in and told the CIA about it.
  • Osama bin Laden was not armed, contrary to reports that he had a machine gun and was killed in a firefight, and he was not killed with just one or two bullets but “obliterated.”
  • “Seals cannot live with the fact that they killed bin Laden totally unopposed, and so there has to be an account of their courage in the face of danger. The guys are going to sit around the bar and say it was an easy day? That’s not going to happen,” that same retired senior intelligence official said.
  • “Despite all the talk” about what the SEALs collected on-site, the retired official said there were “no garbage bags full of computers and storage devices. The guys just stuffed some books and papers they found in his room in their backpacks.”
  • The story about bin Laden’s sea burial may be a fabrication.
  • The retired official told Hersh that bin Laden’s “remains, including his head… were thrown into a body bag and, during the helicopter flight back to Jalalabad, some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains—or so the Seals claimed.”
  • Obama was going to wait until a week after bin Laden’s death to announce it, and he was going to tell the American people that bin Laden had been killed by a drone, but after the SEALs had to blow up their malfunctioning helicopter on-site, attracting attention locally, everything changed.
  • The story about the vaccination program carried out locally in an attempt to get bin Laden’s DNA—a story that “led to the cancellation of other international vaccination programmes that were now seen as cover for American spying”—wasn’t true.
  • Retired official again: “It’s a great hoax.”

(emphasis original)

The American press has been completely dismissive of Hersh’s report, and, it’s fair to say that the sourcing is not as solid as I would have liked.

Then again, when you look at the biggest supporter of the “Zero Dark Thirty” narrative, the CIA, we know that they are still lying about torture, that they still nave not come clean about spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and basically wrote the movie “Zero Dark Thirty”.

I know that the movie version is false, at least as to whether torture worked, the Senate Intelligence Committee report proved that.

I’m not sure where the truth lies, and any dealing with the machinations of the “war on terror” in general, and the Pakistani state security apparatus in particular. is a bag full of cats.

At this point, I’ll go with Charlie Pierce’s:

What’s clear is that, in the war on terror, or whatever it is in which we’ve been engaged since we handed the military policy over to the spooks and thrown international crisis diplomacy into the vast, deep underbrush of myth and legend generated by the conjuring spells of the intelligence world, that we willingly surrendered self-government to magic and spellcraft. And Osama bin Laden is still dead, and his body is still at the bottom of the sea. Maybe.

I’m not clear what the truth is, except (of course) for the fact that the CIA tortured, that it did not work, and that Langley lies about everything.

I is confuzzled.

*And yes, I mean that statement. If is just ¼ true, this is the biggest story that Seymour f%$#ing Hersh has ever broken. Think about that for a moment.

I’ve Heard this Song Before

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In a Japanese redux of the Obama administrations secrecy on the Trans Pacific Partnership, the Abe administration has reneged on a promise of transparency:

A senior government official has backtracked on his proposal to give lawmakers access to the draft text of a 12-nation Pacific trade pact ahead of a potential deal.

Yasutoshi Nishimura, senior vice minister of the Cabinet office in charge of the negotiations, said his intent was misunderstood when he told a press conference on Monday that Japan will “make preparations to allow lawmakers access to the text next week” at the earliest.

Nishimura apparently withdrew the disclosure plan due to strong opposition from some government officials, who are concerned about differences in confidentiality obligations between Japan and the United States, according to informed sources.

In line with a rule agreed with the 11 other countries, only a handful of Japanese officials can currently read the text, such as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, TPP minister Akira Amari and chief TPP negotiator Koji Tsuruoka.

However, the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office has already made the draft Trans-Pacific Partnership text available to U.S. legislators on condition they do not make any part of it public.

Nishimura said Thursday that Tokyo cannot take the same measure as Washington “there is a big difference between the duty of confidentiality” of lawmakers in the two countries.

If this deal cannot handle the light of day, which appears to be the case, it’s a bad deal.

Couldn’t We Send Him to Guantánamo?

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This has to be the best headline of the day:

To Send a Message, Judge Sentences David Petraeus to 75% of One Speaking Fee

David PetraeusFormer CIA Director David Petraeus just got sentenced to two years of probation for leaking highly sensitive information to his mistress and then lying to the FBI about it.

………

The only “surprise” of the hearing is that, rather than getting slapped with a $40,000 fine, Judge David Keesler more than doubled the fine to send a message.

To $100,000.

According to SpeakerPedia, Petraeus makes upwards of $132,750 for each speech.

Needless to say, this is disgraceful.

This guy mishandled secure information, he then deliberately leaked it to his lover, and then he lied to the FBI about it, and he can make enough to pay the fine in about 70 minutes.

BTW, the Obama administration is using him as a consultant now, so it appears that he still has a security clearance.

So Not a Surprise

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You know those “Cybersecurity” bills that are supposed to protect our data and our privacy?

Not so much:

Cybersecurity legislation advancing in Congress could create the first brand-new exemption to the Freedom of Information Act in nearly half a century—a prospect that alarms transparency advocates and some lawmakers.

A bill approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee last month would add a new tenth exemption to FOIA, covering all “information shared with or provided to the Federal Government” under the new measure.

Another provision in the legislation would require that “cyber threat indicators and defensive measures” which companies or individuals share with the federal government be “withheld, without discretion, from the public.” The Senate bill, which is expected to come to the floor soon, also seeks to shut off any access to that information under state or local freedom of information laws.

Two cybersecurity bills are expected to be taken up on the House floor as soon as this week. Both contain similar language about keeping confidential threat and defensive measure information turned over to the government. However, a new FOIA exemption that was in the House Intelligence Committee cyber bill was taken out, a spokesman confirmed Friday.

In an official Senate Intelligence Committee report made public over the weekend, two Democratic members of that panel objected to the new FOIA exemption, which would be the first brand-new exemption added to the landmark transparency legislation since 1967.

“We are unconvinced that it is necessary to create an entirely new exemption to the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA,” Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) wrote in a statement accompanying the panel’s report on the cyber bill. “Government transparency is critical in order for citizens to hold their elected officials and bureaucrats accountable; however, the bill’s inclusion of a new FOIA exemption is overbroad and unnecessary as the types of information shared with the government through this bill would already be exempt from unnecessary public release under current FOIA exemptions.”

………

Critics say the proposed new FOIA exemption could allow companies to block disclosure of virtually any information by anyone in the government simply by submitting that information to the new cybersecurity portal. McDermott said the narrower provisions were also troubling and have mandatory language that could preclude the government from releasing cyber-related information even when needed to warn about a danger to the general public.

McDermott also said it would set a bad precedent if a bill creating an entirely new FOIA exemption made it into law without passing through the panels which oversee that law in each chamber.

“By authorizing a new exemption to the FOIA through a committee other than the committees of jurisdiction….you’ve undermined FOIA,” she warned.

Not surprised that the Obama administration likes this a lot. His history as President is one of being a cheerleader for the overarching security state, and his jihad on whistle blowers is a national disgrace.

About F%$#ing Time………

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Swedish prosecutors have agreed to interrogate Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy:

In an abrupt reversal, the Swedish prosecutor leading the investigation against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has finally agreed to question him inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Assange, who has been holed up in the building for nearly three years, has been accused of but not formally charged with committing sex crimes in Sweden.

In an English-language statement Friday, the Swedish Prosecution Authority wrote that Director of Public Prosecution Marianne Ny “has made a request to Julian Assange’s legal representatives whether Assange would consent to being interviewed in London and have his DNA taken via a swab.”

Why the sudden change of heart?


“The reason the prosecutor now decides to request permission to interview Julian Assange in London is chiefly that a number of the crimes Julian Assange is suspected of will be subject to statute of limitation in August 2015 i.e. in less than six months’ time,” the statement says.

Previously, the Swedish Prosecution Authority was on record as saying that “the prosecutor’s assessment is that a request for legal assistance involving the questioning of Julian Assange in London would not take the case forward in a significant manner.”

It’s clear that a part of this is the fact that the prosecutor is facing the statute of limitations, but I think that another part is that, with Edward Snowden’s revelations, it’s pretty clear that the various attempts by the Obama administration to intimidate potential whistle blowers has clearly failed, so the Swedes are no longer being pressured by the US.

My guess is that the charges will expire without the prosecutor filing anything.

Seriously, Pocket Change and a Meaningless Probation?

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David Petraeus has pled guilty to to leaking top secret information, and his deal includes a two point “enhancement” for obstructing justice by lying to the FBI, and the DoJ is asking foir a $40,000.oo fine and 2 years probation:

………DOJ quietly announced it had reached a plea deal with former CIA Director David Petraeus for leaking Top Secret/Secure Compartmented Information materials to his mistress, Paula Broadwell.
Among the materials in the eight “Black Books” Petraeus shared with Broadwell were:

…classified information regarding the identities of covert officers, war strategy, intelligence capabilities and mechanisms, diplomatic discussions, quotes and deliberative discussions from high-level National Security Council meetings, and defendant DAVID HOWELL PETRAEUS’s discussions with the President of the United States of America.

The Black Books contained national defense information, including Top Secret/SCI and code word information.

Petraeus kept those Black Books full of code word information including covert identities and conversations with the President “in a rucksack up there somewhere.”

Petreaus retained those Black Books after he signed his debriefing agreement upon leaving DOD, in which he attested “I give my assurance that there is no classified material in my possession, custody, or control at this time.” He kept those Black Books in an unlocked desk drawer.

For mishandling some of the most important secrets the nation has, Petraeus will plead guilty to a misdemeanor. Petraeus, now an employee of a top private equity firm, will be fined $40,000 and serve two years of probation.

He will not, however, be asked to plead guilty at all for lying to FBI investigators. In an interview on October 26, 2012, he told the FBI,

(a) he had never provided any classified information to his biographer, and (b) he had never facilitated the provision of classified information to his biographer.

This is a guy whose record seems to be more of an exercise in self-promotion than anything else, and it’s pretty clear that he deliberately mishandled classified information because he wanted to help his girl friend, and it also clear that he lied to the FBI with the specific intent of obstructing an investigation, and the Department of Justice doesn’t want any jail time.

I hope that the judge goes a bit further than the Department of Justice.

Jabba the Governor Has Been a Very Busy Boy

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Federal law enforcement officials have launched a criminal investigation of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and members of his administration, pursuing allegations the governor and his staff broke the law when they quashed grand jury indictments against Christie supporters, International Business Times has learned.

Two criminal investigators from the U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday interviewed the man who leveled those charges, Bennett Barlyn. He was fired from the Hunterdon County prosecutor’s office in August 2010, and subsequently brought a whistleblower lawsuit against the Christie administration, claiming he had been punished for objecting to the dismissal of the indictments of the governor’s supporters for a range of corrupt activities.

Barlyn told IBTimes that he met with the federal investigators at his Pennsylvania home for more than an hour on Wednesday afternoon. He said they specifically focused on why Christie’s then-attorney general, Paula Dow, had moved to expunge the indictments. The investigators are examining what state and federal laws may have been broken in the process. Barlyn said the investigators appeared to be at an exploratory stage, with no certainty that criminal charges would ultimately be filed. The meeting followed a June letter to Barlyn from New Jersey’s U.S. Attorney, Paul Fishman, instructing Barlyn to be in touch with his office’s investigative team about the case.

This is not particularly surprising.

When Christie was the US Attorney for New Jersey, he routinely leaked grand jury proceedings to target political opponents.

Ethics is not his strong suit.

We knew this when he was booking excessively expensive hotels when he was US attorney, and these days, he is getting the luxury treatment paid for by campaign contributors and state contractors:

As Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey waited to depart on a trade mission to Israel in 2012, his entourage was delayed by a late arrival: Mr. Christie’s father, who had accidentally headed to the wrong airport.

A commercial flight might have left without him, but in this case, there was no rush. The private plane, on which Mr. Christie had his own bedroom, had been lent by Sheldon G. Adelson, the billionaire casino owner and supporter of Israel. At the time, he was opposing legislation then before the governor to legalize online gambling in New Jersey.

Mr. Christie loaded the plane with his wife, three of his four children, his mother-in-law, his father and stepmother, four staff members, his former law partner and a state trooper.

King Abdullah of Jordan picked up the tab for a Christie family weekend at the end of the trip. The governor and two staff members who accompanied him came back to New Jersey bubbling that they had celebrated with Bono, the lead singer of U2, at three parties, two at the king’s residence, the other a Champagne reception in the desert. But a small knot of aides fretted: The rooms in luxurious Kempinski hotels had cost about $30,000; what would happen if that became public?

………

As United States attorney for New Jersey, Mr. Christie developed a reputation for flouting the rules on travel. A Justice Department report after he left office found that he was the prosecutor who most often exceeded the charges allowed for hotel stays in different cities, without properly searching for a cheaper alternative, or justifying any exemption from the rules. He stayed at a Four Seasons in Washington and a new boutique hotel in Boston, for example, at more than double the cost allowed for those cities.

It’s therefore no surprise that while all of this is going, he is also aggressively ignoring New Jersey open records laws:

On his first day as governor of New Jersey, Republican Chris Christie promised “a new era of accountability and transparency.” But five years later, local reporters and watchdog groups accuse Christie’s administration of making unprecedented efforts to keep public records a secret.

Stonewalled by the Christie administration, media outlets have been forced to sue to obtain even routinely disclosed information, such as payroll data. Rather than release documents connected to the George Washington Bridge scandal, pay-to-play allegations, possible ethics violations, and the out-of-state jaunts Christie has made while weighing a run for president, Christie’s office and several state agencies have waged costly court battles. As the 2016 presidential primary race draws closer, and Christie considers jumping in, his administration is fighting 23 different open-records requests in court.

“The track record is abysmal,” says Jennifer Borg, general counsel for the North Jersey Media Group. Her organization, which publishes the Record, has sued the state for public documents a half-dozen times since Christie took office. When a judge determines that the state withheld records illegally—which happens frequently—her group wins legal fees. As of September 2014, Christie’s administration had paid $441,000 to North Jersey Media Group and other media outlets for records. And that doesn’t count the cost of government lawyers’ time.

The fight has become so expensive for the state because when newspapers go to court for these records, they usually win. But winning doesn’t automatically produce the sought-after records. “We can and do beat them in court. But as long as they’re appealing—I don’t want to call it a pyrrhic victory, but we’re not going to get the records,” says Walter Luers, an attorney who helped a transparency project run by the state Libertarian Party sue for public access for Christie’s travel expenses. “Appeals take two to three years. We’re already into the presidential elections. By the time we get these records, Christie could have a new address.”

 And then we have his not-corrupt-but-harebrained vaccine statements, which appear to have a pretty long track record, and so it appears to be an actual statement of beliefs, not a gaffe:

New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s administration does not participate in a national program embraced by several of his potential rivals for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination that advises new parents to vaccinate their young children against measles and other diseases.

Governors and senior health officials from 28 states send signed cards to new mothers congratulating them on giving birth and providing them with a detachable checklist of immunisations that their infants should obtain before they are two years old. Christie is not among them, according to the New Jersey department of health.

“One of your most important roles as a parent is to make sure your baby is immunised,” says the message in a recent version of the card. “Keeping your little one healthy means starting immunisations by two months of age.” The advice and checklist are reviewed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The card lists recommended vaccinations, including the combined shot against measles, mumps and rubella that some campaigners continue to link to cases of autism in children, despite this claim’s having being repeatedly and comprehensively debunked by medical researchers.

………

New Jersey participated in the program under former Republican governors such as Christie Whitman and Donald DiFrancesco. Yet Donna Leusner, the communications director for Christie’s department of health, said the state had not taken part under the administrations of Christie or his predecessor Jon Corzine, a Democrat.

Jon Corzine, who should be sharing a cell with Chris Christie, though the former should be in jail for fraud in his business practices, and the latter should be in jail for official corruption.

We haven’t even begun the Republican Presidential debates, and it looks like the clown show has already begun.