— by Polydamas
The vast majority of Americans did not see this past week a common theme between the resignation of the Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner (R-OH) and the new scandal involving the Secret Service. We here at The Cassandra Times are happy to connect the dots and show our loyal readers the depths into which our once proud Republic has sunk.
A brief review is needed to place people and events into the right context. One of the earlier scandals of the new Clinton administration in the early 1990s was “FBI Filegate”. Some of the details of this scandal were recounted in former FBI agent Gary W. Aldrich’s book “Unlimited Access”. Shortly after taking over the administration, in May of 1993, Bill and Hillary Clinton decided to sack Billy Dale and the White House Travel Office staff, in what became known as “Travelgate”. Hillary Clinton had wanted to replace them with her own hand-picked appointees.
Shortly after arriving in Washington, D.C., Hillary Clinton had arranged for a former bar bouncer by the name of Craig Livingstone to be appointed the head of White House Security and to investigate Billy Dale. Livingstone proceeded to collect the FBI files on Billy Dale, but also on more than 900 people, according to an opinion essay by respected journalist William Safire titled “Unclosed Filegate” in the July 23, 1998 of the New York Times (http://nyti.ms/1Vxw08E). According to Safire, the FBI files provided to Livingstone contained secret information on “hundreds of former Reagan and Bush appointees never being considered for jobs” which caused “even Clinton partisans to shudder[] at shades of an ‘enemies list.'” Safire wrote that “White House spokesmen dismissed it as a ‘bureaucratic snafu,’ caused by a Secret Service that couldn’t keep its lists straight.”
Safire further reported that L’ivingstone told reporter Bill Sammon of The Washington Times ”I can see a secretary or some poor intern being relegated to typing up somebody’s information on the computer . . . so that the President could read it or the chief of staff could read it.” Far more likely than not, the secretary or intern was ordered to extract sensitive material on the Republican establishment from the FBI files and to accumulate opposition research in the Clintons’ own archives. Damaging information could then be used to blackmail Republican elected officials, key aides, and donors by threatening to leak the information to selected media allies for public dissemination. This notion is further confirmed by Daniel Halper’s book Clinton Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine, which contained the following:
- “As was revealed during the impeachment investigations, the Clintons hired private investigators to look into the personal lives of their political enemies.”
- “The Clintons also got lucky in who their enemies were. For the most prominent congressional Republicans during the Clinton administration—who tried to find out just how many laws the Clintons had broken, or who voted to impeach or convict the president of his crimes—decline, defeat, or disgrace awaited them. The aging and once widely respected Henry Hyde, who chaired the House Judiciary Committee, was outed as an adulterer, his sterling reputation tarnished. Also exposed were affairs by Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who resigned; by Louisiana congressman Bob Livingston, who would have replaced him; and by Dan Burton, the Indiana congressman who exhibited an almost Javert-like determination to uncover Clintonian duplicity and dirty dealings.”
- “I spoke to many, if not all, of Senator Clinton’s biggest opponents within the Republican Party during her time as First Lady. On or off the record, no matter how much they were coaxed, not one of them would say a negative thing about Hillary Clinton as a person—other than observing that her Democratic allies sometimes didn’t like her.”
If we connect all the dots together, it would appear that Halper is understated in his belief that the Clintons were merely lucky in who their political enemies were. The Clintons had ample damaging information on the Republican leadership during their first and second terms in the 1990s that they were able to not only peek at the Republican playbook before the plays were called but also influence which plays would be called and when.
Circling back to Representative John Boehner. Representative Boehner was first elected to the House of Representatives from the Eighth Congressional District of Ohio in 1990. He was elected in the midterm election in the midst of President George Herbert Walker Bush’s term in office. It is quite likely that the Clintons had obtained damaging Secret Service and FBI information about John Boehner back in the 1990s. This is probably also true of much of the Republican leadership, which has been justly derided by us here at The Cassandra Times as composed of effete Elmer Fudd Republicans.
Blackmail on career Republican politicians, like Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, caused them to be completely compromised and corrupted into becoming complicit participants and beneficiaries of inside-the-Beltway crony capitalism. They may talk tough to their own state and district constituents. They may pledge allegiance to the principles of a limited government, but, when push comes to shove, their actual deeds do not match their lofty words.
As for Speaker Boehner, he was always an Elmer Fudd Republican, the co-author together with Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, which federalized and nationalized education to the same extent that the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, nationalized health care. Speaker Boehner never adhered to any principles except the sacred Washington principles of horse trading and quid pro quo.
Speaker Boehner embodied Beltway wisdom that bipartisanship is always a great virtue when so-called moderate Republicans compromise, defect, and betray the principles of limited government to expand statism and to support it through profligate spending. Yet, it should be noted that no one in the mainstream media ever praises the rare bipartisanship of Democrats, who are always castigated for joining with Republicans or refusing to vote in lockstep with the Democrats. For example, Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) was widely pilloried in the press for daring to dissent from the nearly unanimous block of elected Democrats who blessed the Obama administration’s foolhardy nuclear pact with Iran.
The resignation of Representative John Boehner from his position as Speaker of the House of Representatives was not a complete surprise to us. As liberal pundits everywhere gleefully marveled, over the past few years, Speaker Boehner owed his continued tenure to the ingenuity and support of Democratic House minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca) and her loyal flock lending their votes to him. Also, the liberal media occasionally flattered Speaker Boehner as an enlightened bipartisan statesman, an adult in a room full of tantrum-throwing Tea Party infants. They lauded him for responsibly capitulating to liberal wisdom or, alternatively, wisely sidelining the far more principled members of his own party, which were tarred as “extremists”.
Unfortunately for Speaker Boehner, the midterm elections of 2010 and 2014 brought a small but sufficiently principled Republican new blood to Washington that refused to take part in his brand of teary-eyed, pusillanimous collaboration with the Democrats. When these new, younger, and more principled Republican Representatives refused to kowtow to his Vichy Republicanism and challenged him, Boehner retaliated by repressing them and taking away their committee chairmanships and otherwise attempting to relegate them to irrelevance. The internal rebellion against Speaker Boehner must have reached such proportions that he could no longer suppress the principled Republicans below him and was no longer of any use to the Democrats and the Chamber of Commerce types who held his leash. Speaker Boehner had no choice except to resign his office.
After enjoying two terms in control of Congress, Republicans essentially have nothing to show for it. The Democrats’ audacious blackmailing and, alternatively, political bribery of Elmer Fudd Republicans like Speaker Boehner completely blurred any meaningful distinction between the Democrats and the Republicans. This is why the Republicans’ congressional victories at the polls in 2010 and 2014 turned to ashes. Republicans were never able to offer more than verbal, token, and turnstile resistance to the Obama administration’s brazen steamrolling of principled governance, the outright destruction of the Constitution, and the piecemeal disintegration of the American Republic.
In stark contrast to the tacit capitulation by Elmer Fudd Republicans to blackmail and political bribery, a number of politicians in Washington expressed their outrage this week over the recent revelation that high officials in the Secret Service had deliberately retaliated against Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) for his open criticism of them by leaking to the media secret and private information about him. According to a Roll Call post by Hannah Hess and Matthew Fleming, dated October 2, 2015 and titled “Secret Service Targeting of Chaffetz Alarms Lawmakers” (http://bit.ly/1OQ23BF), there is a great concern about the lack of effective congressional oversight over American intelligence agencies and their spying on the phones and electronic devices belonging to elected officials.
On October 2, 2015, the editors of The National Review aptly described the Secret Service’s newest misdeeds as nothing short of a “conspiracy to commit blackmail against a member of Congress.” (http://bit.ly/1Oez4aT). Rep. Chaffetz is not just a simple member of Congress; he is the chairman of the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee whose function includes to oversee intelligence agencies. Emboldened by President Barack Houssein Obama and his administration’s refusal to enforce valid laws with which they disagree, it is not surprising in the least that other politically-minded, highly-placed bureaucrats in the executive branch would seek to follow suit. Lois Lerner, head of the Internal Revenue Service’s Tax Exempt Organizations, decided that she did not wish to follow the directives of the United States Supreme Court in the Citizens United case regarding the McCain-Feingold Act. She used the powers of her executive agency to usurp the prerogatives of the judicial branch and suppress constitutionally-protected political speech during the 2010 and 2012 elections. By silencing the opposition, she may have been the one most instrumental person who assured President Obama’s re-election. In the same manner, highly-placed officials in the Secret Service sought to silence Rep. Jason Chaffetz and to prevent Congress from reining in renegade intelligence agencies.
As of the date of this post, Rep. Jason Chaffetz is said to seek to replace Rep. John Boehner as Speaker of the House of Representatives. We here at The Cassandra Times believe that a person of integrity and principle like Representative Chaffetz should be the next Speaker rather than another Elmer Fudd Republican in the mold of John Boehner. A person like Jason Chaffetz who dares to take on the Secret Service and curtail the runaway powers of intransigent intelligence agencies is not likely to be successfully blackmailed by statist Democrats and Chamber of Commerce crony capitalists into becoming a sock puppet Vichy Republican. The future of the American Republic, halting, and reversing the erosion of individual liberty depend upon the success of elected officials like him.
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Secret Service Targeting of Chaffetz Alarms Lawmakers
Hannah Hess and Matthew Fleming
Roll Call
October 2, 2015
A Secret Service official’s allegedly deliberate decision to embarrass Rep. Jason Chaffetz could “give pause” to other lawmakers who have applied for federal jobs, cautioned former House Judiciary Chairman Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis.
The inappropriate intrusion into Privacy Act-protected information, acknowledged in a report by the agency’s inspector general, could have a chilling effect, Sensenbrenner told CQ Roll Call Thursday — and he thinks someone “should be fired over it.”
Spying on the phones and electronic devices of elected officials has stoked concern in Congress. Even Sensenbrenner, the lead author of the 2002 Patriot Act, has protested lax oversight of the National Security Agency’s activities. But the disturbing leak to two media outlets of Chaffetz’s rejected application for a Secret Service job and the particulars surrounding it raised further alarm about privacy.
“Those responsible need to be held accountable, because behavior like this threatens the very nature of independent oversight of law enforcement,” Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, said Thursday.
Stakes in the monthslong conflict between Congress and the Secret Service went even higher Friday, after agency Director Joseph P. Clancy revised his account of what he knew and when he knew it, disclosing he had knowledge that private information about the Utah Republican was circulating before it was published.
The controversy started on March 24. Eighteen minutes after Chaffetz convened a House Oversight and Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing titled, “Holding the Protectors Accountable,” a senior Secret Service agent queried the chairman’s name in the agency’s electronic database. As Chaffetz blasted Clancy for an “infuriating” lack of knowledge about an alleged mishap by two agents, the internal search returned Chaffetz’s September 2003 application.
By the end of the day, seven Secret Service employees had accessed the record, which showed Chaffetz had not been hired because “better qualified applicants existed.” A screenshot of the application, including Chaffetz’s Social Security number and birth date, was embedded in one email chain. But the sensitive data was not included in “a number of other emails,” according to the report.
“It’s outrageous,” said Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wis., who has called out the Secret Service, Capitol Police and U.S. Park Police for their lack of clear responsibility for investigating breaches of Washington’s airspace security. Johnson has also teamed up with Grassley to confront the Justice Department about its investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s email server.
“If that is personal information, it should be private information, it should be ruled off limits,” Johnson said. He told CQ Roll Call he never felt threatened by such a personal leak, because he’s “actually quite the Boy Scout.”
Ranking House Judiciary Democrat John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., who engaged in a 2013 battle against the White House and congressional leadership over NSA spying, said the committee’s lawyers were going to look into the situation.
“I think that there are probably instances where an agency has overstepped its bounds and that’s something we all have to be constantly sensitive to,” Conyers told CQ Roll Call.
When the Daily Beast published an April 2 report on Chaffetz’s rejected job application, 45 employees located across the country and abroad had accessed the record approximately 60 times. Some senior managers who learned Chaffetz’s application was spreading warned their employees against it, “but it was done orally and without reporting up the chain of command or an attempt to address what was becoming a widespread issue,” the report stated.
Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, and ranking member Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., called out the agency’s leaders for callous handling of the breach. Thompson said the supervisors’ response “undermines my confidence that the reforms you are pursuing have any hope of curing what ails the Secret Service.”
Another lawmaker who has been a thorn in the side of intelligence agencies, outspoken Florida Democrat Alan Grayson, said the incident “illustrates the dangers of pervasive spying not just on members of Congress, but on members of the general public.”
“It’s not so much whether members of Congress, per say might feel chilled, but whether its chilling to think that the federal government has a record of our phone calls, mail that we send, the mail that we receive, our purchases,” he said Thursday during an interview in the Speaker’s Lobby.
Though Clancy and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson each called Chaffetz personally — twice, the lawmaker told CNN — to apologize, the incident casts a shadow over an agency that was enjoying a brief moment in the sun.
On the South Lawn of the White House Tuesday, President Barack Obama praised the Secret Service for a protecting Pope Francis, Chinese President Xi Jinping and more than 100 world leaders gathered at U.N. meetings in New York.
“The foolishness of a handful of people” has harmed that reputation, reflected Sen. Thomas R. Carper, D-Del., the ranking member on the committee that oversees the Homeland Security Department.
“Nobody’s talking about what a terrific job they did there,” Carper said. “Most of the chatter is about well, ‘How ’bout Congressman Chaffetz’s employment file at the Secret Service?”
Whoever distributed it should be “ashamed,” the senator said, “because what they have done is disparaged the work of tens of thousands of their colleagues who’ve done a great job.”
Grassley, who oversees the Secret Service and FBI under his committee’s jurisdiction, couldn’t resist a wisecrack about the leak. “A lot of people made a joke out of, ‘Well, surely Grassley must be living OK, because with all these investigations of the FBI he would’ve been picked up by now.’”
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Another Secret Service Scandal — This One’s Not Just About Sex or Drugs
by the Editors
National Review
October 2, 2015 4:00 AM
Let’s not shy away from what the Secret Service actually was up to in the matter of its illegal spying on Representative Jason Chaffetz: conspiracy to commit blackmail against a member of Congress.
Representative Chaffetz has been investigating the scandal-plagued protective agency — the habitual drunkenness and whoring of its agents, among other things — when Secret Service personnel improperly accessed his protected records in a hunt for dirt. The aim of this was made clear by assistant director Ed Lowery, who wrote to assistant director Faron Paramore: “Some information that he might find embarrassing needs to get out.”
Critics are saying that the agency’s brass — at least 18 of them were culpably aware of the plan, and 45 employees illegally viewed the congressman’s information — have violated the Privacy Act. They certainly have, but that is the least of it. They have illegally accessed protected federal records, which is fraud under federal law and carries a ten-year prison sentence. Releasing embarrassing information about the congressman (assuming there was any), with the inevitable implicit threat of releasing more unless he backed off in his investigation of the Secret Service, rises to the level of prosecutable blackmail under federal law. Throw in the interstate-communication and obstruction charges and there’s an excellent case to be made for locking away Ed Lowery and his confederates for a long time. Frankly, it’s a pity more robust punishment is not an option. A society with a bit of moral vigor would have them flogged.
Public corruption is extraordinarily dangerous to a free society, and corruption by law-enforcement agencies is the deadliest of all. This isn’t a case of questionable police behavior with conflicting witnesses; the inspector general’s report is unequivocal on the facts of the case. Yes, of course, they should have their day in court — the problem with the Secret Service is that its agents never end up on trial when they have plainly broken the law, even when there are witnesses, and even when those witnesses are police officers. Men with guns and the power to put citizens under arrest must be held to the very highest standards — and punished with the utmost severity when they transgress.
But adhering to the highest standards isn’t on the agenda of this basket case of an agency. Case in point: David Neiland, the Secret Service investigator entrusted with investigating the agency’s prostitution scandals, resigned — was permitted to resign rather than be fired — after his own prostitution scandal. A prostitute identified him and confirmed that he had paid her for sex, but he was not charged with a crime. Why? Prior to the prostitution scandal in Cartagena, the agency maintained a blind-eye policy toward the crimes of its agents. Why? Secret Service agents drove drunk on the White House grounds — through emergency barriers erected as part of an emergency bomb investigation — and they weren’t even given sobriety tests; in fact, they were permitted to drive home in government cars, despite their being obviously “hammered” as one police officer put it. Why?
Perhaps now that they’ve moved on from buying Colombian women to targeting congressmen, somebody in Washington can get around to treating these criminals like the criminals they are.
But that should not be the end of the housekeeping. The Secret Service is, undeniably, a rogue police agency infected with a culture of lawlessness. Director Joseph Clancy has had an opportunity to address this, and he has failed. He should be relieved of his duties, and so should Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson if he cannot get this heavily armed goon squad under control.
And perhaps it is time to start thinking about transferring the Secret Service’s law-enforcement functions to the FBI and its protective functions to a new agency, one less prone to behaving like a crime syndicate.
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(http://bit.ly/1M8jsQ1)
Another Targeting Scandal
Noah Rothman
Commentary Magazine
October 1, 2015
“This is scary. 1984 scary,” National Journal columnist Ron Fournier remarked on Thursday. “We’ve got an agency called ‘Secret Service’ targeting political enemies. Think about that.”
Indeed. This week, the fraternity house that is United States Secret Service graduated from ribald antics and hijinks to the outright political intimidation of those who would dare spoil the good time. The specific target of the Secret Service’s botched decapitation strike was House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz. According to the Department of Homeland Security inspector general, the USSS assistant director tried to get some embarrassing information about the congressman into the public sphere in the effort to coerce Chaffetz to back off his investigation of the agency responsible for the personal safety of America’s most prominent political figures.
This was not just an implied threat against Chaffetz. It wasn’t a coy wink and a nod from the agency manager in question that triggered the operation aimed at defaming and intimidating an influential member of the House of Representatives. “Some information that he might find embarrassing needs to get out,” wrote USSS Assistant Director Edward Lowery. “Just to be fair.”
Such a nasty communications trail for such an half-hearted character assassination attempt. That “embarrassing” information that was to tar forever Chaffetz’s reputation did, in fact, make its way into the press. The revelation designed to tarnish the House Oversight chairman? He tried to enlist in the Secret Service in 2003 but was rejected.
… Yes, that’s it.
On the heels of the scandal involving the accusation that IRS officials used their power to target political enemies in order to reduce their ability to damage officials allied with the party in control of the White House, another targeting scandal should by rights ignite a firestorm in the press. And it would if the targets were not Republicans.
At this point, the press can excuse itself for being scandal-fatigued. From the Department of Justice, to the Environmental Protection Agency, to the Department of Energy, to the Department of Veterans Affairs, to the Office of Personnel Management, to the Defense Intelligence Agency, to the Pentagon – not to mention the IRS and the USSS; virtually every arm of the executive branch under this president has been implicated in some form of malfeasance. Of all the scandal-plagued institutions in the Obama era, however, the Secret Service might be the most worrisome in part because it is the most embarrassingly inept.
As The Federalist’s Sean Davis pointed out on Wednesday, the USSS has been comporting itself in an embarrassing fashion for years. He noted that the USSS was unaware in 2011 that a gunman had fired at the White House and fumbled the investigation into that incident. He recalls the controversy that erupted when it was learned that Secret Service agents on a presidential detail in Colombia occupied their time patronizing local prostitutes. Davis noted that the institution’s agents were found drunk and non-responsive in an Amsterdam hotel hallway while performing advance work for the president just two years later.
“Last April, a Secret Service supervisor was placed on leave following charges of sexual harassment from a female employee,” Davis reminded his readers. “That scandal came on the heels of news last March that two other agents, suspected of being drunk, literally drove through an active bomb investigation, nearly hitting the suspicious device that was thought to be a bomb.”
The criminal misconduct and bureaucratic defensiveness of the United States Secret Service has for years been the dirty little secret of which everyone in Washington was aware. Under this president, the institution has exposed itself as one in dire need of a total overhaul. In October of last year, after a disturbed individual jumped the White House fence and bee-lined his way into the White House — making his way into the East Room before finally being subdued — USSS Director Julia Pierson resigned. But much like the high-profile resignation of former Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki, it represented only the reshuffling of deck chairs.
The Secret Service needs rebuilding from the ground up, but it is not the only institution that has shed public trust. The scale of the corruption that plagues the presidency’s many arms, and the general lack of interest in this crisis displayed by the watchdog press, is a dangerous condition. According to Gallup, which has been polling on the question since 1993, the public’s trust in government has neared all-time lows. Only one-third of the public expresses any trust in the presidency, and fewer trust the news media, the Congress, or the courts. In fact, the police and the military are the only public institutions that retain the trust of a majority of poll respondents. That’s an especially precarious place for a constitutional republic to occupy.
And yet, Washington yawns. The targeting of the administration’s political opponents by institutions of vested power like the Secret Service, the IRS, and the Justice Department are dismissed as imprudent excesses. The party of government would do well to use its remaining months in power in the White House to restore some of the public’s lost faith in Washington’s ability to govern responsibly, if only to establish that no future White House should abide such intimidation tactics. Surely, the press will reawaken to the dangers of an administration inclined to silence its political opponents through law enforcement agencies when the White House is again in Republican hands. By then, however, it may be too late to reverse the country’s near imperceptibly meandering glide into tyranny.