When The S*** Hits the Fan

#DOJ Employees Investigating Hillary Email Scandal Gave $75K to Her Campaign

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(ANTIMEDIA) United States — In what must be described as a massive conflict of interest, Hillary Clinton has amassed nearly $75,000 in campaign donations from individuals listing their place of employment as “Department of Justice.” Considering Clinton is the subject of a sweeping investigation by the FBI — for which the DoJ will determine whether or not charges will be levied — such donations seem at least somewhat dissonant.

As the Washington Free Beacon reported, of all the presidential hopefuls, Clinton received by far the heftiest sum from DoJ employees — $73,437 total, including 228 individuals contributing the maximum allowable by law, $2,700. On its own, the total could be considered substantial, but as the Free Beacon noted, Clinton’s previous presidential run wasn’t favored as heavily by DoJ employees — in 2008, she raised just $15,930 from 23 contributors.

Hillary’s donations from the Department of Justice completely swamp those of the other candidates, in fact, as Sanders’ total from 51 donors was just $8,900 and Trump garnered an inconsequential $381.

“I’m not surprised in the least to see more evidence that shows the politicization of the Justice Department,” said watchdog group, Citizens United, president David Bossie, in a statement to the Free Beacon. “How can Democrat political appointees fairly investigate someone who is about to become their nominee for president? That’s why last July I called on Attorney General Lynch to appoint an impartial special counsel to investigate the private Clinton email server.

“Today, I renew my call that Attorney General Lynch must appoint a special counsel to determine if Hillary Clinton or her agents broke the law and compromised our national security. This investigation needs to be conducted free of political influence once and for all.”

Critics have previously pointed to Lynch personally donating over $10,000 to Democratic candidates as evidence of her lack of impartiality — and sufficient reason she should not be charged with overseeing the investigation of Clinton’s emails.

As if the DoJ connections to the Clinton investigation weren’t enough, the former secretary has also received a number of hearty contributions from the private prison industry.

As The Intercept reported nearly a year ago, two of Clinton’s top campaign donors are Corrections Corporation of America and the Geo Group — two of the biggest private prison corporations on the planet.

For Clinton to not only claim to follow the letter of the law in the face of evidence to the contrary — in her use of a private email server for official State business — but to also tout her devotion to minorities and social justice, while accepting donations from for-profit prisons, belies the flimsiest of façades.

As usual, Hillary Clinton’s stances run the gamut of personal convenience while flouting the public interest. Though evidence grows stronger by the day that at least one of her many wrongs is deserving of an indictment, the levying of charges remains an open question — if not downright doubtful.

This article (Dept. of Justice Investigating Hillary Email Scandal Gave $75K to Her Campaign) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Claire Bernish and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. Image credit: Marc Nozell. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org.

 

From theantimedia.org Team

Hacker #Arrested and Jailed After Exposing Flaws in #Election Website

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(ANTIMEDIA) Lee County, FL — A hacker in Florida exposed security vulnerabilities in one county’s elections web domains so officials could fix the problem — but, instead, he ended up behind bars.

Hacker David Michael Levin, owner of Vanguard Cybersecurity, was arrested on Wednesday after the Florida Department of Law Enforcement received a referral from the Lee County Sheriff’s Office after his apparently misguided attempt to help prevent election fraud by pointing out online vulnerabilities.

After spending six hours in jail, where he was held on $15,000 bond, Levin now faces three counts of gaining unauthorized access to a computer, network, or electronic instrument — despite the fact he had not only been doing his job, but also alerted the county to a potentially serious security concern.

To hack the Lee County Elections Office and the Division of Elections in Tallahassee, Levin performed Structured Query Language (SQL) injection attacks — which he documented on video and later uploaded to YouTube. According to the somewhat redacted police report, Levin’s associate, Daniel Sinclair, sent a security report about the SQL vulnerability — including details of the security flaw and a screenshot — to “an employee within the Department of State, Division of Elections.”

That employee then forwarded all the information to Special Agent Christopher Tissot, and the investigation began.

Though superficially, the case appears to be one of an unwelcome security breach despite that it was attempted for otherwise laudable purposes. But some aspects of what led to Levin’s arrest deserve further consideration.

Levin’s associate, Sinclair, is currently running against incumbent Sharon Harrington, Lee County Supervisor of Elections — whose name and password were used in the SQL hack. In the YouTube video about the attack, Levin and Sinclair explain how they obtained data from the elections website, which wasn’t even encrypted.

The possibility Levin chose Harrington’s account to perform the SQL injection as a publicity stunt to make Harrington’s job performance appear untenable must be taken into consideration. That being said, Levin’s foray into the elections data had not been undertaken with the appropriate permission — and because he didn’t alert the authorities as soon as he discovered vulnerabilities, law enforcement is required to be blind to his good intent.

However, in Levin’s defense, the privacy concerns of millions of voters — and any other potential issues with unencrypted and unsecured information — on the official Elections website should perhaps trump the strictures of law. Levin cooperated fully during a raid of his property — during which electronics were confiscated — and has in no way been deceitful regarding the hack.

Considering the sheer volume of complaints so far during the 2016 election cycle, it would seem counterproductive for law enforcement to go after a credentialed individual who obviously has the voting public’s best interests in mind.

With rather overt fraud disenfranchising voters across the country, arresting the one hacker who attempted to help secure elections seems oddly ironic.

This article (Hacker Arrested and Jailed After Exposing Flaws in Election Website) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Claire Bernish and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org.

 

From theantimedia.org Team

Video: #Hillary Confronted by #Coal Miner Whose Jobs She Vowed to Destroy

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Claire Bernish
May 4, 2016

(ANTIMEDIA) United States — Hillary Clinton already has an issue with being truthful, but her latest waffling on coal — and, specifically, coal miners’ livelihoods — has most of the country crying foul.

“Instead of dividing people the way Donald Trump does, let’s reunite around policies that will bring jobs and opportunities to all these undeserved poor communities,” Clinton boasted at a town hall meeting in March — immediately, hypocritically, and even jovially following up with this zinger:

“So, for example, I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean, renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

Granted, the chameleon presidential candidate elucidated, however vaguely, that “we don’t want to forget those people” — and she did ultimately apologize for the original remark. But the damage from such a powerful dismissal of the livelihoods of generations of Americans had already been indelibly marked in the hearts of coal mining families — as well as in the minds of members of West Virginia’s Republican Party.

Clinton has been touring West Virginia ahead of the state’s primary — and coal miners clearly can’t let her promise to put them out of work fall by the wayside.

Hillary sat down for a roundtable discussion with local residents on Monday as throngs of protesters could be heard outside, chanting “Go home!” One of the locals, Bo Copley, who recently lost his coal mining job, pleaded with Clinton to explain her statement from March.

“The reason you hear those people out there saying some of the things that they say,” Copley said, noting the loud protesters just outside the room, “is because when you make comments like ‘we’re going to put a lot of coal miners out of jobs,’ these are the kind of people that you’re affecting.”

Copley then thrust a picture of his family in front of an obviously uncomfortable — or possibly bored — Clinton, demanding to know if his family members would “have a future in this state” were she to be elected president.

“What I said was totally out of context from what I meant, because I have been talking about coal country for a very long time,” Clinton asserted during the conversation.

Hillary’s backtracking seems disingenuous at best considering her track record is more replete with mendacity than honesty. As you can see in the following footage, Clinton has more in common with a desperate chameleon than she does with the honest voters she actively attempts to court.

And, judging by the fully extended middle fingers greeting her in coal country, it seems more and more people realize they’re likely to hear Clinton say just about anything to win votes.

This article (Video: Hillary Confronted by Coal Miner Whose Jobs She Vowed to Destroy) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Claire Bernish and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org.

 

From theantimedia.org Team

Over Half of #Americans Now Believe the #Voting System Is Rigged

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AnonHQ Staff
May 3, 2016

(ANONHQ) This American primary season has been unlike any other election in recent memory, if not United States history. Between the Donald Trump phenomenon, Sanders supporters claiming voter fraud after what seems like every single state election and candidates in rivaling parties both publicly stating that the system is rigged, one thing is clear, there is something very strange happening.

We all understand that on some level, of course the system is rigged to a degree. I mean we have all known that Hillary Clinton was going to be ‘the next President’ for over six years now. It is no surprise she is running for election in 2016, we have known this all along. This is the illusion of having a choice in American politics. The reality is that you are presented with a choice to make, the illusion though, is that your choices are narrowed down by a rigged system.

People forget that in 2012 Donald Trump was in the mix to become the next President, however he was told he could not participate in the Republican debates. The same exact thing happened to Rand Paul this year. He did not want to stop campaigning for President, the GOP literally told him they would no longer allow him on the debate stage. Like it or not, on some level the entire system is rigged to a degree and apparently the majority of American citizens now agree. According a new study conducted by Reuters News, “more than half of American voters believe the U.S. system is rigged.”

The study was conducted via an online poll between the dates of April 21 – 26 and consisted of approximately 2,215 people – 1,582 of which were Americans. According to the results, when presented with the question “Agree or disagree: The current system of presidential primaries and caucuses are ‘rigged’ against some candidates?” 47.5% of people agreed. 23.6% disagreed with the statement and 28.9% were undecided or did not have an opinion for or against. Overall 51% of perspective American voters in the upcoming election believe that the system as a whole is rigged in general.

The study also went on to reveal that 71% or respondents said they would favor a direct vote for individual candidates on a single day rather than the current prolonged state delegate based system we see today. People point to the fact that when the primary season first began the Republicans had a field of 17 candidates. Today we are still in the process, some states haven’t even had a vote and yet the field of candidates available to vote for has shrunk down 3 – hardly fair or equal for every state.

Further numbers reveal that 27% of respondents admit that they have no idea how the political process actually works, something we refer to as low-information voters. Another 44% of voters have no idea what delegates actually are or why they are involved in the voting process at all.

This Article (Over Half of Americans Now Believe the Voting System Is Rigged) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and AnonHQ.com. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. Image credit: justgrimes. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org.

 

From theantimedia.org Team

#Hillary #Clinton’s Million Dollar Professional Internet Troll Army

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Nick Bernabe
April 24, 2016

(ANTIMEDIA) Hillary Clinton-aligned Super PAC, Correct the Record, is taking a page out of Vladimir Putin’s playbook by employing a $1 million dollar professional internet troll army to build a paid, positive consensus about the Clinton campaign. The effort, called “Breaking Barriers 2016,” claims:

“While Hillary Clinton fights to break down barriers and bring America together, the Barrier Breakers 2016 digital task force will serve as a resource for supporters looking for positive content and push-back to share with their online progressive communities, as well as thanking prominent supporters and committed superdelegates on social media.

“Correct The Record will invest more than $1 million into Barrier Breakers 2016 activities, including the more than tripling of its digital operation to engage in online messaging both for Secretary Clinton and to push back against attackers on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Instagram.”

The campaign will essentially be employing an unknown number of paid, pro-Hillary trolls to spread positive news about the candidate and counter anyone posting negative information about her. And these aren’t just ragtag trolls living in their mothers’ basements — they are industry and campaign professionals. As Correct the Record acknowledges:

“The task force staff’s backgrounds are as diverse as the community they will be engaging with and include former reporters, bloggers, public affairs specialists, designers, Ready for Hillary alumni, and Hillary super fans who have led groups similar to those with which the task force will organize.”

In response to this news, Bernie Sanders campaign staffer Mike Casca told The Daily Beast, “Our campaign and our vendors are not paying people to reply to anti-Bernie comments on social media.” He added, “Come on man, really?”

The Hillary campaign was also recently called out by The Intercept for deploying “astroturfers” into the media — people with ties to Clinton who act as experts and political commentators to promote her campaign without disclosing their ties to the candidate.

With Hillary’s highly effective media strategies employing media surrogates — and now internet trolls — it’s becoming increasingly hard to decipher a distinction between actual Clinton supporters, unbiased political commentators, and paid campaign shills.

This article (Hillary Clinton’s Million Dollar Professional Internet Troll Army) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Nick Bernabe and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. Image credit: Gage Skidmore. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org.

From theantimedia.org Team

The Video That Could Bring Down #Hillary #Clinton’s Campaign

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Claire Bernish
April 20, 2016

(ANTIMEDIA) After New York’s stunningly disorganized and questionable primary results proved, yet again, our elections are rigged to ensure establishment darling Hillary Clinton garners the Democratic nomination, a new video from Abby Martin’s Empire Files could topple Clinton’s entire campaign.

Evidence of said rigging isn’t difficult to find — it’s written directly into the electoral process in superdelegates, whose 700 “unpledged” votes remain uncommitted to a candidate until the nomination. This is “to ensure nominees are hand-picked party insiders,” as Martin explains in the video.

“The single vote of a superdelegate is worth thousands of ours,” Martin notes. “Many of these people are current and former members of Congress, and dozens more are literally corporate lobbyists working on behalf of every industry from healthcare to private prisons.”

In fact, the employment of superdelegates was initiated precisely for situations when the people’s choice doesn’t align with the establishment’s — such as the current overwhelming popularity of Bernie Sanders.

But the web of corporate media executives and insiders contributing directly to Hillary Clinton’s campaign couldn’t possibly explain the extreme bias, lack of criticism, and virtual media blackout on Sanders’ success, right? And her campaign, dripping with corporate lobbying cash, wouldn’t concern the American voting public, even though lobbyists literally act as superdelegates — would it?

Watch Empire Files: Abby Martin Exposes What Hillary Clinton Really Represents to see the proof the establishment doesn’t want you to discover.

This article (The Video That Could Bring Down Hillary Clinton’s Campaign) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Claire Bernish and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. Image credit: Gage Skidmore. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org.

From theantimedia.org Team

Yes, the #PanamaPapers Could Really End Hillary #Clinton’s Campaign

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Op-Ed by Jake Anderson
April 6, 2016

(ANTIMEDIA) With Senator Bernie Sanders winning seven of the last eight delegate battles — the most recent was Tuesday night’s Wisconsin victory — there’s a feeling in the air that most progressives haven’t felt since the Iowa caucus. It speaks to a hard truth Hillary Clinton and her choleric campaign staffers will encounter when they wake up in the morning: Bernie really could still beat Clinton and become the Democratic nominee for president.

No way, some of you are saying. The television faces said the delegate math was too hard. The superdelegates make it impossible. Hillary wins the primaries, Bernie only wins caucuses; America won’t elect a socialist; the nation won’t rally behind free healthcare and college tuition.

Despite the supposedly ineluctable logic of Sanders’ unelectability, many pundits now believe there has been a seismic shift in the 2016 presidential race. It is becoming increasingly obvious that Americans are sick to death of the two corporatist political establishments and will do anything to send them a message. The evidence of this is that the two most popular candidates in the 2016 election are a Jewish democratic socialist and a reality TV star who referred to his penis during a nationally televised debate.

Then there’s the matter of the Panama Papers. In case you haven’t heard about them over the roar of mainstream media’s ‘round-the-clock anti-Trump coverage, it’s being referred to as the biggest data leak in history. For the last year, 400 journalists have been secretly decoding 11.5 million documents leaked from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. The 2.6 terabytes of data show billions of dollars worth of transactions dating back 40 years.

Acquired from an anonymous source by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and then shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the documents present a jaw-dropping paper trail of how the upper echelon of the 1 percent has used shell companies and offshore tax havens to avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes. In less than a week of exposure, the Panama Papers have already implicated 140 world leaders from 50 different countries. Top executives and celebrities who appear in the leaked emails, PDFs, and other documents may also be indicted in money laundering, tax evasion, and sanctions-busting activities.

Though the source of the leak opted not to do a Wikileaks-style data dump and is instead allowing media outlets to curate the information, international tax reform could be imminent.

truth-cancer-ad

The revelations are relevant to the 2016 presidential election because they once again illustrate the stark contrast in judgement between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. The transgressions documented in the Panama Papers were directly facilitated by the Panama-United States Trade Promotion Agreement, which Congress ratified in 2012. In 2011, Sanders took to the floor of the senate to strongly denounce the trade deal:

“Panama is a world leader when it comes to allowing wealthy Americans and large corporations to evade US taxes by stashing their cash in offshore tax havens. The Panama free trade agreement will make this bad situation much worse. Each and every year, the wealthiest people in this country and the largest corporations evade about $100 billion in taxes through abusive and illegal offshore tax havens in Panama and in other countries.”

Clinton, on the other hand, completely ignored the tax haven issue, and instead, regurgitated the same job-creation platitude she used to peddle NAFTA, which has decimated American manufacturing jobs and led to an economic refugee crisis in Mexico.

Beyond just exposing her unwillingness to understand how modern free trade agreements benefit the rich and punish impoverished countries, Clinton may have a more nefarious connection to the Panama Papers.

In lobbying for the Panama-United States Trade Promotion Agreement, Clinton paved the way for major banks and corporations, most notably the Deutsche Bank, to skirt national laws and regulations. After she resigned as Secretary of State, the Deutsche Bank paid her $445,000 for a speech. While criminality can’t yet be definitively established, this may change when the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” publishes its comprehensive list at the end of the month. In addition to the aforementioned connection, Clinton’s name has already surfaced in connection to a billionaire and a Russian-controlled bank named in the files.

The fallout from the Panama Papers is being felt around the world. On Tuesday, Iceland’s Prime Minister resigned after it was revealed his family had used a shell company to hold millions of dollars worth of bonds in a collapsed bank. After an interview in which Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson had a meltdown when asked about the company’s assets, over 20,000 citizens of Iceland protested. For context, that’s approximately 10% of the country’s population.

How does this lead to Bernie Sanders defeating Hillary Clinton? The Sanders campaign has been run on the premise that Clinton is inextricably linked to political corruption, disastrous military interventions, and collusion with Wall Street. If it can be shown that Clinton was involved in criminal improprieties exposed by the Panama Papers, this will constitute yet another major line of attack for Sanders headed into the April 14th debate in New York. If Sanders wins the New York primary a few days later and scoops up its 95 delegates, the narrative of the election will dramatically shift.

When added to the myriad other Clinton scandals and political vulnerabilities, the Democratic party’s gatekeeper superdelegates could decide that Clinton is too big of a liability going into the general election. It all comes down to New York, though — Sanders must win New York. If he does, you will see historic chaos unleashed upon the American electorate. And if the Panama Papers leak sets off an unstoppable domino effect, the DNC may soon find its fractured party looking just as ghoulish as the clown’s autopsy being conducted on the Republican Party.

This article (Yes, the Panama Papers Could Really End Hillary Clinton’s Campaign) is an opinion editorial (OP-ED). The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of Anti-Media. This article is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Jake Anderson and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11 pm Eastern/8 pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, please email the error and name of the article to edits@theantimedia.org.

 

From theantimedia.org Team