- Last Chance to Get Tickets for Monday's Judicial Watch's 'Leadership Summit on Washington Corruption and the Transparency Crisis'
- New Judicial Watch Legal Salvo Seeks State Department Records on IT Specialist Pagliano Implicated in Email Scandal
- San Francisco Crime Records Highlight Deadly Dangers of Sanctuary Cities
- 9/11
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Last Chance to Get Tickets for Monday's Judicial Watch's 'Leadership Summit on Washington Corruption and the Transparency Crisis'
Other
top-flight speakers include U.S. Congressman Louie Gohmert; Fox News
analyst Andy McCarthy; former federal prosecutor Joe diGenova; Steve
Bannon, executive chairman of Breitbart News; John Fund, national
affairs columnist for National Review Online and a senior editor at The
American Spectator; J. Christian Adams, president and general counsel
for the Public Interest Legal Foundation; and Sidney Powell, Federal
Appeals Court practitioner and author of Licensed to Lie: Exposing
Corruption in the Department of Justice.This is your last chance to get your tickets to Judicial Watch's "Leadership Summit on Washington Corruption and the Transparency Crisis" which is only a few days away - this Monday, September 14. The keynote speaker is Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, who is a senior judicial analyst for the Fox News Channel. He is also the author of eight books on the U.S. Constitution, two of which have been New York Times best-sellers. This full-day event will address the current, unprecedented assault on the rule of law and corruption epidemic in Washington, DC - including the transparency crisis caused by illegal and out-of-control government secrecy. Plus, as you'll see here, we'll be breaking big news on Hillary Clinton's email scandal. Again, here are the details: Date:Monday, September 14, 2015 Judicial Watch litigation and investigations are widely recognized as being more effective than Congress and much of the media. Judicial Watch broke open the IRS, Benghazi, and, most recently, the Hillary Clinton email scandals. The Summit is a perfect chance for you to learn, collaborate, and be motivated on our cause to clean house in government. So check those last minute airline deals or hop in your car for a road trip to DC because you will not want to miss our inaugural Leadership Summit!
New Judicial Watch Legal Salvo Seeks State Department Records on IT Specialist Pagliano Implicated in Email Scandal
There's that name Clinton again. It just keeps popping up in connection with questions concerning crimes, classified information mishandling, secrecy, lies, and purloined government documents. We have just filed yet another Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit seeking records concerning the service and maintenance of former Secretary Hillary Clinton's email server. Specifically, Judicial Watch seeks records that will show whether Bryan Pagliano was hired or paid by the State Department to maintain the email server used by Clinton and her aides to conduct official State Department business and whether the State Department spent taxpayer money to manage the email server. (Pagliano, Hillary Clinton's IT director during her 2008 run for the presidency, was hired by her State Department in 2009.) Our team filed a simple FOIA request on August 5, the day after The Washington Post reported Pagliano, while employed at the State Department, "continued to act as the lead specialist responsible for [Clinton's email system]...with Pagliano summoned at various times to fix problems. Notably, the system crashed for days after New York was hit by Hurricane Sandy in October 2012, while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state." Judicial Watch's request seeks: • Records concerning the hiring of Pagliano; • Time sheets, calendars, or similar records of Pagliano; • Travel records to/from Chappaqua, NY. Such records include, but are not limited to, expense reports, reimbursement forms, and travel logs; • Pagliano's records concerning, regarding, or relating to the maintenance of former Secretary Clinton's email server. Such records include, but are not limited to, expense reports, reimbursement forms, and maintenance logs; and • Records of communications between Pagliano and any official, officer, or employee of the Office of the Secretary concerning former Secretary Clinton's email server. We requested expedited processing (which is DC-speak for "hurry up"), which the State Department agreed to on August 13: [B]ecause a compelling need for the requested information exists. ... Specifically, Judicial Watch has at least 15 cases pending in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia related to Secretary Clinton's email practices while Secretary of State. The information at issue in this request will shed light on whether the State Department was involved in the operation of Secretary Clinton's email server. Though the State Department agreed with Judicial Watch to expedite this request, the agency has failed to provide any documents or otherwise comply with the Freedom of Information Act. (Reports state Pagliano plans to refuse to provide testimony to Congress by asserting his Fifth Amendment rights. So much for the Clinton apologist claims that the Justice Department/FBI investigation into her mishandling of classified material on her alias email system is not criminal!) Mrs. Clinton's argument that her "server" was private fails on many levels, especially if Mr. Pagliano, a State Department employee, was paid by taxpayers to take care of it. We must wonder if Mr. Pagliano has emails from the Clinton server. The Obama State Department is in cover-up mode, refusing to comply with federal law and honor our request about whether its employee was responsible for the Clinton server maintenance. This is yet another example of the Obama administration's complicity in the Clinton email scandal. Hillary Clinton, immediately following our lawsuit, said that she personally paid Pagliano to handle her server issues. This, if true (and that is a big "if") raises all sorts of other issues. How many of other State Department employees did she pay on the sly? Was the alleged income reported as required by law? I'm sure you can think of a few more. It was back in March that the news initially broke that Hillary Clinton used a non-government email during her four years as secretary of state. Let us not lose sight that JW FOIA lawsuits forced Hillary Clinton's separate email system into the light of day. And that it was our litigation that forced Mrs. Clinton to do what no other congressional committee, FBI, or Justice Department investigation has done - submit information, under penalty of perjury, about her email system. Judicial Watch's work on this scandal is now so vast that I can't possibly tell you everything that's going on in all our twenty plus lawsuits and countless investigations. Check our website, www.judicialwatch.org every day for breaking news on this fast moving scandal. You can also track our investigations on Facebook, Twitter, and now even Instagram. As I mentioned above, we will have big news next week, so stay tuned... Kathryn Steinle was the 32 year-old woman who was walking with her father on a pier in San Francisco on July 1 just before she was gunned down by an illegal alien criminal knowingly released by San Francisco authorities under that city's sanctuary policies.. We live in a cruel, dangerous world riddled with crime. That's the hard reality. But certainly, elected officials could move decisively if they wanted to against "Sanctuary Cities" and the dangerous criminal aliens who fly under the law. Criminal illegal alien may sound redundant; that's how your government describes illegal aliens who have committed serious offenses on top of their immigration violation. Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, the illegal alien charged with murder in Steinle's death, had already been convicted of seven felonies and deported five times. San Francisco, in pursuit of a policy that flouts the rule of law, set in motion the chain of events that led to Kathryn Steinle's murder. We forced new records out of San Francisco that strongly suggest that Steinle is but one of dozens of murder victims tied to San Francisco's sanctuary policies. Documents your JW obtained from the San Francisco County Sheriff's Department reveal that violent crime has skyrocketed since 2011, with the number of arrests for murder up 55%, and the number of arrests for rapes up 370%. Judicial Watch's investigators uncovered these shocking, though not entirely surprising, numbers through a July 9, 2015, California Public Records Act request that sought the number of arrests for violations of the following crimes between 2011 and 2015: Penal Code 187 - first and second degree murder According to the data provided by the Sheriff's Department, arrests for violations of the most violent of the crimes listed - murder and rape - have soared over the past four years:
According to the information provided to our team by Sheriff's Department Assistant Legal Counsel Mark Nicco, "These numbers reflect the number of charges for arrests and bookings (not just arrests)." In response to a request for details on the U.S. citizenship status of the offenders, Nicco informed Judicial Watch: "This information is not tracked by the Jail Management System." But Kathryn Steinle's murder shows that the number is at least "1." It is disconcerting that SF authorities don't want to track the crimes of the illegal aliens they surreptitiously and illegally let loose on an innocent public. As bad as these numbers are, they are only the tip of the iceberg. Despite the increased arrests for violent crimes, the overall arrest rate has plunged by 42 percent according to Max Szabo, spokesman for the San Francisco District Attorney's Office. More crimes, less arrests - thanks in no small measure directly to public official lawlessness. In 2013, the San Francisco Sheriff and City Council expanded San Francisco's infamous illegal alien sanctuary policies. The City changed policies and passed an ordinance that required San Francisco law enforcement to ignore most U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainers. These detainers required San Francisco authorities to hold detained illegal alien criminals until federal authorities could determine whether to take them into custody. Citizens, and even some politicians, understand that when San Francisco and other sanctuary cities release illegal alien criminals onto the streets, crime is going to increase. These new crime statistics suggest that there are more murders and an epidemic of rape linked to San Francisco's releasing illegal alien criminals in violation of law. Your JW is a long-time national leader in advocating for a rule-of-law approach to illegal immigration. This work includes exposing and challenging dangerous sanctuary policies in San Francisco, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, D.C., Maryland, Arizona, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and more. In 2011, because of Judicial Watch's work, San Francisco was ordered to end its sanctuary policy that protected aliens arrested for certain drug offenses from being reported to ICE. Our legal and investigative teams are now investigating whether the city violated the law again with its sanctuary policy that led to the release of Lopez-Sanchez. We will keep fighting while the federal government continues to fall down on the job. Another lawsuit pending before the Illinois Supreme Court challenges Chicago's Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart's refusal to honor ICE immigration detainers or cooperate with ICE in identifying deportable criminal aliens. Cook County jails had released well over 1,000 criminal aliens sought by ICE in the 18 months prior to the lawsuit's filing in 2013. Recall that San Francisco is one of hundreds of sanctuary cities. And certainly Obama's refusal to enforce (and violate) immigration law has turned America into a sanctuary nation. For example, other Judicial Watch litigation forced the release of documents that show the Obama administration released 165,900 convicted criminal aliens throughout the United States, including many convicted of such violent crimes as homicide, sexual assault, kidnapping, and aggravated assault. We will keep fighting to get and spread the truth and challenging the lawless in courts where we can. But you can see there is urgency to this issue - as lives are at stake.
9/11
Then there is the work since. Judicial Watch staff and volunteers travel to monitor the terrorist legal proceedings in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. We have not forgotten 9/11 and our work exposing the truth about the threat of Islamic terrorism and how our government ignores and worsens it is second to none. In fact, our work predates 9/11, as we represented FBI agents whose warnings about missed opportunities to roll up al Qaeda-linked terrorist networks went unheeded in the year before the 2001 attacks. This 9/11 Weekly Update piece from 2011 nicely sums up our work to that date. We've exposed the terrorist Islamic threat on our unsecured border with Mexico. And we've single-handedly broken open the scandal about the Benghazi terrorist attack. Please remember that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton tried to pretend 9/11 did not happen - on 9/11/12, the day of the Benghazi attack. And, as you can see from today's Corruption Chronicles piece, "9/11 Comm. Chair 'Embarrassed' That U.S. Still Keeps Most Records Secret," our work is far from done. There are still many 9/11 questions that remain unresolved. Our Pulitzer Prize-worthy work on Anwar Al-Aulaqi raises questions that could shake the very foundations of two presidential administrations. (Al-Aulaqi was assassinated by President Obama through a drone strike in Yemen on September 30, 2011, the first American ever acknowledged to have been subject to a targeted killing.) You can see that fourteen years later that Judicial Watch, thanks to the support of our members, remains vigilant even as others go AWOL. It is the least we can do for those who died on 9/11 and since in the long war against Islamic supremacists.
Until next week...
 Tom Fitton President |
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