Showing posts with label abuse of power. Show all posts
Showing posts with label abuse of power. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

The Petraeus Plot Thickens

PetraeusLovePentagon

source: paulkatcher.tumblr

Complete Overview of Story from Mother Jones

BBC News: The Cult of the American General

Jill Kelley's 911 Call requesting help for the threatening emails,
via Piers Morgan CNN Transcript
MORGAN: Right. The woman at the center of all this, this woman, Jill Kelley -- let's turn to you, Suzanne, on this. I want to play a tape. It's a 911 tape of Jill Kelley calling the Tampa police near her home to complain about people who were around the house, citing her status as apparently an honorary consul. Let's listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JILL KELLEY, FLORIDA SOCIAL LIAISON: You know, I don't know if by any chance -- because I'm an honorary consul general so I have inviolability so I shouldn't -- they should not be able to cross my property. I don't know if you want to get diplomatic protection involved as well, but now, because that's against the law to cross my property because this is not, like, you know, it's inviolable.

UNIDENTIFIED 911 DISPATCHER: All right. No problem. I will let the officers know.

KELLEY: Thank you.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MORGAN: Now, Suzanne, she seems to be laboring under some massive misapprehensions here. She's not entitled to any diplomatic immunity like this, right?

SUZANNE KELLY, CNN INTELLIGENCE CORRESPONDENT: No, she's not. I mean as an honorary, she's really not entitled to any of that. And -- but you know, I think we're such like -- we're looking for information into who she is and what we know about her and all of this, so this is really the first time we've heard from her in her voice and you can read into it what you want to. But no, she's not entitled to any of that.

MORGAN: I mean I'm getting the feeling watching her over the last two days, we've had the yellow dress, the pink dress, she's dressed to the nines, fully made up, looking very -- and I hate to say this, but looking like she's rather enjoying all the attention that she's receiving. We now believe, you know, if you believe what the people close to General Allen were saying, that she had contacts with all sorts of high ranking military officials.



Jonathan Turley: Jill Kelley Claims “Honorary” Diplomatic Status
Last night, while discussing the Petraeus scandal on CNN, the network played a 911 call from one of the four major figures in the scandal: Jill Kelley. The call is perfectly bizarre in which Kelley, a Florida socialite, claims “honorary diplomatic” status to get the police to stop people from walking across her lawn. The dispatcher takes listens patiently and appears to resist the temptation to tell her that he will be sending over some honorary police to protect their honorary diplomatic residence.
. . . Kelley has been described as invoking her diplomatic status previously. She was given the unpaid titled of “honorary ambassador” to CENTCOM, the Department of Defense Central Command. This gives her about the same diplomatic status as the hostess at an International House of Pancakes.




From Steve Portnoy at ABC News:






Washington Post:
Senior law enforcement officials said that a late-night seizure on Monday of boxes of material from the North Carolina home of Paula Broadwell, a Petraeus biographer whose affair with him led to his resignation last week, marks a renewed focus by investigators on sensitive material found in her possession.

“The issue of national security is still on the table,” one U.S. law enforcement official said. Both Petraeus and Broadwell have denied to investigators that he was the source of any classified information, officials said.

. . . “My immediate gut is like this is the National Enquirer,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, said in an interview on CNN. “I mean, every day there is something new.”

Feinstein added that she has “many questions about the nature of the FBI investigation, how it was instituted, and we’ll be asking those.”


. . . The Allen investigation focuses on his extensive correspondence with Jill Kelley, a Tampa resident who had carved out a role as an ad-hoc social ambassador to military personnel at MacDill Air Force Base.
Kelley, 37, a close friend of Petraeus and Allen, inadvertently triggered the investigation that led to Petraeus's resignation after Allen forwarded her an anonymous e-mails he had received from someone using the handle “kelleypatrol.” The messages warned Allen to stay away from Kelley, calling her a “seductress” and suggesting that Petraeus was having an intimate relationship with her, according to a source close to Kelley.

Kelley subsequently received additional e-mails in a similar vein, sent to the account she shared with her husband. The source close to Kelley said they were sent under four anonymous names, some apparently from Internet cafes. Kelley shared the initial e-mails forwarded from Allen with a friend who is an FBI agent, and eventually turned over all the missives to the bureau, which determined that Broadwell had sent them. The subsequent FBI inquiry exposed the Broadwell-Petraeus affair.
Close associates of Allen, who is married, said the general denied that he had an affair with Kelley or that he had committed any wrongdoing in his communications with her. One said that investigators may have misconstrued platonic references to her as a “sweetheart.”
Nevertheless, the bureau turned over a mountain of documents to Pentagon officials — an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 pages, based largely on communication between Allen and Kelley — prompting Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta to order an inspector general inquiry.


Friday, September 28, 2012

Romney's Harvest Home at Bain Reaps Profits

Photobucket

David Corn at Mother Jones has done it again - unearthed a video from 1985 in which a younger Mitt Romney brags about Bain "harvesting" companies to reap a profit. It was given to them by a former employee of Bain. Unbelievable! I don't know much, but I bet that even people in the business community must be just as sick of hearing about Bain Capital flipping companies for profit as we regular folk.

Romney sounds like the grim reaper, and I'm sure that's how the ex-employees of all those outsourced and ruined companies feel to this day. The Grim Reaper Romney.

Mother Jones Article Here
Mother Jones has obtained a video from 1985 in which Romney, describing Bain's formation, showed how he viewed the firm's mission. He explained that its goal was to identify potential and hidden value in companies, buy significant stakes in these businesses, and then "harvest them at a significant profit" within five to eight years.

The video was included in a CD-ROM created in 1998 to mark the 25th anniversary of Bain & Company, the consulting firm that gave birth to Bain Capital. Here is the full clip, as it appeared on that CD-ROM (the editing occurred within the original):

Mitt Romney:
TRANSCRIPT: Bain Capital is an investment partnership which was formed to invest in startup companies and ongoing companies, then to take an active hand in managing them and hopefully, five to eight years later, to harvest them at a significant profit…


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Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Ohio's Secretary Husted Fires Democratic Officials

Ohio-Voter

Earlier today, I wrote about Jon Husted and his connections to Tea Party group "True the Vote":
True the Vote Poll Watchers are Dangerous Vigilantes

And now comes the news that Husted has decided to fire the two Democratic officials from Montgomery County who stood up to him and extended early voting on the weekends.

But Husted has lots of other irons in the fire to contend with, and we can only hope some legal action eventually will stop this one-man-band who is misusing his power as Secretary of State.

From the Toledo Blade
— A new federal court ruling preventing the state from enforcing a law that disqualifies provisional ballots, the ballots of last resort, when a voter shows up at the right multi-precinct polling place but casts his vote at the wrong precinct table due to poll worker error. Mr. Husted is expected to appeal the decision.

—A pending decision in a lawsuit filed by President Obama’s re-election campaign seeking to reopen the final days before the election to early in-person voting by all voters, not just military members and their families. That three-day window was closed under a law passed last year.

—A lawsuit filed last week by backers of a voter referendum on a GOP-enacted state elections law overhaul that Republicans have since repealed. The suit seeks to force the referendum on the Nov. 6 ballot and to kill Mr. Husted’s early voting directive in the meantime as an illegal reenactment of a portion of that now defunct law.

Unfortunately, conservatives think he isn't doing enough, and are demanding he purge the voter rolls so even more suppression can happen. I bet he goes along with this one - just a hunch.

— The promise of a new lawsuit by a group calling itself Judicial Watch to force Mr. Husted to purge voter registration rolls to reflect what it characterizes as discrepancies with U.S. Postal Service records. It has already filed similar suits in other states.

Sign the Petition asking Husted to Reinstate Early Voting Hours in Ohio