Explosive Devices Sent To Obama, Clintons; CNN Evacuated

This May 25, 2016 file photo shows the home of former President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama in Washington. The Secret Service says a package identified as 'potential explosive device' was sent to former President Barack Obama in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

BY MICHEAL BALSAMO

WASHINGTON (AP) — Disrupting a rash of targeted attacks, the U.S. Secret Service intercepted a bomb that was addressed to Hillary Clinton and a possible explosive that was sent to former President Barack Obama.

Also Wednesday, a police bomb squad was sent to CNN’s offices in New York City and the newsroom was evacuated because of a suspicious package.

A U.S. official told The Associated Press that investigators believe the explosive that was discovered near the Clintons’ home in Chappaqua, New York, is linked to one found Monday at the compound of liberal billionaire George Soros.

The official wasn’t authorized to publicly discuss an ongoing investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The official said one of the packages had the return address of Rep. Deborah Wasserman Schultz, an ironic reference to the former chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee.

The package addressed to Obama was intercepted Wednesday by Secret Service agents in Washington.

Neither Clinton nor Obama received the packages, and neither was at risk of receiving them because of screening procedures, the Secret Service said in a statement.

The White House condemned “the attempted violent attacks recently made against President Obama, President Clinton, Secretary Clinton, and other public figures.”

“These terrorizing acts are despicable, and anyone responsible will be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law,” press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement that that referred to the senders as “these cowards.”

Hillary Clinton was attending campaign events for Democrats in Florida on Tuesday and Wednesday and was not at the family’s New York residence at the time. She is headlining a fundraising reception on Wednesday for former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, who is running for Congress in South Florida.

Political Donor Helps Fraudsters, Bettors And Pornographers

This image from the website of Allied Wallet CEO Ahmad “Andy” Khawaja shows Khawaja posing with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. Khawaja gave more than $4 million to Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign and other Democrats, then began extending his largesse to Republicans after a lunch with GOP fundraiser Elliott Broidy two weeks after Trump clinched the presidency. Records obtained by The Associated Press show that Khawaja has helped pornographers, payday loan debt collectors and offshore gambling operations get past the gates of the banking system.(Andy Khawaja via AP

This image from the website of Allied Wallet CEO Ahmad “Andy” Khawaja shows Khawaja posing with Hillary Clinton. Records obtained by The Associated Press show that Khawaja, a prominent political donor has helped pornographers, payday loan debt collectors and offshore gambling operations get past the gates of the banking system. Los Angeles-based Allied Wallet, its executives and Khawaja have given $6 million in campaign contributions to Republicans and Democrats since late 2015. The records show the company used fake websites and foreign dummy corporations to mask some customers’ true business. (Andy Khawaja via AP)

BY JAKE PEARSON & JEFF HOROWITZ

NEW YORK (AP) — One customer was a debt collector that threatened to jail people if they didn’t pay back loans that they never took out. Another was an offshore gambling operation that hid bets behind innocuous-sounding websites, including one dedicated to orange cats. A third was a phone-sex business catering to men with diaper fetishes or fantasies of raping women.

Ahmad “Andy” Khawaja made his fortune in online payment processing for a host of companies, providing a key conduit in e-commerce for “high risk” merchants by helping route customers’ credit card purchases to banks. And recently Khawaja has shared that wealth in the form of multimillion-dollar political donations, first to Hillary Clinton and then to Donald Trump.

But thousands of internal company documents obtained by The Associated Press reveal that Khawaja’s company, Allied Wallet Inc., has profited from guiding dubious businesses past the gates of the banking system. The records, which include email conversations as well as business and financial documents, show Allied Wallet executives helped deploy sham websites and dummy companies to hide these businesses’ tracks, even in cases where Allied Wallet’s own staff deemed the underlying business activities to be “very, very illegal.”

The company’s actions in these cases flout bank policies, credit card network rules and potentially U.S. laws designed to prevent money laundering. In one instance, a company official complained to Khawaja that a colleague had provided “specific instructions on how to set up and operate an illegal gaming operation online.”

Khawaja and a company lawyer didn’t address a detailed list of questions from the AP about Allied Wallet’s business, as well as Khawaja’s political giving, for over a month.

This week the Los Angeles-based company’s marketing director, A.J. Almeda, said in a statement that “any accusations of illicit or prohibited activities are misleading and categorically false.” Almeda called the AP’s line of inquiry “a political hit job due to the Allied Wallet’s contribution to President Donald Trump’s inauguration and support of his tax cut agenda.”

The Lebanese-born Khawaja gave more than $4 million to Clinton’s failed presidential campaign and other Democrats, then began extending his largesse to Republicans after a lunch with Republican fundraiser Elliott Broidy two weeks after Trump clinched the presidency.

Within days of that lunch, Khawaja met Trump at a $5,000-per-person transition fundraiser in Manhattan. Soon after he contributed $1 million to his inaugural committee, eventually earning himself a photo with the president inside the Oval Office.

The documents reviewed by the AP provide an unprecedented look behind the scenes of Khawaja’s company, which claims to process billions of dollars a year in online transactions.

They also come against the backdrop of a previous run-in with federal authorities over processing illegal online gambling proceeds: In 2010, Khawaja and his company were forced to give up $13 million in a civil forfeiture stemming from a sprawling FBI probe into the online poker industry.

“The reason they had to forfeit the money was they were acting on behalf of an illegal gambling outfit,” said Roy Pollitt, a former FBI special agent who worked the case. “Based upon the agreement that was made years ago, it’s troubling to hear there might be similar behavior still occurring.”

Allied Wallet’s past hasn’t stopped Washington from accepting Khawaja’s political generosity.

In all, Khawaja, his company and its executives have contributed at least $6 million to politicians and political organizations since late 2015, according to an AP review of disclosure reports.

Since Trump’s inauguration, the company and its executives have given nearly $1 million more to Republican candidates and committees, including $200,000 from Khawaja to Rep. Ron DeSantis, a Trump-backed candidate running for governor in Florida.

Donations to Democrats include nearly $2 million to the Democratic National Committee, along with a who’s who of top candidates, including Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill.

In June, the Senate minority leader, New York Democrat Chuck Schumer, appointed Khawaja as one of nine members on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. In April, Charlie Kirk, the outspoken head of the pro-Trump super PAC Turning Point USA, touted Khawaja on Twitter as a beneficiary of Trump’s tax plan.

Nobody in Washington, Democrat or Republican, appears to have questioned how Khawaja earned his money, and what exactly Khawaja might hope to gain from his political giving is not entirely clear. The records reviewed by the AP show that Khawaja has pursued foreign business deals, including an investment by a United Arab Emirates-controlled wealth fund, a prospective deal with an Iranian bank and a potential business arrangement with Lebanon. Some U.S. senators he has supported are on the banking committee, which writes laws governing his industry.

‘IT JUST SCARED ME SO I PAID IT’

Last August, the Trump administration ended a Justice Department effort called Operation Choke Point that investigated banks and other financial institutions working in industries such as payday lending that carry high risks of fraud.

That kind of policy change could be helpful for Allied Wallet customers like Stark Law LLC of Chicago, an aggressive debt collector that posed as a law firm and threatened tens of thousands of Americans into giving them money — often for payday loans they never even signed up for.

That’s what happened to Mary Liz Nogueras when a Stark debt collector called her at work in late 2015 and threatened to take her to court if she didn’t immediately pay $890 to cover an outstanding payday loan. Nogueras didn’t recall owing any money but was frightened by the collector’s abrasiveness, so she offered up her credit card number over the phone.

“It just scared me so I paid it,” said Nogueras, who lives in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, with her husband and their two children, one of whom has special needs.

A few months later, in March 2016, Federal Trade Commission regulators and Illinois prosecutors charged Stark’s owners with running a massive fraud operation, eventually forcing them out of the debt collection business entirely, issuing a $47 million judgment against them and making them personally forfeit $9 million — along with a 1-kilogram gold bar — to settle the claims.

Eight months before Stark was busted, Allied Wallet set up credit card processing for a web of online merchants that supposedly sold home goods but actually were owned by payday loan-related companies with names like Clearwater Lending, the records reviewed by the AP show. The arrangement included some indications of suspicious activity: The websites lacked inventory, were unable to collect payments and failed to correctly spell words like “towels.”

Whenever a bank caught the obvious misconduct, Allied Wallet would shut down the site and notify the bank of its actions — but then route the same payments through a new fake company, the records show. In just one month in late 2015, consumers filed hundreds of fraud complaints with their credit card companies about bills from Stark and a web of other front companies, the documents show.

In October 2015, just three months after Allied Wallet began processing for Stark Associates Ltd., a UK shell company that handled the Stark debt collections, a risk analyst warned Allied Wallet about questionable transactions on the account, examining in detail the sale of a yellow curtain valance supposedly shipped to a nonexistent address: 123 Main Street in Townsville, New York.

Not only had one of the banks processing Stark’s payments — OCBC Wing Hang Bank in Macau — noticed multiple fraud complaints on the account, the analyst wrote, but also the websites on the account itself were fishy, designed exactly like another site that Allied had recently shut down for engaging in “transaction laundering,” according to the email.

A month later, the risk analyst followed up with top Allied employees, this time certain Stark was not legitimate: “In case it is of interest to you, we have now received a chargeback case that confirms that the merchant STARK, which you already closed, was indeed misrepresenting its business and offering loan services instead of home decor,” the analyst wrote.

But the risk analyst was mistaken.

Allied Wallet hadn’t stopped processing for Stark and continued to do so until February 2016, one month before regulators busted the company, the emails show.

The account itself was moved to a related company called Rolling Plains Ltd., according to a November 2015 email to Allied Wallet’s chief operating officer, Moe Diab, from Tom Wells, an intermediary who brought Allied the Stark accounts in exchange for a percentage of the business.

“They never stopped processing,” Wells wrote. “In fact you made payment to new acct this week.”

Regulators named Gaurav Mohindra as a key player in the Stark debt-collection scheme. He told the AP he had never heard of Allied Wallet. Incorporation records show he was the director of Stark Associates Ltd., the UK corporation Allied Wallet created for the supposed home decor website jvalances.com that was used to disguise Nogueras’ $890 fake debt payment when it was passed along to Visa.

Wells did not return phone and email messages seeking comment.

‘I NEED YOU TO HELP ME HELP YOU’

With most of the questionable customers Allied Wallet took on, the documents show, the company appeared to seek plausible deniability.

First, Allied Wallet helped businesses create dormant shell corporations in the United Kingdom to access its network of friendly banks from Malta to Macau, the records show. Then it coached clients on how to curate their websites to fool investigators performing compliance checks for banks and credit card companies, the documents reveal.

“Remove the video of the woman being tortured in the top left corner of the home page,” Amy Ringler, the company’s vice president of operations, wrote to one pornography client in October 2012, noting the video would violate Mastercard’s standards.

Once websites passed muster, company officials would then route those businesses’ incoming payments to banks willing to accept them. If a merchant racked up too many fraud complaints — or a bank caught on to suspicious behavior — Allied Wallet would sometimes simply shift the account to a new institution to start fresh. In exchange, Allied Wallet charged hefty rates and fees as a processor of last resort for especially risky clientele, the records show.

These merchants were then mixed in with others that Allied Wallet sent to banks which, though considered in the industry to be “high-risk,” weren’t necessarily legally problematic. Among them: clients peddling multilevel marketing deals, IT help desk services and natural supplements, the records show.

Not all customers were happy with Allied Wallet’s insistence on holding funds for long stretches to cover expected chargeback and fraud fees, but the nature of legally dubious businesses prevented many from finding an alternative processor.

“Why would anyone use a high priced processor unless they have a questionable product?” the frustrated CEO of an unusual Irish company that specializes in selling phony ATM receipts, forged hotel bills and other fabricated documents wrote in a March 2016 email to company officials. “If I’m going to go to the bother of pretending I am a clean green business, then I’ll use a payment system that gets me more of the money in a quicker manner.”

To help the now-defunct website www.phonesexcoffeehouse.com get its payments processed by American Express — which the credit card company wouldn’t otherwise accept — Allied Wallet worked with the company to disguise its true business, the records showed.

The website charged callers in the U.S. $2 a minute to talk about various fetishes or engage in elaborate rape fantasies with female accomplices, according to an archived webpage.

To coordinate their arrangement, an Allied Wallet salesman used a private email address to communicate with Donna Jones, one of the sex line’s owners: “I’ll help you out but I need you to help me help you, notice the email I’m sending this from.”

To avoid raising the suspicions of American Express, Jones and Allied Wallet funneled the payments through another business Jones owned that had nothing to do with sex: a home-cleaning company called WKPS Group, according to the records.

“We will do whatever is asked, and keep our mouths shut,” Jones wrote. “You can make a lot of money with us, I will do as you say.”

Just 45 minutes after the arrangement started, Allied Wallet’s chief compliance officer issued an urgent internal warning based on a tip: The cleaning company had already been identified by a rival processor as a front for phone-sex transactions.

The November 2016 warning went unanswered. Some company officials knew the cleaning business was a front because they already were using it that way.

American Express declined to address Allied Wallet or the records detailing how it processed funds for the defunct sex site. In a statement, a spokesman, Andrew Johnson, said the company could require a processor to cancel processing for merchants that break the law, violate its rules or damage its brand.

Jones could not be reached for comment. She did not return a message sent to the email addresses she used to correspond with Allied Wallet.

‘VERY, VERY ILLEGAL’

The records show that Allied Wallet also took extraordinary steps to disguise how it processed payments for online gamblers — a bold foray back into an industry that just years earlier had involved Khawaja in an FBI investigation.

To settle claims from a 2010 federal probe involving the website PokerStars, Khawaja enlisted former FBI Director Louis Freeh to negotiate with federal prosecutors in New York and write anti-money laundering policies for Allied Wallet, according to court records.

Since then, Khawaja appears to have avoided processing payments for U.S. bettors, the records show. But the documents show that his company has accepted and obscured international business from GVC Holdings PLC, one of the most prominent gambling outfits in the online industry, often in places where online gambling is prohibited or highly regulated.

For example, Allied Wallet handled processing for a company behind the now-defunct, bare-bones website totembazaar.com, which claimed to sell e-books and told credit card companies that it was selling miscellaneous general merchandise.

It wasn’t.

The website was a front, listed in 2012 business paperwork for LLJH Ltd., a company owned by Elizabeth Cullen, then a top corporate officer at GVC Holdings PLC, according to the records.

The records obtained by the AP show that top GVC executives collaborated with Allied Wallet and a trusted middleman to hide gambling operations involving currencies from countries where online betting is illegal or highly regulated, including Turkey, Brazil and Mexico.

Just before Christmas 2012, Jim Humberstone, GVC’s head of operations, worked with Wells, the intermediary who would later bring the fraudulent Stark debt collectors to Allied Wallet, the emails show.

The records show that Wells passed GVC’s information along to Khawaja and other top Allied Wallet company officials, who placed the business in an Allied Wallet account called Bluestar 7. That account handled payments for totembazzar, along with the site radialmarkets.com, which GVC claimed was owned by a company called JHLL Ltd.

“I’m concerned about the descriptor containing ‘GVC’ could we remove this and have ‘Radial’ and ‘Totem’ alone?” Lisa Lupi, then the head of GVC’s risk department, wrote in an email to Wells.

Allied Wallet made the changes and processed payments for the gambling sites, switching the Bluestar 7 account every week between two banks, Borgun in Iceland and Postbank in Germany.

In February 2016, Wells wrote to top Allied Wallet officials to inquire about leftover reserves in the Bluestar gambling accounts on behalf of GVC, noting they were handling Brazilian, Mexican or Turkish currencies, according to the email.

Online betting is highly regulated in Mexico and Brazil. In Turkey, it is prohibited altogether; an internal Allied Wallet guide to global casino regulations described it as “very, very illegal” there.

Humberstone and GVC’s head of corporate communications did not respond to emails and phone calls over several weeks seeking comment. Lupi and Cullen didn’t return emailed messages.

Allied Wallet’s chief operating officer, Diab, said in a brief phone interview that he didn’t know what GVC was and denied the company transacted for it.

“We don’t do gambling at all,” he told the AP, directing further questions to Khawaja and a company lawyer.

Khawaja and the lawyer did not respond to specific questions from the AP about the company’s business practices.

As recently as February 2017, Allied Wallet operated as many as two dozen Bluestar accounts, recycling old companies to host websites that served as fronts for gambling operations, the records show. The sites could be created as fast as they shut down.

“This is the URL that was closed the other day because the bank said the transactions were coming from a gaming website,” Ringler, the Allied Wallet vice president of operations, wrote to Wells in May 2014 regarding a site called plusfigurines.com.

Plusfigurines.com was being processed via an Allied Wallet account called Bluestar 18, another account dedicated to gambling. But to keep the business flowing, Allied Wallet needed new fronts to disguise the transactions.

“I need a different website, descriptor and company from you,” Ringler wrote Wells in an email reviewed by The AP.

The risks from the gambling business weren’t lost on company officials, the documents show.

In May 2015, the company’s chief compliance officer emailed the top Allied Wallet executives that he had personally verified a company salesman giving “specific instructions on how to set up and operate an illegal gaming operation online.”

That prompted Khawaja to interject: “Guys, stop this... Come on.”

Nine months later, Wells, the trusted Allied Wallet intermediary, notified top company officials that he would be meeting with GVC in London and wanted to know what procedure to follow to open a new set of disguised gambling accounts, according to a February 2016 email.

“Can we create website and eu Corp as before or has anything changed?” Wells asked.

The response from Diab, Allied Wallet’s chief operating officer: “Set up will be the same.”

Horwitz reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Chad Day and editor Ted Bridis in Washington contributed to this report.

H. Clinton: Separating Families At Border A 'Moral Crisis'

Hillary Clinton delivers the keynote address at the 8th Annual Elly Award luncheon, after being one three women receiving this year's award on Monday, June 18, 2018, in New York. Clinton on Monday called the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy that has separated children from their parents at the southern U.S. border “a moral and humanitarian crisis.”Sheila Johnson, Founder and CEO of Salamander Hotels & Resorts and BET co-founder and Deirdre Quinn, CEO and Co-Founder of Lafayette 148 New York, were the other 2018 Elly Award recipients.

NEW YORK (AP) — Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday called the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy that has separated children from their parents at the southern U.S. border "a moral and humanitarian crisis."

Speaking at an awards lunch for the Women's Forum of New York, Clinton said what was happening to families at the U.S.-Mexico border is "horrific." "Every human being with a sense of compassion and decency should be outraged," Clinton said.

The separations stem from a policy that turns all cases of people trying to enter the country illegally over for criminal prosecution. Children are not detained with their parents when those parents are facing a criminal charge, as per U.S. protocol.

President Donald Trump has defended the policy, which has taken nearly 2,000 immigrant children away from their parents. "The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility," he added. "Not on my watch," Trump said Monday.

Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, said she had warned during the campaign that Trump's hard-line immigration stance would result in family separations. "Now as we watch with broken hearts, that's exactly what's happening," she said.

The policy has come under increasingly strong criticism, with accounts of children kept in cages and parents not knowing where their children are. Trump has falsely blamed Democrats, and his administration has echoed his stance by claiming it was enforcing the law, with some using the Bible as religious justification.

Clinton pushed back on all of those points, saying the separations are required by no law and grounded in no religion. "The test of any nation is how we treat the most vulnerable among us," she said. "We are a better country than one that tears families apart."

See AP's complete coverage of the debate over the Trump administration's policy of family separation at the border: https://apnews.com/tag/Immigration

FBI Probing Clinton Foundation Corruption Claims

BY SADIE GURMAN

WASHINGTON (AP)  — The FBI is investigating whether the Clinton Foundation accepted donations in exchange for political favors while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, two people familiar with the probe confirmed Friday. The revelation comes as President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans have been urging the Justice Department to look into corruption allegations involving the foundation.

It is unclear when or why the probe began, but the sources told The Associated Press it has been ongoing for several months, with prosecutors and FBI agents taking the lead from their offices in Little Rock, Arkansas, where the foundation has offices. The people were not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. The Hill newspaper first reported the probe.

Critics have accused the Clinton family of using the foundation to enrich themselves and give donors special access to the State Department when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. But public corruption prosecutors in Washington expressed disinterest in working with the FBI on a Clinton Foundation-related investigation in 2016, saying they had concerns about the strength of the FBI's evidence.

A spokesman for the foundation, Craig Minassian, said it had been "subjected to politically motivated allegations, and time after time these allegations have proven false."

Trump has repeatedly called for an investigation into Clinton, her aides and the foundation, harping on Attorney General Jeff Sessions for not taking action. Democrats say Trump is trying to steer attention away from investigations examining whether his campaign was involved with Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election.

Sessions in November directed senior federal prosecutors to evaluate a number of Republican grievances and determine whether a special counsel should be appointed to look into allegations that the Clinton Foundation benefited from an Obama-era uranium transaction involving a Russian state company. In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Sessions said the prosecutors would also make recommendations into "whether any matters currently under investigation need additional resources."

Associated Press writer Eric Tucker contributed to this report.

State Department Releases Emails From Clinton Aide Huma Abedin

Huma Abedin. Image: Mark Lennihan/AP

WASHINGTON (ASSOCIATED PRESS) — The State Department has released emails from Huma Abedin, a top aide to Hillary Clinton, that were found by the FBI on her husband's laptop.

Some of the emails found on former Rep. Anthony Weiner's laptop were marked classified. It was unclear whether they were deemed classified at the time they were sent or when the State Department was preparing them for release.

The emails were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.

The State Department said it “carefully reviews the content of records requested through FOIA to determine whether any information is sensitive or classified,” and some of the documents released Friday have “classified information that has been redacted.”

The FBI found thousands of emails exchanged between Clinton and Abedin while searching Weiner's laptop as part of a criminal investigation into his sexting with a high school student. The discovery led then-FBI Director James Comey to announce in late October 2016, as Clinton's run for the White House was in its final stage, that he was reopening the probe of her use of a private computer server.

Then two days before Election Day, the FBI declared there was nothing new in the emails. Clinton has called Comey's intervention “the determining factor” in her defeat.

The FBI has since said that only a small number of the emails found on the laptop had been forwarded while most had simply been backed up from electronic devices, including most of the email chains containing classified information. Comey said the FBI had concluded that neither Weiner nor Abedin had committed a crime in their handling of the email.

Clinton Book Relives Democrats' Agonizing Defeat

NEW YORK (AP, SEPTEMBER 09, 2017) — In a candid and pointed new book, Hillary Clinton relives her stunning defeat to Donald Trump, admitting to personal mistakes and defending campaign strategy even as her return to the stage refocuses attention on a race Democrats still can't believe they lost.

Clinton is unsparing in her criticism of Trump and also lays out some of the factors she believes contributed to her loss: interference from Russian hackers, accusations leveled at her by former FBI Director James Comey, a divisive primary battle with Bernie Sanders, even her gender. She also addresses common criticisms of her campaign, including the idea that she didn't have a compelling narrative for seeking the presidency and that she ignored Midwestern turf where Trump picked up enough white working-class voters to win several battleground states.

"Some critics have said that everything hinged on me not campaigning enough in the Midwest," Clinton writes in the book "What Happened." ''And I suppose it is possible that a few more trips to Saginaw or a few more ads on the air in Waukesha could have tipped a couple of thousand voters here or there."

"But let's set the record straight: we always knew that the industrial Midwest was crucial to our success, just as it had been for Democrats for decades, and contrary to the popular narrative, we didn't ignore those states," she wrote.

Clinton already is taking some criticism — complete with mockery from late-night television hosts — for planning book-tour stops in the Great Lakes and Midwestern states that ultimately cost her the election. But she writes that her campaign had more staff and spent more on advertising in both Michigan and Pennsylvania, two states she lost, than President Barack Obama did when he won them in 2012.

She acknowledges that "if there's one place where we were caught by surprise, it was Wisconsin," saying that polls showed her ahead until the end. But while she did not visit the state in the fall, she noted that her surrogates blanketed the state.

In Wisconsin, Democratic pollster Paul Maslin called it a "bitter irony" that Clinton is now trying to reach voters — or consumers — in states he believes her campaign mostly ignored. But he said it's ultimately a side show from a has-been.

"Let her do whatever she's going to do for whatever reason she's doing it, but it doesn't matter. There's just so much else happening every day with Trump," Maslin said. He said he hopes Clinton understands that "most Democrats are beyond" blaming her for November. "For her sake, I hope she can sell enough books, but if she thinks she's affecting the debate in any way, I think she's more delusional than anyone thought."

Clinton's anger is most sharply focused on Comey. She said that all of the theories about why she lost need "to be tested against the evidence that I was winning until October 28, when Jim Comey injected emails back into the election."

She called her use of a private email server while serving at the State Department "dumb" but accused Comey of tarnishing her image and called him "rash" for publicly re-opening the probe in the campaign's final days. She also owns up to other mistakes, saying her comment about putting coal miners out of business was the mistake "I regret the most" and that her paid speeches to Wall Street banks were bad "optics."

Many Democrats have viewed Clinton's return to the spotlight with trepidation, fearing it could trigger another round of infighting over the future of the party between her more centrist supporters and Sanders' progressives.

Michigan Democratic Chairman Brandon Dillon, whose state Clinton lost by about 10,000 votes, said Clinton's book can help Democrats try to "learn the right lessons from 2016." But he said Democrats and other activists on the left should avoid using Clinton's re-emergence to rehash 2016.

"There's a clear difference between all Democrats and any of the Republicans. That's what we should be focusing on," Dillon said. In a recent interview, Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon argued that history will render a favorable verdict on Clinton and her approach to Trump.

"All of these things she tried to warn people about that were a theoretical concern, ... now it's real," said Fallon. "He's the president." In the book, obtained by The Associated Press ahead of its release date, Clinton is unsparing in her assessment of the president, calling him "a clear and present danger to the country and the world." She says she considered saying to Trump: "Back up, you creep. Get away from me" when he loomed over her shoulder during a general election debate.

But Clinton, who has a reputation for avoiding blame for her failures, said she takes "responsibility for all" of her campaign's mistakes. "You can blame the data, blame the message, blame anything you want -- but I was the candidate," she writes. "It was my campaign. Those were my decisions."

She also expressed frustration over what she felt was unfair media coverage. "What makes me such a lightning rod for fury? I'm really asking. I'm at a loss," she asks her readers, before concluding: "I think it's partly because I'm a woman."

Barrow reported from Atlanta.

Follow Lemire on Twitter at http://twitter.com/@JonLemire and Barrow at http://twitter.com/BillBarrowAP

Peter W. Smith, GOP Operative Who Sought Clinton's Emails From Russian Hackers, Committed Suicide, Records Show

BY KATHERINE SKIBA, DAVID HEINZMANN AND TODD LIGHTY

CHICAGO TRIBUNE JULY 14, 2017

Hillary Clinton Image By Justin Sullivan/Getty

A Republican donor and operative from Chicago's North Shore who said he had tried to obtain Hillary Clinton's missing emails from Russian hackers killed himself in a Minnesota hotel room days after talking to The Wall Street Journal about his efforts, public records show.

In a room at a Rochester hotel used almost exclusively by Mayo Clinic patients and relatives, Peter W. Smith, 81, left a carefully prepared file of documents, which includes a statement police called a suicide note in which he said he was in ill health and a life insurance policy was expiring.

Days earlier, the financier from suburban Lake Forest gave an interview to the Journal about his quest, and it published stories about his efforts beginning in late June. The Journal also reported it had seen emails written by Smith showing his team considered retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, then a top adviser to Republican Donald Trump's campaign, as an ally. Flynn briefly was President Trump's national security adviser and resigned after it was determined he had failed to disclose contacts with Russia.

At the time, the newspaper reported Smith's May 14 death came about 10 days after he granted the interview. Mystery shrouded how and where he had died, but the lead reporter on the stories said on a podcast he had no reason to believe the death was the result of foul play and that Smith likely had died of natural causes.

However, the Chicago Tribune obtained a Minnesota state death record filed in Olmsted County that says Smith committed suicide in a hotel near the Mayo Clinic at 1:17 p.m. on Sunday, May 14. He was found with a bag over his head with a source of helium attached. A medical examiner's report gives the same account, without specifying the time, and a report from Rochester police further details his suicide.

In the note recovered by police, Smith apologized to authorities and said that "NO FOUL PLAY WHATSOEVER" was involved in his death. He wrote that he was taking his own life because of a "RECENT BAD TURN IN HEALTH SINCE JANUARY, 2017" and timing related "TO LIFE INSURANCE OF $5 MILLION EXPIRING."

One of Smith's former employees told the Tribune he thought the elderly man had gone to the famed clinic to be treated for a heart condition. Mayo spokeswoman Ginger Plumbo said Thursday she could not confirm Smith had been a patient, citing medical privacy laws.

The Journal stories said it was on Labor Day weekend in 2016 that Smith had assembled a team to acquire emails the team theorized might have been stolen from the private server Clinton had used while secretary of state. Smith's focus was the more than 30,000 emails Clinton said she deleted because they related to personal matters. A huge cache of other Clinton emails were made public.

Smith told the Journal he believed the missing emails might have had been obtained by Russian hackers. He also said he thought the correspondence related to Clinton's official duties. He told the Journal he worked independently and was not part of the Trump campaign. He also told the Journal he and his team found five groups of hackers - two of them Russian groups - who claimed to have Clinton's missing emails.

Smith had a history of doing opposition research, the formal term for unflattering information that political operatives dig up about rival candidates.

For years, Democratic President Bill Clinton was Smith's target. The wealthy businessman had a hand in exposing the "Troopergate" allegations about Bill Clinton's sex life. And he discussed financing a probe of a 1969 trip Bill Clinton had taken while in college to the Soviet Union, according to Salon magazine.

Investigations into any possible links between the Russian government and people associated with Trump's presidential campaign now are underway in Congress and by former FBI chief Robert Mueller. He is acting as a special counsel for the Department of Justice. Mueller spokesman Peter Carr declined to comment on the Journal's stories on Smith or his death. Washington attorney Robert Kelner, who represents Flynn, had no comment on Thursday.

Smith's death occurred at the Aspen Suites in Rochester, records show. They list the cause of death as "asphyxiation due to displacement of oxygen in confined space with helium."

Rochester Police Chief Roger Peterson on Wednesday called his manner of death "unusual," but a funeral home worker said he'd seen it before.

An employee with Rochester Cremation Services, the funeral home that responded to the hotel, said he helped remove Smith's body from his room and recalled seeing a tank.

The employee, who spoke on the condition he not be identified because of the sensitive nature of Smith's death, described the tank as being similar in size to a propane tank on a gas grill. He did not recall seeing a bag that Smith would have placed over his head. He said the coroner and police were there and that he "didn't do a lot of looking around."

"When I got there and saw the tank, I thought, 'I've seen this before,' and was able to put two and two together," the employee said.

An autopsy was conducted, according to the death record. The Southern Minnesota Regional Medical Examiner's Office declined a Tribune request for the autopsy report and released limited information about Smith's death.

The Final Exit Network, a Florida-based nonprofit, provides information and support to people who suffer from a terminal illness and want to kill themselves.

Fran Schindler, a volunteer with the group, noted that the best-selling book Final Exit, written by Derek Humphry in 1991 and revised several times since, explains in detail the helium gas method.

"Many people obtain that information from his book," Schindler said. "It's a method that has been around for many years and is well known."

Smith's remains were cremated in Minnesota, the records said. He was married to Janet L. Smith and had three children and three grandchildren, according to his obituary. Tribune calls to family members were not returned.

His obituary said Smith was involved in public affairs for more than 60 years and it heralded him as a "quietly generous champion of efforts to ensure a more economically and politically secure world." Smith led private equity firms in corporate acquisitions and venture investments for more than 40 years. Earlier, he worked with DigaComm, LLC, from 1997 to 2014 and as the president of Peter W. Smith & Company, Inc. from 1975 to 1997. Prior to that, he was a senior officer of Field Enterprises, Inc., a firm that owned the Chicago Sun-Times then and was held by the Marshall Field family, his obituary said.

A private family memorial was planned, the obituary said. Friends posted online tributes to Smith after his death. One was from his former employee, Jonathan Safron, 26, who lives in Chicago's Loop and worked for Smith for about two years.

Safron, in an interview, said he was working for a tutoring firm when Smith became his client. His job entailed teaching Smith how to use a MacBook, Safron said. At the time Smith was living in a condominium atop the Four Seasons Hotel Chicago. Safron said Smith later employed him at Corporate Venture Alliances, a private investment firm that Smith ran, first out of the same condo and later from an office in the Hancock Building.

Safron, who said he had a low-level job with the Illinois Republican Party in 2014, said he had no knowledge of Smith's bid to find hackers who could locate emails missing from Clinton's service as secretary of state. In his online tribute to his former employer, he called Smith the "best boss I could ever ask for ... a mentor, friend and model human being."

Safron said he worked part-time for Smith, putting in about 15 hours a week. But the two grew close, often having lunch together at a favorite Smith spot: the Oak Tree Restaurant & Bakery Chicago on North Michigan Ave. He called Smith a serious man who was "upbeat," "cosmopolitan" and "larger than life." He was aware Smith was in declining health, saying the older man sometimes had difficulty breathing and told work colleagues he had heart problems. Weeks before he took his life, he had become fatigued walking down about four or five flights of stairs during a Hancock Building fire drill and later emailed Safron saying he was "dizzy," he said.

Smith's last will and testament, signed last Feb. 21, is seven pages long and on file in Probate Court in Lake County. The will gives his wife his interest in their residential property and his tangible personal property and says remaining assets should be placed into two trusts.

He was born Feb. 23, 1936, in Portland, Maine, according to the death record.

His late father, Waldo Sterling Smith, was a manufacturer's representative for women's apparel firms, representing them in department stores in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, according to the father's 2002 obituary. The elder Smith died at age 92 in St. Augustine, Fla., and his obit noted that he had been active in St. Johns County, Fla. Republican affairs and with a local Methodist church

Peter Smith wrote two blog posts dated the day before he was found dead. One challenged U.S. intelligence agency findings that Russia interfered with the 2016 election. Another post predicted: "As attention turns to international affairs, as it will shortly, the Russian interference story will die of its own weight."

Skiba reported from Washington, Heinzmann reported from Rochester and Lighty from Chicago. Lauren Rosenblatt of the Tribune Washington Bureau and Dan Moran of the Lake County News-Sun contributed to this story.

kskiba@chicagotribune.com

dheinzmann@chicagotribune.com

tlighty@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @Katherine Skiba

Twitter @DavidHeinzmann

Twitter @TLighty

Watchdog To Probe Comey's, FBI's Actions Before Election

ASSOCIATED PRESS

JANUARY 13, 2017

FBI Director James Comey testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington. Justice Department's Inspector General Michael Horowitz says he will launch an investigation into the Justice Department and FBI's actions in the months leading up to the 2016 election, including whether department policies were followed by FBI Director James Comey.

WASHINGTON (AP) — In yet another aftershock from the chaotic presidential campaign, the Justice Department inspector general opened an investigation Thursday into department and FBI actions before the election, including whether FBI Director James Comey followed established policies in the email investigation of Hillary Clinton.

Democrats have blamed Comey's handling of the inquiry into Clinton's use of a private email server, and his late-October public letter about the case, in part for her loss to Republican Donald Trump. Workers are now putting final touches on preparations for next week's Inauguration Day festivities, and the new probe will not change the election results. But it revives questions of whether the FBI took actions that might have influenced the outcome.

Inspector General Michael Horowitz, the department's internal watchdog, will direct the investigation, which comes in response to requests from members of Congress and the public. Comey said he was pleased about the review and the FBI would cooperate fully with the inspector general.

"I hope very much he is able to share his conclusions and observations with the public because everyone will benefit from thoughtful evaluation and transparency regarding this matter," he said in a statement.

Robby Mook, who served as Clinton's campaign manager, said it had raised concerns when Comey commented on the investigation and said the release of his letters in the days before the election was "extremely destructive and ended up amounting to nothing whatsoever."

"It's a troubling pattern that the FBI seems to have chosen a horse in this election, and we welcome this investigation so this doesn't happen again," Mook said. During a Senate Intelligence Committee briefing on Russian hacking, Comey was pressed by lawmakers of his handling of the investigation. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said Comey "defended it very well ... he put the facts out there, and hindsight being 20/20, he said these are the facts I had to deal with, and these are the decisions I made, I'm sorry if someone takes offense."

"He explained to us that he was faced with two decisions — one with very bad consequences and the other with disastrous consequences," said Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del. "He chose what he thought was the less harmful consequences to our country."

Horowitz's office is one of many independent investigative bodies designed to oversee the conduct of federal departments and agencies. They most commonly seek to ferret out misconduct and fraud in the department or among its contractors. Investigating an agency's top leadership is a rare, but not unheard of, occurrence.

One part of the review will concern Comey's news conference last July in which he said the FBI would not recommend charges against Clinton for her use of a private email system during her tenure as secretary of state. Trump repeatedly criticized that practice, contending it put national security secrets at risk.

Trump also declared at raucous rallies during the campaign that he would seek a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton and that she would be in jail if he were elected. But he said after the election that he did not intend to seek a new investigation of her.

Comey, during his announcement in the summer, broke protocol when he chastised Clinton and her aides as "extremely careless" in their email practices. It's highly unusual for federal law enforcement officials to discuss a criminal case that ends without charges being filed.

Comey reignited the email controversy on Oct. 28 when he informed Congress that agents would be reviewing a cache of emails between Clinton aide Huma Abedin and Clinton for any new evidence related to Clinton's handling of sensitive State Department material.

That move boiled in the campaign for nine days, before Comey announced on Nov. 6 — two days before Election Day — that the inquiry had found no new evidence of wrongdoing. Clinton and her aides have said the disclosure of the "new" emails, found on a laptop belonging to former New York Rep. Anthony Weiner, Abedin's estranged husband, hurt the candidate in several battleground states. Trump won the election in part with narrow victories in Democratic-leaning states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Comey's statements prompted outrage from Clinton and other Democrats who said they needlessly placed her under fresh suspicion when the FBI didn't even know whether the emails were relevant. Court documents released last month said the FBI had been trying to get a look at thousands of Clinton's emails on the disgraced former congressman's computer to see if anyone had hacked in to steal classified information. Weiner's laptop was initially seized by agents for an investigation into his online relationship with a teenage girl in North Carolina.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican who leads the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, wrote Thursday on Twitter that he supports the IG's review "of what happened at the (hashtag)DOJ and (hashtag)FBI during the Clinton investigation."

Horowitz's broad investigation will also look into allegations that the FBI's deputy director should have been recused from participating in certain investigative matters and allegations that department officials improperly disclosed non-public information to the Clinton campaign.

It will also delve into decision-making related to the timing of the FBI's release of Freedom of Information Act documents in the days before the election and the use of a Twitter account to publicize them.

Asked about the new investigation, Attorney General Loretta Lynch told The Associated Press in Baltimore that "we let them conduct their review before we make any statement about that." She added that "obviously everyone's going to await the results of that."

Associated Press writers Eric Tucker in Baltimore and Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.

Clinton's State Dept. Calendar Missing Scores Of Entries

ASSOCIATED PRESS

FRIDAY, JUNE 24, 2016

Graphic shows example of Hillary Clinton’s State Department appointment calendar compared with other logs of the same event; 3c x 4 inches; 146 mm x 101 mm;


WASHINGTON (AP) — An Associated Press review of the official calendar Hillary Clinton kept as secretary of state identified at least 75 meetings with longtime political donors, Clinton Foundation contributors and corporate and other outside interests that were not recorded or omitted the names of those she met. The fuller details of those meetings were included in files the State Department turned over to AP after it sued the government in federal court.

The missing entries raise new questions about how Clinton and her inner circle handled government records documenting her State Department tenure — in this case, why the official chronology of her four-year term does not closely mirror the other, more detailed records of her daily meetings.

At a time when Clinton's private email system is under scrutiny by an FBI criminal investigation, the calendar omissions reinforce concerns that she sought to eliminate the "risk of the personal being accessible" — as she wrote in an email exchange that she failed to turn over to the government but was subsequently uncovered in a top aide's inbox.

The AP found the omissions by comparing the 1,500-page calendar with separate planning schedules supplied to Clinton by aides in advance of each day's events. The names of at least 114 outsiders who met with Clinton were missing from her calendar, the records show.

No known federal laws were violated and some omissions could be blamed on Clinton's highly fluid schedule, which sometimes forced late cancellations. But only seven meetings in Clinton's planning schedules were replaced by substitute events on her official calendar. More than 60 other events listed in Clinton's planners were omitted entirely in her calendar, tersely noted or described only as "private meetings" — all without naming those who met with her.

Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said Thursday night that the multiple discrepancies between her State Department calendar and her planning schedules "simply reflect a more detailed version in one version as compared to another, all maintained by her staff."

Merrill said that Clinton "has always made an effort to be transparent since entering public life, whether it be the release of over 30 years of tax returns, years of financial disclosure forms, or asking that 55,000 pages of work emails from her time of secretary of state be turned over to the public."

In one key omission, Clinton's State Department calendar dropped the identities of a dozen major Wall Street and business leaders who met with her during a private breakfast discussion at the New York Stock Exchange in September 2009, The meeting occurred minutes before Clinton appeared in public at the exchange to ring the market's ceremonial opening bell.

Despite the omission, Clinton's State Department planning schedules from the same day listed the names of all Clinton's breakfast guests — most of whose firms had lobbied the government and donated to her family's global charity. The event was closed to the press and merited only a brief mention in her calendar, which omitted all her guests' names — among them Blackstone Group Chairman Steven Schwarzman, PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi and then-New York Bank of Mellon CEO Robert Kelly.

Clinton's calendar also repeatedly omitted private dinners and meetings with political donors, policy sessions with groups of corporate leaders and "drop-bys" with old Clinton campaign hands and advisers. Among those whose names were omitted from her calendar were longtime adviser Sidney Blumenthal, consultant and former Clinton White House chief of staff Thomas "Mack" McLarty, former energy lobbyist Joseph Wilson and entertainment magnate and Clinton campaign bundler Haim Saban.

The AP first sought Clinton's calendar and schedules from the State Department in August 2013, but the agency would not acknowledge even that it had the material. After nearly two years of delay, the AP sued the State Department in March 2015. The department agreed in a court filing last August to turn over Clinton's calendar, and provided the documents in November. After noticing discrepancies between Clinton's calendar and some schedules, the AP pressed in court for all of Clinton's planning material. The U.S. has released about one-third of those planners to the AP, so far.

The State Department censored both sets of documents for national security and other reasons, but those changes were made after the documents were turned over to the State Department at the end of Clinton's tenure.

The documents obtained by the AP do not show who specifically logged entries in Clinton's calendar or who edited the material. Clinton's emails and other records show that she and two close aides, deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin and scheduling assistant Lona J. Valmoro, held weekly meetings and emailed almost every day about Clinton's plans. According to the recent inspector general's audit and a court declaration made last December by the State Department's acting executive secretary, Clinton's aides had access to her calendar through a government Microsoft Outlook account. Both Abedin and Valmoro were political appointees at the State Department and are now aides in her presidential campaign.

Unlike Clinton's planning schedules, which were sent to Clinton each morning, her calendar was edited after each event, the AP's review showed. Some calendar entries were accompanied by Valmoro emails — indicating she may have added those entries. Every meeting entry also included both the planned time of the event and the actual time — showing that Clinton's calendar was being used to document each meeting after it ended.

Former senior State Department logistics officials and government records experts interviewed by the AP said that secretaries of state have wide latitude in keeping their schedules — despite federal laws and agency rules overseeing the archiving of calendars and warning against altering or deleting records. Omissions in Clinton's calendar could undermine the document's historical accuracy, particularly its depictions of Clinton's access to political, corporate and other influences, experts said.

"It's clear that any outside influence needs to be clearly identified in some way to at least guarantee transparency. That didn't happen," said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan government reform group. "These discrepancies are striking because of her possible interest at the time in running for the presidency."

When Clinton met in September 2009 with her 12 corporate breakfast guests at the New York Stock Exchange, her planning schedule that morning listed the hourlong event as "CEO breakfast discussion and New York Stock Exchange opening bell ceremony," adding that no press would be allowed.

Besides Schwarzman, Nooyi and Kelly, Clinton's other guests were Fabrizio Freda, CEO of the Estee Lauder Companies Inc.; Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks Corp.; Lewis Frankfort, chairman of Coach Inc.; Ellen Kullman, then-CEO of DuPont; David M. Cote, CEO of Honeywell International Inc.; James Tisch, president of Loews Corp.; John D. Wren, CEO of Omnicom Group; then-McGraw Hill Companies chairman Harold McGraw III; and James Taiclet, chairman of the American Tower Corp. Also attending was then-NYSE CEO Duncan Niederauer, who later accompanied Clinton when she rang the stock exchange bell.

As she opened the day's trading session, Clinton cited Wall Street's resurgence after the 2008 recession. "Coming back as secretary of state after all that we've done in the last year to try to pull ourselves out of this economic downturn is very exciting," she said.

Details about Clinton's private conversation with her corporate guests were not included in her records. Four of the attendees — Schwarzman, Nooyi, Cote and Kullman — headed companies that later donated to Clinton's pet diplomatic project of that period, the U.S. pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo. All the firms represented except Coach lobbied the government in 2009; Blackstone, Honeywell, Omnicom and DuPont lobbied the State Department that year. Schwarzman and Frankfort have personally donated to the Clinton Foundation, and the other firms — except for American Tower and New York Bank of Mellon — also contributed to the Clinton charity.

P.J. Crowley, a State Department spokesman for Clinton at the time, told the AP that Clinton's vision of "21st century statecraft" included exchanging views with corporate leaders and promoting public-private partnerships. "That was certainly reflected in her day-to-day schedule, her travel and her global outreach," Crowley said.

Clinton's calendar listed meetings with 124 business leaders and political donors and loyalists, but not with 114 others who were identified by the AP's review. In some cases, repeat Clinton visitors were listed in her calendar for some meetings, but not for others.

Four meetings with S. Daniel Abraham, a multimillionaire who founded the Center for Mideast Peace, were noted in Clinton's calendar. But in four other sessions — including two listed only as "private meeting" — Abraham's name was omitted. Abraham, a prolific fundraiser for Clinton's 2008 campaign who has donated $3 million to a super PAC backing Clinton in 2016, told the AP last year that he and Clinton typically discussed Mideast policy.

"The fact that some information was not captured isn't necessarily a sign of bad faith," said Steven Aftergood, a government records expert at the Federation of American Scientists. He added, "It's obviously more important to have a complete record than a scattershot one."

AP Interview: Clinton Says Trump Behaving Like A Demagogue

ASSOCIATED PRESS

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 8, 2016

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at a rally in Culver City, Calif. Clinton opened her general election campaign against Donald Trump on June 8 by accusing him of behaving like a "demagogue," likening his attacks on judges, the media, his opponents and their families to dark moments in the world's history.



WASHINGTON (AP) — Hillary Clinton opened her general election campaign against Donald Trump on Wednesday by accusing him of behaving like a "demagogue," likening his attacks on judges, the media, his opponents and their families to dark moments in world history.

"It's classic behavior by a demagogue," she said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "We've seen it many, many places and times in the world, and that's why I think it's so dangerous."

The presumptive Democratic nominee, who declared victory in her race against Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday, a day after reaching the number of delegates needed to claim the nomination, seemed to wonder during the interview whether Trump's candidacy was little more than an elaborate political stunt.

"I don't know if this is just, you know, political gamesmanship that he thinks plays to the lowest common denominator, but whatever the reason for it is, it's wrong and it should not be tolerated by anybody," she said.

But even as she questioned the sincerity of the real estate mogul's rhetoric, Clinton said voters need to take his words seriously and called them evidence that he is untrustworthy, unqualified and unprepared for the rigors of the White House.

While the two candidates have never been personally close, their political and financial circles have occasionally overlapped over the years — especially during Clinton's time as a senator from New York, Trump's home state. Clinton and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, attended Trump's third wedding in 2005, and she said later that she thought Trump was "always entertaining."

But Clinton expressed surprise at what she described as the billionaire's descent into "conspiracy theories" in recent years. "He always had opinions which he freely expressed," she said. "I never really ever had any information about him engaging in bigotry and prejudice until he took up the cause of the birthers against President Obama, which is really so bizarre," she added, with an incredulous laugh.

Clinton and Democrats supporting her campaign are attempting to cast Trump as a ruthless con artist who is tricking voters in the same way he duped prospective students into enrolling into his now-defunct Trump University, a business that offered real estate seminars.

It's an argument Clinton and her aides believe will appeal not only to Democrats, but independent voters and even some Republicans worried about how Trump would manage the nation's economy and foreign affairs.

While stopping short of calling Trump a racist for his recent comments about the federal judge overseeing a class-action lawsuit against Trump University, Clinton said her rival has a "very unfortunate and divisive tendency to attack all kind of Americans."

While Clinton seeks to paint Trump as a dangerous huckster, he has spent the past several weeks since claiming the Republican nomination working to define her candidacy. Trump calls Clinton by the nickname "Crooked Hillary" and often says she belongs behind bars for her use of a private email account and server during her time as secretary of state.

"The Clintons have turned the politics of personal enrichment into an art form for themselves," Trump said Tuesday as he won the final five GOP primary elections. "They've made hundreds of millions of dollars selling access, selling favors, selling government contracts, and I mean hundreds of millions of dollars."

Trump promised to deliver a speech next week focusing on "the Clintons." He's also tried to re-ignite past scandals that dogged Bill Clinton's administration, including his impeachment trial and the Whitewater land deal in his native Arkansas.

Trump has met with Ed Klein, one of Clinton's most strident critics and the author of books spreading discredited rumors about her marriage. Another influence, GOP consultant Roger Stone, is known for peddling conspiracy theories about the Clintons. There is speculation that political strategist Dick Morris, a former Clinton adviser turned adversary, may also join his campaign.

Clinton said she is unconcerned with all of it. "I really don't pay a lot of attention to his efforts to attack me personally," she said. "I don't intend to respond to them because this is his, this is his modus operandi."

Instead, Clinton said she is banking on voters turning to her because of her comparative policy depth, arguing that a frustrated electorate is seeking "specific policies" more than "catchy soundbites" and "throwing slogans around."

For example, when asked Wednesday about the upcoming Summer Olympics in Brazil, she offered a lengthy assessment of the public health crisis caused by the Zika virus. While Clinton said it was probably too late to cancel the Rio de Janeiro Games, as some public health officials have urged, she described the situation as "deeply distressing."

"It's really a serious public health threat and I don't know that we've heard the last word about the advice about whether people or certain kinds of people should go to Rio or not," she said. "This is not just about Rio and the Olympics, this is about a potential outbreak and epidemic."

After calling on Democrats to unify around her candidacy, Clinton said she had no regrets about her campaign against Sanders. She wouldn't offer any hints of what kinds of concessions her campaign might be willing to give the Vermont senator in the party platform.

The two campaigns and the Democratic National Committee are beginning the process of drafting the policy on which Democrats are to rally around in the fall election. On Thursday, President Barack Obama — who defeated Clinton in 2008 — was expected to formally endorse his one-time rival, after meeting with Sanders at the White House.

"I feel very good about the campaign we ran," she said. "It's time that we move forward and unite the party."

Follow Lisa Lerer on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/llerer

Clinton Vows To Find Alzheimer's Cure By 2025

BY SARAH FERRIS, THE HILL

Hillary Clinton is laying out an aggressive plan to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease within a decade, which she says will be achieved by a dramatically boosting spending by four times the current levels.

The Democratic presidential front-runner vows to spend $2 billion per year “to prevent, effectively treat and make a cure possible by 2025.” She will announce her plan at a campaign stop in Iowa later on Tuesday.

The annual $2 billion in spending will be part of a “historic, decade-long investment” that would bring up spending levels from the $586 million spent by the National Institutes of Health this year.

The government spending bill signed by Obama on Friday would add $350 million per year for Alzheimer’s research – a level that researchers still maintain is vastly inadequate.

Her campaign said the plan was shaped by conversations with physicians and scientists who have long pushed for Congress to boost the funding on its own.

Several of those advocates took part in a press conference Tuesday to praise her plan, including Robert Egge, executive director of the Alzheimer's Impact Movement.

“This is the first time a presidential candidate has released a bold and substantive plan [on Alzheimer’s disease],” said Egge, who previously led the Alzheimer’s Study Group co-chaired by former Speaker Newt Gingrich.

In the conference call on Tuesday, another top Alzheimer’s advocate underscored that the plan would reduce strain on the nation’s dwindling Medicare and Medicaid budgets.

“This is a tsunami, epidemic that could single-handedly crush Medicare and Medicaid,” warned Dr. Rudolph Tanzi, director of the Genetics and Aging Research unit at Massachusetts General Hospital.

“It’s an unmet medical need of the greatest type,” he said.

He also highlighted that the plan would benefit women – who are almost two-thirds more likely to have the disease – and both African Americans and Hispanics who are about two times as likely to have the disease. 

Poll: Clinton Would Sail To Win Over Trump

By Kyle Balluck, The Hill

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Image: The Hill

Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton would easily defeat GOP counterpart Donald Trump in a general election matchup, according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released early Monday.

Clinton would cruise to a 10-point win over Trump, pollsters found, 50 to 40 percent, with the help of independent and Hispanic voters.

Clinton would also beat Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) by just 3 points, 48 to 45 percent, within the poll’s margin of error.

But she would lose to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) by 3 points and Ben Carson by 1 point in hypothetical head-to-head matchups.

Pollsters found independent voters would back Rubio over the former secretary of State by a 7-point margin. He would lose the Hispanic vote to Clinton, however, by 23 points. Rubio also takes the highest percentage of female voters among the GOP candidates, but falls short in that demographic to Clinton by 7 points.

Clinton holds a 19-point lead over Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the new poll. Four percent of respondents backed former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley.

The NBC News/Wall Street Journal, conducted December 6-9, has a margin of error of 3.4 percent.

AP EXCLUSIVE: Under Clinton, State's Cybersecurity Suffered

The sign used as the backdrop for press briefings at the U.S. Department of State is seen before a news conference at the State Department in Washington. The State Department was among the worst agencies in the federal government at protecting its computer networks while Hillary Rodham Clinton was secretary from 2009 to 2013, a situation that continued to deteriorate as John Kerry took office and Russian hackers breached the department’s email system, according to independent audits and interviews.



WASHINGTON (AP) — The State Department was among the worst agencies in the federal government at protecting its computer networks while Hillary Rodham Clinton was secretary from 2009 to 2013, a situation that continued to deteriorate as John Kerry took office and Russian hackers breached the department's email system, according to independent audits and interviews.

The State Department's compliance with federal cybersecurity standards was below average when Clinton took over but grew worse in each year of her tenure, according to an annual report card compiled by the White House based on audits by agency watchdogs. Network security continued to slip after Kerry replaced Clinton in February 2013, and remains substandard, according to the State Department inspector general.

In each year from 2011 to 2014, the State Department's poor cybersecurity was identified by the inspector general as a "significant deficiency" that put the department's information at risk. The latest assessment is due to be published in a few weeks.

Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, has been criticized for her use of a private email server for official business while she was secretary of state. Her private email address also was the recipient of malware linked to Russia, and her server was hit with malware from China, South Korea and Germany. The FBI is investigating whether her home server was breached.

State Department officials don't dispute the compliance shortcomings identified in years of internal audits, but argue that the audits paint a distorted picture of their cybersecurity, which they depict as solid and improving. They strongly disagree with the White House ranking that puts them behind most other government agencies. Senior department officials in charge of cybersecurity would speak only on condition of anonymity.

"We have a strong cybersecurity program, successfully defeating almost 100 percent of the 4 billion attempted intrusions we experience each year," spokesman Mark Toner said. Two successive inspectors general haven't seen it that way. In December 2013, IG Steve Linick issued a "management alert" warning top State Department officials that their repeated failure to correct cybersecurity holes was putting the department's data at risk.

Based on audits by Linick and his predecessor, Harold Geisel, State scored a 42 out of 100 on the federal government's latest cybersecurity report card, earning far lower marks than the Office of Personnel Management, which suffered a devastating breach last year. State's scores bested only the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. State Department officials complain the grades are subjective.

In late 2014, cyber intruders linked to Russia were able to break into the State Department's email system, infecting it so thoroughly that it had to be cut off from the Internet in March while experts worked to eliminate the infestation.

Clinton approved significant increases in the State Department' information technology budgets while she was secretary, but senior State Department officials say she did not spend much time on the department's cyber vulnerabilities. She was aware of State's technological shortcomings but was focused more on diplomacy, her emails show.

Clinton's campaign staff did not respond to repeated and detailed requests for comment. Emails released by the State Department from her private server show Clinton and her top aides viewed the department's information technology systems as substandard and worked to avoid them.

"State's technology is so antiquated that NO ONE uses a State-issued laptop and even high officials routinely end up using their home email accounts to be able to get their work done quickly and effectively," top Clinton aide Ann-Marie Slaughter wrote in an email to Clinton on June 3, 2011.

Slaughter suggested that someone write an article to point out the deficiencies, but Clinton aide Cheryl Mills argued that doing so might alert hackers to their use of private email. Under Clinton and Kerry, the State Department's networks were a ripe target for foreign intelligence services, current and former government officials say, echoing the situation at OPM, which last year saw sensitive personnel data on 21 million people stolen by hackers linked to China.

The Russian hackers who broke into State's email system also infiltrated networks at the Defense Department and the White House, officials say, and no clear line can be drawn between their success and State's dismal security record.

But as with OPM, State's inspector general identified many of the same basic cybersecurity shortcomings year after year, and the department failed to correct them, records show. Officials in the inspector general's office believe the department's cybersecurity shortcomings played a role in the email breach, said two officials familiar with their thinking.

Senior State Department officials disagree. They say the Russian hack was the result of a "well-crafted intelligence operation" designed to look normal to the employee who clicked on the attachment, and it was unrelated to other cybersecurity deficiencies.

No technology can completely thwart the most sophisticated of such hacks, but one official familiar with State's cyber deficiencies argues that the department's sloppy security means officials can't be sure other breaches haven't gone undetected.

State Department officials say that only email was taken in the hack, and that no sensitive databases were breached. The National Security Agency conducted a classified assessment and deemed the breach significant and severe, two officials say. A State Department official said the assessment concluded there was no way to be sure what the hackers accessed.

Those officials, and many others interviewed for this story, declined to be quoted because they were not authorized to address the matter publicly. Although the hacked email system was unclassified, State Department personnel regularly use it to communicate very sensitive information, some of which is routinely withheld on national security grounds when the emails are made public. It would be valuable intelligence for a foreign adversary, officials say.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the committee that funds the State Department, is concerned about cybersecurity problems "that have existed for several years," a senior Leahy aide said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

While many of the details have been blacked out of the audits, the inspector general has criticized State for not implementing an effective risk management program. Without one, "the department cannot prioritize, assess, respond to, and monitor information security risk, which leaves the department vulnerable to attacks and threats," the IG wrote in the latest report, issued last October.

There are also examples of sloppy management. For example, in 2012, the IG reported that of 116,821 unclassified email accounts, 5,717 had not been used, 529 had passwords set not to expire, 19,335 had been set not to require passwords, and 6,269 users had not logged into their accounts between 2005 and 2011. Such a large volume of unattached accounts makes it easier for hackers to co-opt one of them without anyone noticing.

In 2013, an inspection by the IG into State's cybersecurity office — the Bureau of Information Resource Management's Office of Information Assurance — found waste, mismanagement and dysfunction. The office required State Department agencies to fill out paper spreadsheets to track system updates, and was "unable to locate information in a timely manner," the report found.

State Department officials responsible for cybersecurity acknowledged that the department had gotten behind in its compliance with standards in the Federal Information Security Management Act, known as FISMA, which requires, for example, that agency systems be certified as secure. Many of the State Department systems had not been certified for many years. Officials say they have made great strides in the last year.

"FISMA is very important, but it is process-oriented, and compliance is judged on meeting the process," not whether data is actually protected, Toner said. State Department officials argue that their system for continually monitoring its networks for threats, known as iPost, exceeds FISMA's security standards.

The inspector general and the Government Accountability Office concluded, however, that iPost did not provide a true picture of the risk to State's networks.

Clinton Threatens Military Action If Iran Breaks Deal

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks at the Brookings Institution in Washington, Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2015, about the Iran nuclear agreement and other topics. Clinton is making the case for the international agreement to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions as Congress opens debate on the accord.


 WASHINGTON (AP) — Hillary Rodham Clinton issued a hardline warning to Iran on Wednesday that as president she would "not hesitate" to take military action to stop the country from acquiring nuclear weapons.

 Casting herself as a key player in talks that led to the landmark agreement to control Iran's nuclear program, Clinton praised the accord as part of a larger Middle East strategy even as she stressed that it is not a step toward normalizing relations.

"We should anticipate that Iran will test the next president," she told a Washington think-tank. "They'll want to see how far they can bend the rules." The Democratic presidential contender and former secretary of state said: "That won't work if I'm in the White House. I'll hold the line against Iranian noncompliance."

She coupled her remarks about the Iran deal with a call to convene an emergency gathering at the United Nations to tackle the crisis of Syrian and other refugees flooding Europe. She said the crisis is a "global responsibility," the U.S. should lead the effort and countries at the conference could pledge to accept migrants or donate aid money.

Clinton spoke as Congress prepared to open debate Wednesday on the deal. Democrats have clinched the votes needed to block passage of a disapproval resolution against the accord, a win for the White House against united Republican opposition.

But much of the responsibility for enacting the agreement will fall on the next administration, making the issue likely to linger in the presidential campaign. The deal would require Iran to limit its nuclear program for at least a decade in exchange for billions of dollars in relief from international sanctions.
Republicans are seizing on opposition to the deal among much of Congress and many American Jews to criticize Clinton, frequently casting the agreement as a plank of an "Obama-Clinton foreign policy." A new Pew survey released on Tuesday found that just 21 percent of Americans approved of the deal — a 12-point drop since mid-July.

In her remarks, Clinton attempted to reassure skeptics by threatening serious penalties for violations, including possible military action. She offered strong support for Israel, whose leaders strongly oppose the agreement, promising that if elected she would invite the country's prime minister to the White House during her first month in office.

"The Iranians and the world need to understand that we will act decisively if we need to," she said. "As president, I will take whatever actions are necessary to protect the United States and its allies."
But even as she offered a stern warning to Iran, she stressed that rejecting the deal would lead to international isolation for the U.S. "Several Republicans boast they'll tear up this agreement in 2017," she said. "That's not leadership, that's recklessness."

Instead, she proposed measures to halt Iran's support for terrorist groups and other bad behavior in the region. Clinton called for expanding the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf and increasing support to Israel and other allies in the region. She also proposed building a coalition to crack down on weapons shipments to Hamas and to counter terrorist organizations financed by Iran, such as Hezbollah.

Another goal: Press countries in the region to block ships and aircraft of Iran's elite military unit, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, from entering their territory. As secretary of state, Clinton helped facilitate the talks that eventually led to the nuclear deal. She sent a top adviser to participate in secret meetings with Iran through the sultan of Oman that started the international negotiations.
Since then, she's largely backed the negotiations, staying current with the talks with regular briefings from administration officials, according to aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss private meetings publicly.

Clinton's current support for the deal marks a striking role reversal for the second-time presidential candidate and her long-ago rival. In 2008, she called Barack Obama's offer to meet Iran's leader without preconditions "irresponsible and, frankly, naive." And when Clinton said she would "obliterate" Iran if the country used nuclear weapons against Israel, Obama likened her "bluster" to the "tough talk" of then-President George W. Bush.

More recently, she's wondered publicly whether a deal would ever take shape. Clinton told an American Jewish organization last year that she was "skeptical the Iranians will follow through and deliver." She said she had "seen many false hopes dashed through the years."

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