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With a tip of the hat to Longtime Sharp VodkaPundit Reader™ cfbleachers comes the heartwarming tale of a presidential “candidate,” a private email server, and the whistleblower who says you ain’t seen nothin’ yet:
The Daily Caller learned of a three-hour May 1 meeting two State Department whistleblowers held with the general counsel and staffers for the Oversight Committee, which is led by Utah Republican Jason Chaffetz.
According to a copy of notes from that meeting, State Department whistleblower Richard Higbie and another whistleblower told of an inspector-turned-whistleblower with State’s office of the inspector general who claims his investigation into Abedin’s work with Teneo Holdings, a consulting firm, led to the discovery of Clinton’s private email server.
According to the notes, the whistleblower also told Higbie that the investigation was shut down by Harold Geisel, the former acting inspector general for the State Department whose tenure was marked by accusations of political favoritism.
…
According to the notes, the whistleblower in question “was the case agent on a criminal investigation pertaining to Huma Abedin and outside employment/income. The investigation involved the unlawful use of the clintonemail by Abedin to conceal their activity.”While investigating Abedin’s gig with Teneo, a firm founded by former Bill Clinton adviser Doug Band, the inspector “identified the HRC email server and its use as part of his investigation. This developed into evidence implicating HRC,” according to the notes.
The whistleblower reportedly has his own notes and recordings to back his claims and says that the evidence shows that Clinton was “criminally culpable” to some degree.
The first thing that jumped out at me was the detail about Huma Abedin and “outside income.” Let’s dial the Wayback Machine to May, 2013:
Huma Abedin — Hillary Clinton’s longtime aide and the wife of all-but-declared New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner — spent her final months at the State Department working as a part-time consultant with the agency who at the same time was allowed to represent outside clients, POLITICO has confirmed.
Abedin, a fixture at the Clintons’ side for at least 15 years — from Iowa to Indonesia — shifted to her new role after maternity leave in the early summer of 2012, according to a source familiar with the arrangement.
The new status made her a “special government employee,” which was tantamount to being a consultant, according to the source, whose information was confirmed by two other staffers familiar with the matter. Multiple sources told POLITICO Abedin did work for other clients, which a friend of Abedin said totaled four, including the State Department, Hillary Clinton, the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation and Teneo, the firm co-founded by former Bill Clinton counselor Doug Band.
And what is it Teneo does, exactly? The company claims to provide “integrated counsel for a borderless world.” Here’s more from Teneo’s corporate website:
Leveraging the deep global relationships, experience and intellectual capabilities across all 12 of our operating divisions, we sit at the center of information and networks, offering unparalleled execution to capture opportunities and solve complex problems.
That, my friends, is a whole lot of nothing. In other words, Teneo is in the shady business of protecting wealthy people who have done or who wish to do shady things.
More from Wikipedia:
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair were paid advisers to Teneo. The New Republic described “the extent to which Teneo’s business model depend[ed] on [Band’s] relationship with Clinton” as “striking”.[2] Clinton ended his relationship with Teneo on February 2012.[20] Doug Band’s longtime advisor relationship with Clinton ended in 2013 after concerns that Band had leveraged his ties with Clinton too much for his own business interests with Teneo.[2]
Wikipedia also states that “Teneo’s monthly retainer fees have been as high as $250,000.” That’s just the retainer, folks — if you have to ask about the hourly rate, you can’t afford it.
Band is the company’s president, who apparently got into too many shady dealings for even Bill Clinton to remain connected to him or the company — at least publicly. But at the same time, not so shady that Hillary Clinton’s longtime confident, Abedin, couldn’t collect multiple paychecks from Teneo, Hillary, and the US State Department.
(In retrospect, Anthony Weiner’s penis-waving antics around that time barely even register as a sideshow to whatever it was the Clintons were up to.)
Meanwhile, we are assured that Hillary deleted 32,000 emails pertaining only to wedding plans and “yoga routines,” and that she willfully ignored the Federal Records Act as a “matter of convenience” because she doesn’t like to carry two devices. But as the Daily Caller story reminds us, Huma also used a clintonemail.com address at the time she was triple-dipping for Hillary, Teneo, and State:
It was reported in April that State’s current inspector general, Steve Linick, informed Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley that his office was investigating Abedin’s past arrangement with Teneo.
In a letter to Grassley, stated that “based on my staff’s current knowledge, the OIG was not aware of Secretary Clinton’s and Ms. Abedin’s use of a private email system until recent media reports.”
Just yesterday, speaking about an unrelated issue, Hillary repeated “an old Arkansas saying” Bill is fond of:
You find a turtle on a fencepost, [it] did not get there on its own.
Like a snapping turtle, those words could very well turn around and bite her on the ass.
This investigation is only now really getting started, and already there are enough turtles sitting on fenceposts to bring down most anyone not named “Clinton.”
UPDATE: There’s more on Teneo and the Clintons in a Dick Morris/Eileen McGann column from earlier this week — and if there’s anyone who understands anything about shady dealings, it’s Dick Morris.
Read:
[In 2011 Bill Clinton] envisioned a network of corporate and foreign clients who would give him speaking fees, generate consulting income in which he could share, and give to his Foundation, whose assets and income he could use as he wished.
But to realize this grand vision, he needed an intermediary that would get clients and nurture the web he envisioned. So, working through his top aide and protege, Doug Band, he set up Teneo.
Band, for his part, realized this was the way to cash in on the relationship with his boss.
But Doug and Bill faced a problem. They needed the approval of the State Department Ethics Office that President Obama had made Hillary set up to monitor the business dealings of her peripatetic husband.
So they scrubbed the application. Band’s role as a principal of Teneo was omitted and he was identified just as the Clinton aide who submitted the application. The real purpose of the new company was hidden and the application claimed it was only designed “to study geopolitical, economic and social trends.”
In fact, it was a deal to hire Bill using his name and relationship with Hillary to attract global corporate and government clients. In return, Teneo paid him handsomely, solicited donations for the Clinton Foundation and set up lucrative speaking engagements for Bill.
Win-win for Teneo and Clinton. He’d get them clients; they’d get him speaking gigs.
Team Teneo desperately wanted Bill Clinton to head its advisory board — so it could hold out the former president and husband of the secretary of state as part of its team.
The “dupes” as Morris calls them at State more or less rubber-stamped its approval to this setup, after the Clintons whitewashed the application. What was the Obama White House doing all this time, despite promises about State Department Ethics Office oversight? Apparently, nobody at the White House was looking too closely at what was going on at State, in the same way Sergeant Schultz never looked too closely under Colonel Hogan’s bunk.
And Abedin? Her position at State was Hillary’s Deputy Chief of Staff, so presumably she wasn’t directly involved in the Ethics Office. But certainly she performed some kind of duty worthy of getting an unreported paycheck from Teneo. Teneo’s “job” was to funnel foreign money to the Clintons in exchange for influence and access– so what influence or access was provided by the SecState’s own Deputy Chief of Staff, and to whom?
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