Candidate for FBI post has history in scandals ~ By Jerome Corsi

Role in not preventing 9/11

Also, from 1994 to 1997, while serving in the Department of Justice as a deputy attorney general, Gorelick wrote a 1995 memo creating what in time became known as the "Gorelick Wall."

Basically, the Gorelick memo set in stone the Clinton-era doctrine that terrorism was to be regarded as a criminal justice problem. That meant information developed by intelligence agencies was not to be shared with criminal investigative units, including the Department of Justice, largely because the regulations under which intelligence agencies operate did not necessarily protect the civil rights of criminal suspects under U.S. law.

Gorelick's role in writing the memo was not generally known until she was appointed by then-Senate Democratic Party minority leader Tom Daschle to serve as a commissioner on the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, commonly known as the 9/11 Commission.

Her participation as commissioner became controversial when then-Attorney General John Ashcroft in his testimony to the 9/11 Commission declassified and brought to light the 1995 Department of Justice memorandum authored by Gorelick.

Appearing before the 9/11 Commission, Ashcroft testified, "Although you understand the debilitating impact of the wall, I cannot imagine that the commission knew about this memorandum, so I have declassified it for you and the public to review. Full disclosure compels me to inform you that its author is a member of this commission."

I think that once you read this article by Jerome Corsi, you will understand why the choice of Jamie Gorelick to head up the FBI would be an extremely bad decision by the Obama administration.

After you read Jerome's column, be sure to also read the two stories linked below under RELATED STORIES. First, Ellis Washington will help you understand more about "Gorelick's Wall" and how it helped to undermine our anti-terror efforts. But, it will be the second story that goes way beyond what even Jerome Corsi mentioned in this column. Jack Cashill discusses how Jamie Gorelick hijacked the 1996 Pan Am 800 crash investigation, and possibly assisted in a cover-up of what may have been an act of terrorism.

In all that I've read about Jamie Gorelick, in these stories and many more, I need to tell you that as the Director of the FBI, she would be a severe detriment to this country's national security. With Gorelick, along with Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, and Attorney General Eric Holder, our safety, national security, and freedom would all be in grave danger.

I believe that if Gorelick is Obama's choice for the Director of the FBI job, she would have to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. I think this would be a good time to write your Senators so that we can prevent this possible appointment from ever happening. If you have a twitter account and/or Facebook page, please link to this column, we need to get the word out. It's time to begin informing others. Now!

When I found this article by Jerome Corsi just a few days ago, I almost fell out of my chair, knowing what I did from Jack Cashill's columns and other reading. I doubt any other name that could have been considered for FBI Director would have stunned me any more. And what we should really be concerned about is how it will effect the morale of the current agents! My bet is that most of them are very aware of who Jamie Gorelick is, and what she is about. We are still in a war on terror, and I do not think this is a good time to neuter one more line of our defense. I'm just sayin'...

RELATED STORIES:
Mr. Obama, tear down this Gorelick Wall! ~ By Ellis Washington
The last great coverup ~ By Jack Cashill


Candidate for FBI post has history in scandals

Gorelick's resume includes undermining anti-terror effort, aiding mortgage meltdown

JEROME CORSI

By Jerome Corsi

March 24, 2011 ~ 9:35 pm Eastern

© 2011 WorldNetDaily

JAMIE GORELICK

There are reports that President Obama is considering former Clinton administration official Jamie Gorelick as a possible candidate to be the next chief of the FBI, and critics are erupting with horror at the idea of a person in that position who, as one alleged, "helped to bring us 9/11 and the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac."

The Wall Street Journal and Fox Nation have reported that Gorelick is on the short list of candidates to take over the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

But if the White House seriously is considering such an appointment, surely discussed as part of the vetting process will be her controversial role as a deputy attorney general under Clinton in not preventing the 9/11 tragedy as well as her role under Clinton as a vice chair at Fannie Mae when the mortgage giant developed catastrophic problems.

Lucrative history at Fannie Mae

In the aftermath of the U.S. government takeover of Fannie and Freddie, attention focused on three prominent Democrats who served as Fannie Mae executives: Franklin D. Raines, former Clinton administration budget director; James Johnson, former aide to Democratic vice president Walter Mondale; and Gorelick.

All three earned millions in compensation while serving as top Fannie Mae executives.

• Raines earned $90 million in his five years as Fannie Mae CEO, from 1999 to 2004;

• Johnson earned $21 million in just his last year serving as Fannie Mae CEO from 1991 to 1998; and

• Gorelick earned an estimated $26 million serving as vice chair of Fannie Mae from May 1997 to May 2003, according to a May 2006 Special Examination of Fannie Mae conducted by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight.

All three subsequently were involved in mortgage-related financial scandals concerning their stewardship at Fannie Mae.

In 1998, as Fannie Mae vice chairman, Gorelick received a bonus of $779,625, despite her alleged involvement in a scandal in which Fannie Mae employees falsified signatures on accounting transactions in order to manipulate Fannie Mae books to meet 1998 earning targets. The manipulations allegedly triggered multi-million dollar bonuses for top executives, including Gorelick.

The 1998 bonus reported for then-Fannie Mae Chairman and CEO James Johnson was $1.932 million and for then-chairman designate Franklin Raines was $1.11 million.

In 2001, Gorelick bragged to Business Wire that Fannie Mae had passed in the second quarter of 2001, a year-and-a-half ahead of schedule, its acquisition target to purchase $10 billion of sub-prime mortgage loans under the terms of the Community Reinvestment Act, passed in 1977 during Jimmy Carter's administration.

"Our approach to lenders is 'CRA Your Way,'" Gorelick explained to Business Wire. "Fannie Mae will buy CRA loans from lenders' portfolios; we'll package them into securities; we'll purchase CRA mortgages at the point of origination; and we'll create customized CRA-targeted securities."

Business Wire noted that through its "American Dream Commitment," Fannie Mae under Gorelick's management pledged to transact before 2010 more than $20 billion in specially targeted CRA business and to finance over $500 billion in CRA business altogether.

Over the course of the past decade, an estimated one-third of loans financed by Fannie Mae were specified to meet Fannie Mae's CRA business goal.

In remarks to the American Bankers Association's National Community and Economic Development Conference in Chicago on Oct. 30, 2000, Gorelick said, "We will take CRA loans off your hands – we will buy them from your portfolios, or package them into securities – so you have fresh cash to make more CRA loans."

The Wall Street Journal reported Sept. 25, 2008, that Gorelick, while yet an executive at Fannie Mae, received from Countrywide Financial Corp. a favor from Countrywide's then-CEO Angelo Mozilo, a "friend of Angelo" refinancing. The favor, in 2003, reportedly was favorable interest for a 10-year, 5 percent fixed-rate deal on a $960,149 mortgage owned by Gorelick.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Gorelick said she had no knowledge of receiving special treatment.

Still, the Wall Street Journal reported Gorelick's mortgage was handled through the Countrywide's VIP lending department in California, and the staff there was aware of her position as a senior Fannie Mae executive, according to statements Robert Feinberg, a former Countrywide employee, made to the newspaper.

READ FULL STORY at WorldNetDaily.com

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Obama's assassinations of Americans ~ By Nat Hentoff

Rather than going in and capturing high-value terrorists, we've been sending in pilotless drones and killing them. That's a good thing in the War on Terror, right? Save money on holding and trying them. Well, maybe not exactly. Nat Hentoff talks about the fact that some of the terrorist "hit" targets are American citizens.

Focusing on American targets, Ben Wizner, a staff attorney of the ACLU National Security Project, in a Feb. 4 press release emphasizes: "It is alarming to hear that the Obama administration is asserting that the president can authorize the assassination of Americans abroad, even if they are far from any battlefield and may have never taken up arms against the U.S., but have only been deemed to constitute an unspecified 'threat.'"

By Nat Hentoff

Posted: February 24, 2010 ~ 1:00 am Eastern

© 2010

On Sept. 14 in Somalia, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a long-sought link between al-Qaida and its East African allies, was in a vehicle bombed by a helicopter flying from an American ship off the Somali coast. As Karen DeYoung and Joby Warrick reported in a front-page Washington Post story – "Under Obama, more targeted killings than captures in counterterrorism efforts" (Feb. 13) – another U.S. helicopter "set down long enough for troops to scoop up enough of (Nabhan's) remains for DNA verification."

That news story offered a telling consequence: "The opportunity to interrogate one of the most wanted U.S. terrorism targets was gone forever." And a senior military officer, careful not to give his name, lamented: "We wanted to take a prisoner. It was not a decision that we made."

That decision came from Obama, our commander in chief, who, as I've previously reported, has authorized in his first year more such assassinations than Bush and Cheney in their last years. The result, as the Washington Post noted, "has been dozens of targeted killings and no reports of high-value detentions."

After all, there can be no fierce arguments about whether a charred corpse should be tried in a federal civilian court or by a military commission. Some American citizens, believed to be highly connected to al-Qaida or its affiliates, are also on these "hit" lists. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, pilotless U.S. drone planes have perpetrated these assassinations.

These are highly classified operations, but thanks to the First Amendment, an increasing number of these summary executions have been revealed in the Washington Post and on the Internet. There have already been probing, through unanswered questions, from the ACLU, human-rights groups and other constitutionalists about this corollary damage to such an anchor of our rule of law as the separation of powers when the executive branch alone decides who shall die instantly rather than having been permitted time-consuming and costly due process of law. And there are no defense attorneys to raise objections, even when an American citizen is marked for oblivion.

Resistance to these terminal operations – which often inadvertently but effectively end the lives of innocent civilians – intensified in February when a high-ranking American official at last confirmed that targeted assassination is a legitimate American way of self-defense.

During a Feb. 3 hearing before the House Intelligence Committee, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair testified that the U.S. intelligence community, when dealing with direct terrorist threats to the United States, does "take direct action against terrorists" (Washington Post, Feb. 4).

And "if we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that." Blair – sensitive to the Obama administration's delicate use of language in these matters – did not use the word "assassinations," but the message was lethal enough.

READ FULL STORY at WorldNetDaily.com

When Republicans were Nazis ~ By Jack Cashill

Commentary from WorldNetDaily

By Jack Cashill Posted: November 26, 2009 ~ 1:00 am Eastern © 2009 I had the occasion this past week to meet with former Attorney General John Ashcroft. I asked him how he felt when Democrats express outrage about accusations of fascism against the Obama administration. Ashcroft smiled. He knows a little something about such accusations. Five years ago I wrote about the subject on these pages, and I thought it worth a revisit. Back then, one progressive friend after another alerted me to a rather scary development: U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft had become a Nazi – "another Hitler" as one fretfully described our former Missouri governor and senator. This all came as news to me. I had met Ashcroft a few times, and he had exhibited no signs of latent Nazism: no heel-clicking or arm-thrusting, no anti-Semitic slurs or "sieg heils," no quiet yearnings for the Fatherland. I wondered, too, how a man of such presumed extremes could manage to win five statewide races in America's most politically indicative state. Still, I could not just dismiss those alarums. At least three of my friendly Cassandras were prominent Missourians. Perhaps they knew something I did not. To test their suspicions, I did a quick online search and got a jolt of confirmation. Some 18,400 Web postings linked "Ashcroft" and "Nazi," at least two-thirds of which accused Ashcroft of being a Nazi. One site served as an unofficial Ashcroft songbook. It posted the lyrics of more than 70 songs, all of which alerted the innocent to the suspected reign of terror at Justice. Indeed, it must have taken an act of deep courage to pen a song like "The Obnoxious Right Wing Nazi Pig Dog From Missouri" (sung to tune of "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy") knowing that the aforementioned "pig dog" was creating "Dachaus" for his political opponents. I could not write off these suspicions as mere Internet blather. On one even more damning site, America's erstwhile "most trusted man," the late Walter Cronkite, denounced Ashcroft as the "Torquemada of American law." Torquemada was the proto-fascist responsible, according to Cronkite, for the unholy methods of the Spanish Inquisition, "including torture and the burning of heretics – Muslims in particular." Egads! No wonder my friends were upset. As I learned in my investigation, progressives do not upset easily. During World War I, the Espionage and Sedition Acts allowed Woodrow Wilson's progressive administration to prosecute those reckless enough to voice anti-war sentiments. Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs spent 10 years in prison as a result. He was one of 2,000 so prosecuted. During World War II, the always progressive FDR interned – by executive order – 120,000 ethnic Japanese with the full-throated support of the Supreme Court. The Clinton years witnessed a renewal of the left's selective affection for civil rights. When, for instance, Ashcroft's predecessor as attorney general, Janet Reno, launched a tank assault on a religious community outside of Waco, killing 80 people, more than half of them minorities, 20 of them children, my friends kept silent. [CLICK HERE TO READ MORE]