Clinton Campaign Kicks Off as Huma Abedin Probe Begins
By Matthew Vadum
At long last the Department of State is investigating why a top Hillary Clinton aide with generational ties to Islamic terrorism was allowed to work in a sensitive government position while simultaneously working for a Clinton-connected private sector consulting firm.
Hillary Clinton and the senior aide, Huma Abedin, apparently conspired to keep the sweetheart working arrangement that the Muslim Brotherhood-linked employee had at Foggy Bottom a secret. Because it involves a Clinton, the story is, of necessity, complex and convoluted. And it’s classic Hillary as she tiptoes through a minefield of ethics violations, conflicts of interests, and potential national security-related breaches.
News of the probe came two days before the Benghazi bungler finally launched her long-awaited coronation parade campaign Sunday on YouTube [1].
“I’m running for president,” Mrs. Clinton said in the video. “Americans have fought their way back from tough economic times. But the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top. Everyday Americans need a champion and I want to be that champion.”
Yes, Clinton is a champion — of Islamic expansionism. She let four Americans die in 2012 so President Obama, in the midst of his reelection fight, wouldn’t have to reconcile the terrorist attack on a U.S. consulate in Libya with his dishonest boast that al-Qaeda was on the run under his leadership. That she hired someone of questionable loyalty to the United States shouldn’t surprise anyone.
Until Sunday the Clinton Foundation had served as a de facto campaign headquarters and international shakedown machine for Mrs. Clinton. With her campaign now officially on, the foundation will probably continue functioning as what the Wall Street Journal‘s Kimberly Strassel calls “The Clinton Foundation Super PAC.”
“Most family charities exist to allow self-made Americans to disperse their good fortune to philanthropic causes,” Strassel wrote in a recent column. “The Clinton Foundation exists to allow the nation’s most powerful couple to use their not-so-subtle persuasion to exact global tribute for a fund that promotes the Clintons.”
Abedin herself is a Muslim who is married to disgraced former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.). Bill and Hillary Clinton are reportedly so close to her that they have called her their surrogate daughter. Abedin, who almost certainly played some kind of a role in the Obama administration’s myriad catastrophic foreign policy failures, currently works at Mrs. Clinton’s personal office in New York City — or at least she worked there as of last week before Hillary launched her campaign.
Very few Republican lawmakers who are critical of Abedin’s working arrangement have raised the alarm about the threat she poses to national security. Some may have been scared away after the grandstanding stunt pulled three years ago by know-nothing Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). He bristled with indignation when then-Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and a handful of House lawmakers raised legitimate concerns about Abedin working in such a sensitive government post. McCain thundered: Abedin’s “character, reputation, and patriotism” were unjustly attacked and “these attacks on Huma have no logic, no basis, and no merit, and they need to stop now.”
State Department Inspector General Steve Linick sent a letter [2] to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) Thursday advising that the inner workings of the “Special Government Employee Program” at the department are now the subject of a preliminary inquiry by Linick’s office. (The document is available here [3].)
“This program is meant to be used in a limited way to give the government special expertise it can’t get otherwise,” Grassley said in a statement Friday. “Is the program working the way it’s intended at the State Department or has it been turned on its head?”
Amazingly enough, the Obama-loving media establishment has been on this case of ethical gymnastics and the potential compromise of U.S. national security for a while.
As the New York Times [4] reported two years ago, under Clinton the Department of State “created an arrangement for her longtime aide and confidante Huma Abedin to work for private clients as a consultant while serving as a top adviser in the department.”
On her mandatory financial disclosure form, Abedin failed to disclose the setup or how much she was paid. “[T]he picture that emerges from interviews and records suggests a situation where the lines were blurred between Ms. Abedin’s work in the high echelons of one of the government’s most sensitive executive departments and her role as a Clinton family insider.”
In a July 2013 letter the State Department indicated Abedin was employed full-time from January 2009 to June 2012. It also indicated she did not disclose outside employment when ending her full-time status. The department kept her on as an adviser-expert at the hourly rate of $74.51 with maximum pay of $155,500 per year.
When Abedin returned from maternity leave in mid-2012, her role as deputy chief of staff to Secretary Clinton ended and she became what’s called a special government employee, or consultant. A State Department official told the Old Gray Lady “that change freed her from the requirement that she disclose her private earnings for the rest of the year on her financial disclosure forms. Still, during that period, she continued to be identified publicly in news reports as Mrs. Clinton’s deputy chief of staff.”
It goes without saying that the Clintons have long believed that rules and laws are for the little people, not them. They live by the maxim that it is better to ask for forgiveness after the fact than seek permission before doing something awful.
In the second half of 2012 while working at State as a consultant, Abedin also worked for Teneo, a high-flying consultancy established by Doug Band, who was an adviser to President Clinton. Teneo advised MF Global, the failed brokerage of Democrat Jon Corzine, former governor of New Jersey and former U.S. senator.
“At the same time, Ms. Abedin served as a consultant to the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation and worked in a personal capacity for Mrs. Clinton as she prepared to transition out of her job as secretary of state,” the newspaper reported. (The foundation has since changed its name to the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.)
The head of the liberal group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) at the time, Melanie Sloane, engaged in Monty Pythonesque understatement when she described Abedin’s special working arrangement as merely unusual. “If she was being held out as a deputy chief of staff, it would be highly unusual for her to be a part-time employee or a consultant,” Sloane said. “Being a deputy chief of staff at the State Department is generally considered more than a full-time job.”
So Abedin was double- or even triple-dipping, working on sensitive issues in the Obama administration while at the same time working as a consultant at Teneo and the Clinton Foundation.
Political commentators might be more outraged over the Abedin affair but for the fact that the Clintons have always been shady operators. It’s scandal fatigue.
Pick a scandal, any scandal. There’s Whitewater, Juanita Broaddrick, Troopergate, Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Travelgate, Vince Foster, Elizabeth Gracen, Monica Lewinsky, Bill lying under oath and being disbarred for doing so, Filegate, the senseless slaughter of religious non-conformists at Waco, Texas, and many, many others.
There are so many Clinton scandals that Wikipedia had to create an index page [5] to list them all. Clinton-watching is an exhausting hobby that will turn into a full-time job for multitudes of talking heads, journalists, columnists, and activists should the Clintons take up residence in the White House again.
In the meantime we are left to wonder what role Abedin played in a long list of irregularities, mishaps, scandals, and America-weakening events while serving at the Department of State.
What role, if any, did Abedin play in:
*the Benghazi massacre and the coverup of it
*the State Department’s accountability review board failing to blame Clinton for Benghazi
*the failure of the Obama administration to disclose the cause of death of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens who was reportedly tortured and sodomized to death by Muslim terrorists
*the Obama’s administration’s perverse embrace of America’s longtime enemy, the Islamic Republic of Iran whose leaders can’t go a day without screaming “Death to America” (and “Death to Israel”)
*Iran’s conquest of its neighbors
*the ousting of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi
*the rise of Islamic State
*the removal of longstanding ally Hosni Mubarak as president of Egypt followed by the installation of Muslim Brotherhood favorite Mohamed Morsi in the position
*the conversion of NASA into a Muslim outreach agency
*the odious, lie-strewn “A New Beginning” speech President Obama gave at Cairo University in 2009
All these things that happened on then-Secretary Clinton’s watch. And they happened while the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Foundation reportedly raked in millions of dollars in donations from the governments of Muslim countries including the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Algeria.
Call them anticipatory bribes thrown over the transom in case Mrs. Clinton secures the presidency. (Statistics wiz Nate Silver says [6] Clinton is a virtual shoo-in for her party’s nomination but gives her roughly a 50/50 chance of winning the general election.)
As Hillary was screwing up America’s foreign policy, Bill was giving highly remunerative speeches in the Islamic nations of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE, and Turkey, according to Judicial Watch.
For what it’s worth, President Obama’s Cairo speech came on the heels of his worldwide apology tour in which he begged forgiveness from the countries of the world supposedly oppressed for so long by the U.S.
The oration was a major propaganda victory for Islamism that has emboldened fanatics and terrorists worldwide. It was also jam-packed with falsehoods, according to academics Mary Grabar and Brian Birdnow [7].
The address, of course, is a breathtaking work of fiction [8] that whitewashes the blood-drenched history of Islam and falsely attributes accomplishments such as printing, navigation, and medicine to the Islamic world.
Obama gave Islam credit for un-Islamic things such as the Enlightenment and religious tolerance. Islam “carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for European Renaissance and Enlightenment,” and “has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality,” Obama said.
Grabar and Birdnow counter that in fact “the intellectual Renaissance began when Byzantine scholars, mostly Greek, fled the advancing Turks in the 14th century and settled in Italy. The Enlightenment was openly anti-theistic and would have been anathema to most practicing Muslims.”
Moreover, they add, “Muslims wiped out Zoroastrianism, they battled Hinduism and Buddhism for centuries, and they levied a special tax on Christians and Jews in their domains.”
The lies in the Obama speech would no doubt be embraced by Abedin’s family. Born in 1976 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Abedin’s connections [9] to the Muslim Brotherhood run deep.
Her mother is Saleha Mahmood Abedin [10], widow of the late Zyed Abedin, an academic who taught at Saudi Arabia’s prestigious King Abdulaziz University in the early 1970s. The year after Huma was born, Mrs. Abedin received a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. She is a founding member of the Muslim Sisterhood, a pro-Sharia organization consisting of the wives of some of the highest-ranking leaders in the Muslim Brotherhood.
In 1978 Mr. Abedin was hired by Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs (IMMA), a Saudi-based Islamic think tank created by Abdullah Omar Naseef. Naseef was a Muslim extremist with ties to al-Qaeda. In 1983 he became secretary-general of the Muslim World League (MWL), a militant organization with links to Osama bin Laden.
The elder Abedins both became members of the editorial board of IMMA’s publication, the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs. According to Andrew C. McCarthy, IMMA’s “Muslim Minority Affairs” agenda is “to grow an unassimilated, aggressive population of Islamic supremacists who will gradually but dramatically alter the character of the West.”
Mrs. Abedin became an official representative of MWL in the 1990s. When her husband died in 1994, Mrs. Abedin became the IMMA’s director. She currently serves as editor-in-chief of its journal.
Mrs. Abedin is also a member of the board of the International Islamic Council for Dawa and Relief (IICDR), which has long been banned in Israel because it has ties to Hamas. (In Arabic, dawah, or dawa, means the proselytizing or preaching of Islam.) She also runs the Amman, Jordan-based International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child (IICWC), a Muslim World League affiliate that self-identifies as part of the IICDR. The league, according to Andrew C. McCarthy, “has long been the Muslim Brotherhood’s principal vehicle for the international propagation of Islamic supremacist ideology.” Huma Abedin was an intern in the Clinton White House between 1997 and some time in 1999, she was a member of the executive board of George Washington University’s radical Muslim Students Association (MSA). The MSA has extensive ties to al-Qaeda. From 1996 to 2008, she was employed by IMMA as assistant editor of its Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs.
Someone with Abedin’s background shouldn’t be anywhere near the levers of power in Washington. Yet Hillary Clinton trusted her with vital secrets of state and then surreptitiously deleted their electronic correspondence.
Were Secretary Clinton’s dealings with the foreign governments that gave money to the Clinton Foundation discussed in the emails that she deleted from her now-infamous private email server? We may never know.
There is, nonetheless, some reason for hope. Yes, it is depressing that even as evidence continues to accumulate that Mrs. Clinton’s cavalier approach to state secrets put U.S. national security in jeopardy, the shady background of Abedin is barely acknowledged on Capitol Hill.
Republican lawmakers seem for the most part unaware of Abedin’s ties to the world of Islamic terrorism, or like John McCain, remain stubbornly in denial.
But with the State Department Inspector General’s investigation set in motion, there is at least a possibility something will be discovered about Abedin that will spark the interest of the party whose elected officials now dominate both chambers of Congress.
The exposure of Huma Abedin is vitally important to the national security of the United States.
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