InsideSources

Information obtained by InsideSources raises questions about a new report that the Clinton family made multiple trips to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s New Mexico ranch, and a spokesman for the former president says the allegation is “simply not true. Period.”

A DailyMail.com report claims that Bill and Hillary Clinton — along with Chelsea — visited Zorro Ranch “a whole bunch of times” and credited all its attributed allegations to Jared Kellogg, a security analyst based in Albuquerque.

But Kellogg told InsideSources he has no direct knowledge about the Clintons and he got the information during a brief encounter with Brice Gordon — the Zorro Ranch’s estate manager — in 2015. He says Gordon confided in him during a conversation at the ranch about installing lights and other security measures.

“This was all stuff told to me by [Gordon] and I can’t verify anything that this guy was telling me,” he said. “I spent literally only 20 minutes with him and Brice asked me to consult with him on some cameras. On and off he would tell me the Clintons had stayed there.

“I had no idea who Jeffery Epstein was when I first met Brice,” Kellogg said, adding he only found out when the reports of Epstein’s crimes and his connection to the Zorro Ranch hit the news.

Kellogg said his short meeting with Gordon was their only encounter and he did not do any security work on the ranch. Gordon could not be reached for comment and several sources told InsideSources he is believed to have left the country.

According to DailyMail.com: “The [Clintons] visited the 10,000-acre estate in the New Mexico desert often, but never stayed in the main house. 

“Instead, the Clinton family bunked down in a special cowboy-themed village created by Epstein, which is a mile south of his own luxury mountaintop villa. They’d use one of the two guest houses, which look like they’re straight out of the 19th century.”

Angel Ureña, a spokesman for President Clinton, told InsideSources that DailyMail.com “quoted an ‘IT contractor’ who once did a walkthrough of the ranch, who is in turn putting words in the house manager’s mouth.”   

Ureña also took note of a tweeted rebuttal in July to initial allegations about contacts between President Clinton and Epstein, who committed suicide in August while being jailed awaiting trial for additional crimes. In the lengthy tweet Ureña wrote, in part:

“President Clinton knows nothing about the terrible crimes Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to in Florida some years ago, or those with which he has recently been charged in New York. … He’s not spoken to Epstein in well over a decade and has never been to Little St. James Island, Epstein’s ranch in New Mexico, or his residence in Florida.”

“[It’s] simply not true. Period,” Ureña said.

Local realtor Brandon Sanchez, who represents property owners in the area around Zorro Ranch, told InsideSources rumors about the Clintons at Epstein’s home were common.

“I knew there’s always been rumors that the Clintons used to frequent the ranch, but I never knew of anything firsthand at all,” Sanchez said. “It’s just hearsay.”

Epstein’s alleged suicide in a New York City jail while awaiting trial on child molestation charges is still under investigation.

In September, New Mexico officials seized control of state-owned land from Epstein’s property, which they believed he used to create a protective buffer while he and co-conspirators committed alleged sex crimes.

New Mexico State Land Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard sent a letter canceling the state-property leases to Cypress Inc., a company owned by Epstein and listed as the owner of the ranch. Cypress agreed to relinquish the land last month.

Soon after Epstein’s arrest in New York in July, New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas announced his office had opened its own investigation into the financier and would forward findings to the SDNY, InsideSources reported. 

A federal lawsuit filed in New York last month, claims Epstein trafficked and sexually assaulted a 15-year-old girl at his New Mexico ranch in 2004. The suit was filed against the executors of Epstein’s estate, Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn.

Although other lawsuits have been filed against the estate, this appears to be the first one solely involving assaults at the Zorro Ranch.

The ongoing WikiLeaks dump of emails hacked from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta have given insight to the candid policy positions of the Democratic nominee infamous for siding with the politically popular, and while Podesta himself rarely elaborates on his opinions — mostly sticking to one-sentence replies — a new batch of correspondence released this week suggests the former White House chief of staff will be an advocate for encryption if his camp claims victory in November.

Last May FBI Director James Comey was hitting his stride with a round of congressional testimonies warning lawmakers that moves by Apple and Google to encrypt user communications from end-to-end by default would assist terrorists and criminals in “going dark” online, making it exceedingly more difficult for agencies to surveil them and raising the chances of successful kidnappings or terrorist attacks.

At the same time Apple was mounting support from cryptologists, privacy advocates and fellow companies in the form of a letter to the White House urging President Obama to reject any government proposal mandating backdoors for law enforcement in encryption products.

On May 19 Apple’s vice president of environmental policy and social initiatives, Lisa Jackson (an administrator for the EPA during Obama’s first term) emailed a Washington Post article about the letter to Podesta, offering to brief the month-old Clinton campaign on the issue.

“Hey John,” Jackson wrote. “I know you’ve seen the article below. Huge issue out here as I am sure you know. If you ever want our tech experts to brief your folks, we’d be happy to do it.”

Podesta — a fan of Apple products according to numerous emails — gave an uncharacteristically (compared to his other emails) long reply, describing the issue as going “back to the future” of his time in the White House when then-President Bill Clinton’s administration wrestled with encryption.

“Back to the future,” Podesta replied. “I managed this issue for President Clinton after we got ourselves all tangled in knots over the Clipper Chip. Had many disagreements with Louis Freeh on the topic.”

In 1993 then-FBI Director Louis Freeh tried to promote “key escrow” solutions to access encryption, including a microchip known as a “Clipper Chip” developed by the National Security Agency for use by telecommunications companies to encrypt voice data in their phone products. The chip essentially acted as a master key for accessing encryption that would be held by the government or a third party, and it’s proposal birthed the first “Crypto Wars.”

While Congress debated an eventual update to wiretapping laws in the early 1990s, Freeh and others in law enforcement argued “the extra effort and expense will be wasted if the only thing the wiretappers can hear is the hissy white noise of encrypted phone conversations and faxes,” The New York Times reported in June 1994.

“If cryptography is not controlled, wiretapping could be rendered obsolete,” the article reads. “[Freeh] has told Congress that preserving the ability to intercept communications legally, in the face of these technological advances, is ‘the No. 1 law enforcement, public safety and national security issue facing us today.'”

Podesta’s reply to Jackson implies he was an advocate for encryption during the debates in the Clinton White House, which eventually sided against the chip and removed export barriers on encryption products (another debate that was revived last year).

Campaign staff worked against multiple terror attacks through the end of the year and into 2016 to ensure Clinton wasn’t perceived as pro-backdoor, despite the former secretary of state’s own verbal blunders and scarce knowledge on the issue.

By November Clinton described the issue publicly as a “classic hard choice” between privacy and security following ISIS-inspired terror attacks in Paris, and staffers began to worry the “Internet Freedom” agenda she championed while secretary of state in the midst of the Arab Spring, when whole countries including Egypt shut down internet access, could be used against her for promoting tools like encryption, which investigators in Paris said attackers used.

“Man this is tough,” Sara Solow, a domestic policy advisor for Clinton, wrote on an email chain discussing a press response. “Is there evidence that bad guys — not just dissidents but terrorists or whatever — have also benefitted from the technologies supported by the internet freedom agenda?”

“The bad guys could already get crypto — we helped the good guys get it,” Ben Scott, who advised Clinton on tech issues while she was secretary of state, wrote in suggested talking points.

Debate heated up last December following the San Bernardino shootings and the FBI lawsuit brought against Apple to unlock the iPhone of one of the shooters. After the third Democratic presidential primary debate, staffers went back and forth on how to spin conflicting comments Clinton made that could be construed as supporting some kind of backdoor.

“She basically said no mandatory back doors last night (‘I would not want to go to that point’). In the next paragraph she then said some not-so-great stuff — about there having to be ‘some way’ to ‘break  into’ encrypted content– but then she again said ‘a backdoor may be the wrong door,'” Solow wrote, “…she’s certainly NOT calling for the backdoor now — although she does then appear to believe there is ‘some way’ to do the impossible.”

Teddy Goff, who manages Clinton’s online presence and served as the digital director for President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, added Podesta to the chain, who he described as “a fellow crypto hobbyist” (who “may be something more than a hobbyist”).

Goff said Podesta “heard nice things from friends of ours in [Silicon Valley], which is rare!” following the debate and suggested the campaign could safely say Clinton “pledged not to mandate a backdoor as president,” but warned against her use of some language making it clear she didn’t fully grasp the issue.

“[S]peaking of not understanding the technology,” Goff wrote, “there is a critical technical point which our current language around encryption makes plain she isn’t aware of. [O]pen-source unencrypted messaging technologies are in the public domain. there is literally no way to put that genie back in the bottle. [S]o we can try to compel a whatsapp to unencrypt, but that may only have the effect of pushing terrorists onto emergent encrypted platforms.”

Solow suggested the campaign “tell tech off the record” Clinton was referring to hacks of specific devices, not backdoors into encryption products broadly.

“[I]n terms of wanting a way to break in – couldn’t we tell tech off the record that she had in mind the malware/key strokes idea (insert malware into a device that you know is a target, to capture keystrokes before they are encrypted),” Solow wrote. “Or that she had in mind really super code breaking by the NSA. But not the backdoor per se?”

In early 2016 California Democrat Rep. Zoe Lofgren, an avid advocate for digital privacy who’s repeatedly sought to block surveillance technology via legislation, wrote to Podesta with “hope that our candidate does not leap on the side of the FBI on the encryption ruling,” and asked to speak with Clinton if she was leaning in favor of law enforcement.

As the legal battle between the Department of Justice and Apple ensued, Lofgren followed up in February with a statement she wrote for Clinton calling on the DOJ to abandon the lawsuit.

Podesta replied that while the campaign would likely “stay out” of the issue, he assured Lofgren Clinton wouldn’t “embrace” the FBI’s position.

“I think we are inclined to stay out of this and push it back to companies and [the United States Government] to dialogue and resolve,” he wrote. “Won’t embrace FBI.”

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If you don’t know who Neera Tanden is, you should. She is not only the CEO and president of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress (CAP), but she is a longtime friend and adviser to Hillary Clinton.

But Tanden has come under recent scrutiny for essentially running CAP like a mini-Clinton White House instead of a center for progressive ideas, just waiting for the day the former secretary of state is inaugurated, so Tanden can take a position within her administration.

The latest WikiLeaks email dump has given people a rare inside look into the Democratic presidential nominee’s campaign, and Tanden is a big player in that, showing how CAP and the campaign are very close.

Tanden first started as an associate director for domestic policy in Bill Clinton’s White House and senior policy adviser to the first lady. In 2000, she was Hillary’s deputy campaign manager and issues director for her New York Senate campaign. She also served as a policy director for Hillary’s 2008 presidential run and eventually served as a senior adviser for health reform during President Barack Obama’s presidency.

While she has no formal role with Clinton’s 2016 White House bid, she constantly stays in touch with John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, whose emails were illegally hacked and published by hacktivist group WikiLeaks this week. Podesta also previously served as president of CAP, highlighting the close relationship between Tanden and one of Clinton’s right-hand guys.

In many of the emails, Tanden offers advice or gives policy ideas to Podesta and other Clinton aides. For example, Tanden emailed Jake Sullivan, a top foreign policy adviser, Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s communications director, and Podesta on June 2, 2015 to talk about the U.S. Supreme Court’s impending ruling on the Affordable Care Act.

“I think it would be helpful to have a story of how progressives and Hillary would make the Supreme Court an election issue (which would be a ready argument for liberals) if the Court rules against the government. It’s not that you wish that happens. But that would be the necessary consequence of a negative decision…the Court itself would become a hugely important political issue,” Tanden wrote in the email.

She then suggested that the CAP Action Fund, the political advocacy arm of CAP which Tanden is also in charge of, could “get that story started. But kinda rests on you guys to make it stick.”

And it looks like Tanden did what she suggested she would do. On June 21, The Atlantic wrote a story about how the Supreme Court ruling could be one of the first policy tests for 2016 presidential candidates. Tanden is quoted saying how Democrats would respond to an overturn of Obamacare with a “much broader critique.”

“You would see really two strands of response,” she said. “One is on the Affordable Care Act itself, and the other is on the role of the courts.”

This is the clearest example from the emails highlighting the coordination of CAP and the Clinton campaign, suggesting the two entities are in lock-step with each other.

It’s not necessarily surprising that Tanden would advise Clinton’s campaign and use her organization to help Clinton, but since CAP claims to represent progressive ideas, many people would assume that the organization would not take a side in the Democratic presidential primary or would even go as far as to support Clinton’s primary rival, Bernie Sanders, a self-identified democratic socialist.

While CAP never publicly said they wouldn’t get involved in the primary, the emails show there was some negative discussion about the Vermont senator and his policies.

In an email chain about supporting a $15 minimum wage, Tanden and Sullivan suggested that people who supported the wage increase — which was a significant cornerstone of Sanders’ campaign — were part of the Red Army, a name given to the Russian military during communist leadership.

“Calling the ‘Fight for $15’ minimum wage campaign a modern-day communist ‘Red Army,’ these emails reflect how Clinton and her liberal allies at CAP really feel about the disastrous economic consequences of these policies,” said Jeremy Adler, communications director for America Rising Squared, a non-profit research firm that promotes conservative policies, to The Daily Caller. “As she famously noted, Clinton will say one thing in public and another in private — unfortunately in this case she’s willing to put millions of family-supporting jobs at risk to help herself politically.”

Tanden has also received heat for saying, “What’s wrong with the people of NH?” after Sanders’s First in the Nation primary win.

This doesn’t sit well with Sanders supporters and former employees who saw CAP as an organization pushing progressive ideas, but ended up just being a political machine for Clinton.

Zaid Jilani, a former reporter for ThinkProgress — CAP’s political reporting blog — has constantly criticized his former employer on social media.

When I worked at Center for American Progress, basically Hillary's think tank, Wall Street money impacted their policy big time #DemDebate

— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) November 15, 2015

In the email leak, some emails also pointed to coordination between ThinkProgress and the Clinton campaign.

Judd Legum, founder and editor ThinkProgress blog, fed the Clinton campaign information about Sanders during the Democratic primary.

In one example in February 2016, Legum sent Podesta a link to an NBC story about Sanders defending rapper Killer Mike, one of his highest-profile supporters.

Legum highlighted a quote from Sanders explaining why Killer Mike isn’t sexist for urging Clinton supporters to vote for Sanders.

“I don’t go around, no one has ever heard me say, ‘Hey guys, let’s stand together, vote for a man.’ I would never do that, never have,” the Vermont senator stated to which Legum added, “Needless to say, he doesn’t say that because he doesn’t have to.”

Podesta replied, “Yes — we are on it.”

The WikiLeaks emails has intensified many frustrated feelings that Sanders supporters have about the primary process being rigged by the Democratic National Committee in favor of Clinton.

The fact that CAP, who according to their online mission is “dedicated to improving the lives of all Americans, through bold, progressive ideas, as well as strong leadership and concerted action,” is seen coordinating with the Clinton campaign to push her ideas and campaign, isn’t helping members of the Bernie or Bust movement join the Clinton camp.

One user on Reddit perfectly summed up the movement’s thoughts on CAP:

“I used to work for CAP until I left earlier this year. I left in part because of we were to be a progressive organization we should have been behind Sanders 110%,” the user wrote. “Instead the entire organization has been retooled to be a pseudo PAC for [Hillary] Clinton. Also, Neera Tanden is just waiting and using CAP to get herself a cabinet post in a Clinton administration.”

Tanden has not publicly responded to the email hack yet and the Clinton campaign is claiming that the Russian government is trying to influence the presidential election.

Former President Bill Clinton supported keeping U.S. oversight of the internet in 2014 after the Obama administration said it would hand it over to the international community, a move Republicans in Congress led by Ted Cruz may try to stop by leveraging an imminent government shutdown.

“A lot of people who have been trying to take this authority away from the United States wanted to do it for the sole purpose of cracking down on internet freedom, and limiting it and having governments protect their backsides instead of empower their people,” the 42nd president of the United States said during a Clinton Foundation event in 2014.

The remarks came less than two weeks after the Obama administration announced its intention to cede federal government oversight of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the private organization that manages the crucial back-end functions of the internet Domain Name System (DNS), to a global multi-stakeholder community of nations, internet companies and technical organizations.

It was during Clinton’s presidency in 1998 that the current framework was established, charging the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) with overseeing ICANN’s Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which it uses to manage critical functions like assigning internet protocol addresses, overseeing top-level domain names like .com and .org and running the root servers that route web addresses to their correct source.

“I understand why the reaction in the rest of the world to the Edward Snowden declarations has given new energy to the idea that the United States should not be in nominal control of domain names on the internet, I understand that,” Clinton said. “But I also know that we’ve kept the internet free and open, and it’s a great tribute to the United States that we have done that, including the ability to bash the living daylights out of those of us who are in office or have been.”

At the time Clinton touched on the major concerns Republicans in Congress have expressed since — that the transition would be a venue for oppressive regimes with a reputation for online censorship within the borders, such as China and Russia, to try and exert control over global free speech and the free flow of information online.

Lawmakers have used appropriations riders to block the transition for the last two years, with Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz leading this year’s effort ahead of its planned completion on Oct. 1.

Though Democrats, administration officials and ICANN representatives themselves have pointed out ICANN has never had the mandate or authority to protect free speech online, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, who sat on the same panel with Clinton in 2014 and has sat in on “high-level” discussions at ICANN, said the concerns were legitimate.

“Are you at all worried, Jimmy, that if we give up this domain jurisdiction we’ve had for all these years that we’ll lose internet freedom?” Clinton asked.

“Yeah, I’m very worried about it,” Wales replied, explaining his concern stems from the cultural influences other nations could exert over ICANN — a worry echoed by an FCC commissioner on Tuesday.

“There is the First Amendment in the U.S. and there is a culture around free expression that’s so strong, that it’s really important,” Wales said. “When I’m on a high-level panel at ICANN, one of the things that really concerns me is some of the other people on the panel [say] ‘it’s important we have respect for local cultures. Okay, I respect local cultures, but I’m not sure that means I think…the head of the telecom regulation unit in a particular country should be banning parts of Wikipedia.”

“That’s not local cultural variation that we should embrace and accept,” he continued, “that’s a human rights violation.”

Wales lamented that the U.S. lost the moral high-ground over China and Russia as a result of leaks detailing global digital surveillance programs by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

“Now, going and and saying, ‘the U.S. will do a good job’ — people don’t believe that necessarily anymore,” he said, describing the handoff as a concession to the international community over the Snowden disclosures — a criticism many opposed to the transition have maintained since, especially given the lack of a technical correlation.

“I don’t know the way forward; internet governance is a very complicated issue, but it does concern me,” he added. “[It’s] really something the U.S. should be taking leadership on, and if, because of the embarrassing revelations we’re not able to take leadership anymore, I think the world is possibly a little worse off for that.”

Though proponents say the international transition has been planned all along, Clinton — who ordered the current framework be established in 1997, and whose administration oversaw the dawn of the modern internet — didn’t appear to support that narrative.

“Whatever you believe about what the NSA has done, what the president has proposed to change it, whatever — the internet has flourished in freedom and people have had access to it,” Clinton said. “I understand in theory why we would like to have a multi-stakeholder process, I favor that, I just know that a lot of these so-called multi-stakeholders are really governments that want to gag people and restrict access to the internet.”

In her technology policy platform, 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said she supports the transition.

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In 1996, then-President Bill Clinton signed into law the Telecommunications Act, setting the standards for regulating telephone, cable, broadcasting, satellite, cellular and Internet for the next two decades. Now, 20 years later, Republicans in Congress are looking to put their stamp on the regulations after the Federal Communications Commission recently rewrote the rules on net neutrality.

The act came at a time when neither the FCC nor Congress engaged in the bulk of communications policymaking — that heavy lifting fell to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia as a result of the government-mandated breakup of AT&T into several smaller companies negotiated by the Justice Department.

AT&T and the seven regional holding companies separated from it spent the years since the 1984 breakup continually seeking guidance from the court on business practices they could or could not engage in, the latter including long-distance calling, hardware manufacturing and offering information services — the category the Internet would fall under 12 years later, in the 1996 act.

In an effort to shift rule-making power back to Congress and experts in government and provide clear guidelines for providers to operate under, as opposed to waiting on court rulings, lawmakers in the ’90s began negotiating an update to the Communications Act of 1934 — legislation originally intended to tackle anticompetitive and monopoly business practices by Bell Telephone.

Congress hadn’t revisited the 1934 act for 62 years by the time the 1996 act was passed.

The law put in place major changes aimed at balancing regulation and boosting competition, including Title III permission for any communications provider to enter the market and compete with any other — setting up the groundwork for the telephone, tv and Internet conglomerates of today.

It also exempted information services, or Internet providers, from Title II, the regulation classifying telephone companies as public utility common carrier services, subjecting them to stricter anti-competitive government oversight — a carryover from the 1934 act.

Additionally, 1996 set the stage for the restoration of the FCC as the primary telecommunications regulator, an agency that has operated with few limitations from Congress. Since then, the agency’s power has only grown.

According to Republicans in Congress, that unchecked power most recently manifested in the agency’s decision last year to undo Congress’ Internet exemption in the 1996 act and reclassify Internet service providers (ISPs) as public utility common carriers.

According to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, the change in classification gives the agency the legal justification to enforce net neutrality rules adopted under the same Open Internet Order previously struck down in several court challenges by the telecom industry.

The rules mandate ISPs treat all Internet traffic equally by banning content blocking, download throttling and paid prioritization — steps edge providers like Amazon, Google YouTube, Netflix and others called for amid claims providers including AT&T and Verizon were throttling download speeds to customers in an effort to get edge providers to pay more for acceptable service.

Republicans from the House to the Senate have argued since the rules’ passage last February the FCC lacked the authority to reverse Congress’ designation, and accused the agency of being opaque and acting unilaterally without seeking oversight from Congress or publishing the rules before implementing them.

Though the rules are still awaiting a ruling on their legality likely coming in March, Republicans including Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee Chairman John Thune aren’t waiting to pursue an update to the 1996 act.

“With the FCC poised to reclassify broadband due to a lack of clear statutory authority, we can readily see the consequences of that obsolescence and the need for action,” Thune said prior to the FCC’s vote last year. “Updating the Communications Act is no small undertaking, but it would be a dereliction of duty if Congress did not at least try to modernize the law.”

At the time the South Dakota senator said those changes could come via a series of small bills or a legislative package like the 1996 law.

Thune has already started work on a bill to implement net neutrality protections without Title II reclassification, though he’s waiting on the pending court challenge to move forward. He’s also partnered with a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers on his Mobile Now Act, aimed at freeing up more wireless spectrum for the burgeoning mobile market to satisfy Americans’ growing need for bandwidth heavy service like video streaming.

Groups including U.S. Telecom, the industry lobbyist group leading the court challenge against the FCC, agree it’s time for an update.

“While the Telecom Act was ahead of its time in the 1990s, 20 years later it is time for a refresh,” the group’s president and CEO Walter McCormick wrote in an op-ed Monday. “Having achieved its core market-opening goals and achieved a fast-paced, dynamic broadband economy, much of the act is now obsolete.”

“Congress, as the elected representatives of the American people, must ensure that telecom policy addresses today’s challenges, not last century’s, and ensures that we retain our international leadership.”

Others including the Consumer Technology Association, whose members include Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix and others, said the act continues to serve its purpose.

“But overall, in the last two decades, the act has not hindered companies from creating new products and services, and thanks to the Internet, new services and business models have benefitted the American people,” president and CEO of CTA said in a statement Monday. “The Internet as we know it today — a platform for accessing information and developing new consumer markets — is a product of this act.”

“This act has been — and will continue to be — important for spurring innovation in the United States and maintaining our global competitiveness.”

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