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An email hacked from the private Gmail account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, is raising new questions about when President Barack Obama found out about Clinton’s private email server. In a March 7, 2015 interview with CBS News’ senior White House correspondent Bill Plante, Obama said he hadn’t been aware of Clinton’s use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state until “the same time everybody else learned it through news reports.”

On Tuesday, WikiLeaks’ highlighted a March 7, 2015 email found in its archives of Podesta’s emails, writing: “Clinton campaign panics after Obama misleads public over Clinton emails.”

In the original email sent shortly after the CBS interview aired, Josh Schwerin, spokesperson for Hillary For America, Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, alerted Jennifer Palmieri, the campaign’s director of communications, about Obama’s statements. Schwerin wrote: “Jen you probably have more on this but it looks like POTUS just said he found out HRC was using her personal email when he saw it in the news.” The email also includes a link to a March 7, 2015 tweet from Katherine Miller, a political editor at Buzzfeed. “I have some questions here,” she wrote about Obama’s statement.

Seventy sailors from the USS Ronald Reagan are filling suit against the Japanese company TEPCO after allegedly suffering radiation contamination from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant melt down.

The law suit states TEPCO downplayed the nuclear radiation danger until it was too late. According to the suit, radiation experts who assisted in the decontamination say the USS Ronald Reagan sailed straight into a plume of radioactivity, which contaminated the ship’s water supply. Crew members washed, brushed their teeth and drank potentially contaminated water. The law suit claims active and former sailors are suffering from cancer, blindness, impotence, and fatigue as a result of the radiation exposure.

The United States would not recognize a referendum by Crimea to leave Ukraine, and a shift of that region to Russia “is not a done deal,” a top Obama administration official said Sunday. “If there is a referendum and it votes to move Crimea out of Ukraine and to Russia, we won’t recognize it and most of the world won’t either,” deputy national security advisor Tony Blinken said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Were that to happen, the isolation of Russia, the cost that it would pay, would increase significantly from where they are now,” he said. Russia has shown no signs of backing down over the Crimea crisis in the face of economic sanctions from the U.S. and its European allies. The sanctions came after Russian troops seized control of the Crimean peninsula, which has a Russian-speaking majority. Moscow claims that the takeover of key facilities there in late February was the work of local pro-Russian militias. A referendum organized by pro-Russian members of Crimea’s regional assembly is scheduled for March 16.

Blinken, who was traveling with President Obama this weekend in Florida, said sanctions have taken an economic toll on Russia and that the dispute still could be resolved. “We've seen Russian markets go down substantially, the ruble go down, and investors sitting on the fence. So Russia’s paying a price for this,” Blinken said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “It's not a done deal,” he said of Crimea seceding from Ukraine to join Russia. “I think the door is clearly open to resolving this diplomatically.” The White House announced Sunday that Obama would meet with new Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk in Washington on Wednesday to “discuss how to find a peaceful resolution to Russia’s ongoing military intervention in Crimea that would respect Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity.” But former Obama administration Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said he did not foresee Russian President Vladimir Putin backing down. “I do not believe ... that Crimea will slip out of Russia’s hands,” Gates said on “Fox News Sunday.”

A recent article written by this writer for Global Research posted last Saturday – “The Benghazi Scandal Is Obama’s Watergate But Worse” – was written in an effort to seek and uncover the truth. Accurate reporting on major world events is a challenge in today’s world where propaganda and disinformation are mainstream media norms and where virtually all major players in American politics simply lie through their teeth every time they open their mouths in constant effort to look good and cover up the truth. The American public knows this pathetic and sobering fact that deception has come to rule in the world of both politics and the media. People today neither believe their newscasters nor their political leaders. That is why examining the content of the tidal wave of assertions and opinions spewing forth from politicians and pundits in the aftermath of the latest Benghazi revelations must be taken with a grain of salt. Again, truth in today’s world is hard to come by. But as an investigative reporter, presenting a brief overview of recent comments and statements for any informed citizen to process and digest seems a worthwhile and important enterprise.

A timeline of recently unfolding events: On 10/12/12 exactly one month after the Benghazi incident, the legal conservative group Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking documents related to the Benghazi attack on September 11th, 2012 that killed the US Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Obama, who had campaigned on a promise of transparency in the criminal wake of the Bush regime, has proven to be anything but open and transparent. Having to sue the US government for access to the records, on April 18th, 2014, a full year and a half later, the Obama administration’s stonewalling ultimately failed and Judicial Watch successfully got hold of 41 State Department Benghazi related documents. Emails between high level White House officials discussing damage control strategies in the immediate aftermath of the Benghazi assault were released last week. Jubilant Republicans are now calling one of those emails their “smoking gun,” believing it is so incriminating that it will do in their would-be opponent Hillary Clinton from potentially competing in the 2016 presidential election.

The newly declassified email written by Obama’s then Deputy Strategic Communications Adviser Ben Rhodes specifically directed then UN Ambassador Susan Rice in preparation for her Sunday morning talk show appearances on September 16th, 2012 to explain the administration’s take on what it knew of the Benghazi murders. Rhodes advised Rice to attribute the Benghazi uprising as “rooted in an Internet video, and not a failure of policy,” pushing talking points designed to bolster Obama’s presidential image as a cool-as-a-cucumber-under-fire kind of wise and benevolent leader and statesman. The major emphasis of the email instructed Rice to blame the bogus anti-Moslem video as inciting a spontaneous protest like in other countries in the region that apparently grew violently out of control, of course all the while knowing that that was a boldface lie. This crucial piece of evidence proves that President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton both knew that the video did not cause the attack but that they chose to willfully deceive the American public in order to protect their own political careers and hence was born the infamously never ending Benghazi cover-up. Obama and Hillary withheld this damning email evidence even from the House Oversight Committee led by Congressman Darrel Issa (R-CA) requesting all documents pertaining to Benghazi more than a year ago. With the presidential election less than two months away at the time of the attack, Obama and Hillary were determined at all cost to keep hidden from Americans the real truth of criminal Benghazi activity they were guilty of engaging in during the months leading up to the attack. Last Thursday an angry Issa subpoenaed current Secretary of State John Kerry to appear before the committee on May 21st to further explain why those critical State Department records recently given to Judicial Watch were not among the 3200 documents originally handed over to his committee well over a year ago.

SMITH v. MARYLAND, 442 U.S. 735 (1979)

The telephone company, at police request, installed at its central offices a pen register to record the numbers dialed from the telephone at petitioner's home. Prior to his robbery trial, petitioner moved to suppress "all fruits derived from" the pen register. The Maryland trial court denied this motion, holding that the warrantless installation of the pen register did not violate the Fourth Amendment. Petitioner was convicted, and the Maryland Court of Appeals affirmed. Held: The installation and use of the pen register was not a "search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, and hence no warrant was required. Pp. 739-746. (a) Application of the Fourth Amendment depends on whether the person invoking its protection can claim a "legitimate expectation of privacy" that has been invaded by government action. This inquiry normally embraces two questions: first, whether the individual has exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy; and second, whether his expectation is one that society is prepared to recognize as "reasonable." Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 . Pp. 739-741.

(b) Petitioner in all probability entertained no actual expectation of privacy in the phone numbers he dialed, and even if he did, his expectation was not "legitimate." First, it is doubtful that telephone users in general have any expectation of privacy regarding the numbers they dial, since they typically know that they must convey phone numbers to the telephone company and that the company has facilities for recording this information and does in fact record it for various legitimate business purposes. And petitioner did not demonstrate an expectation of privacy merely by using his home phone rather than some other phone, since his conduct, although perhaps calculated to keep the contents of his conversation private, was not calculated to preserve the privacy of the number he dialed. Second, even if petitioner did harbor some subjective expectation of privacy, this expectation was not one that society is prepared to recognize as "reasonable." When petitioner voluntarily conveyed numerical information to the phone company and "exposed" that information to its equipment in the normal course of business, he assumed the risk that the company would reveal the information [442 U.S. 735, 736]   to the police, cf. United States v. Miller, 425 U.S. 435 . Pp. 741-746. 283 Md. 156, 389 A. 2d 858, affirmed.

Sen. Tom Cotton says bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities would take several days and be nothing like Iraq War.

Cotton challenged Obama’s assertion that “no deal is better than a bad deal” with the words of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said the alternative to a bad deal is “a better deal.” Cotton said any military action against Iran would not be like the Iraq War and would instead be similar to 1999’s Operation Desert Fox, a four-day bombing campaign against Iraq ordered by President Bill Clinton. “Even if military action were required — and we certainly should have kept the credible threat of military force on the table throughout which always improves diplomacy — the president is trying to make you think it would be 150,000 heavy mechanized troops on the ground in the Middle East again as we saw in Iraq and that’s simply not the case,” Cotton said. “It would be something more along the lines of what President Clinton did in December 1998 during Operation Desert Fox. Several days air and naval bombing against Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction facilities for exactly the same kind of behavior. For interfering with weapons inspectors and for disobeying Security Council resolutions. All we’re asking is that the president simply be as tough as in the protection of America’s national security interest as Bill Clinton was.”

The criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, over his intention to address the US Congress two weeks before the Israeli elections, has not stopped at water's edge. And while the criticism from President Barack Obama's administration and the editorial board of the New York Times was expected, this weekend the Likud leader was targeted by a network he once counted among his supporters – Fox News.

Secretary of State John Kerry met with the heads of major studios on Tuesday to talk about how to counter the ISIS narrative. “Great convo w/ studio execs in LA. Good to hear their perspectives & ideas of how to counter #Daesh narrative,” Kerry tweeted, along with a photo of his meeting with Jeff Shell, chairman of Universal Filmed Entertainment Group; MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd; Warner Bros. Entertainment CEO Kevin Tsujihara; DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg; 20th Century Fox Chairman and CEO Jim Gianopulos; 20th Century Fox Co-Chair Stacey Snider; Sean Bailey, president of Walt Disney Motion Picture Production; Universal Pictures Chairman Donna Langley; Tom Rothman, chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment’s Motion Picture Group; Universal Pictures President Jimmy Horowitz; Amblin Partners CEO Michael Wright; and NBCUniversal Vice Chairman Ron Meyer.

Daesh is an acronym for the Arabic phrase “al-Dawla al-Islamiya fil Iraq wa al-Sham,” another term for ISIS. The terrorist group reportedly hates the term, but western leaders have been using it instead of Islamic State. The meeting was held at Universal Studios, and lasted about 90 minutes. One attendee who was there said that the executives also exchanged ideas and observations about studio worldwide marketing of movies and TV shows, a way of showing how narrative storytelling can cross cultures. The attendee described part of the gathering as a “brainstorming session,” including how to involve storytellers in regions afflicted or threatened by ISIS, as a way to counter the narratives promulgated by the terrorist organization. “Let’s figure out how to involve people who are there,” the attendee said.

The Pentagon’s plan for seizing and occupying territory in east Syria is beginning to take shape. According to a Fox News exclusive: “The Islamic State has essentially moved its so-called capital in Syria… ISIS is now centered in Deir ez-Zur, roughly 90 miles southeast of Raqqa, the officials said.” (“ISIS moves its capital in Syria”, FOX News ) The move by ISIS corresponds to the secretive massing of US troops and military equipment on the Syria-Jordan border. It creates the perfect pretext for a ground invasion followed by a long-term military occupation in an area that Washington has sought to control for the last 18 months.  Here’s more on the topic from South Front: “The US military is reportedly concentrating troops and military equipment at the Syrian-Jordanian border. Local sources said that about 20 US Army armoured vehicles (including battle tanks and artillery pieces) carried on trucks were spotted in Al-Mafraq. US troops were allegedly accompanied with the Jordanian Army’s 3rd Division.