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ASHINGTON — Israel attempted to use tapes of former US president Bill Clinton’s steamy conversations with intern Monica Lewinsky to leverage the release of Jonathan Pollard, a new book on the Clinton family’s political enterprises has claimed. In the book, titled “Clinton Inc: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine,” author Daniel Halper relies on on-the-record interviews with former officials together with a close analysis of documents termed “the Monica Files” to paint a salacious – and uncomplimentary – picture of one of the most prominent political families in the United State

Halper is not the first to claim that Israel illicitly taped the steamy conversations between Clinton and Lewinsky and tried to leverage it to its advantage. In 1999, UK author Gordon Thomas claimed that the Mossad had collected some 30 hours’ worth of phone sex conversations between Lewinsky and Clinton and was using them to blackmail the US or to protect a deeply-embedded mole in the White House.

Halper, the online editor of the Weekly Standard, says that he “was well aware that the former (and perhaps future) first family and its massive retinue of loyalty enforcers, professional defamers and assorted gadflies would rue my intent to examine the real Clintons” and had been warned “of what to expect from the Clinton PR team.” In a piece that he wrote for the Huffington Post late Tuesday, Halper said that all of the warnings he had received about clever steps to downplay the impact of his book had proven true. Copies of Halper’s book were sent out in PDF form to hundreds of reporters days before the book’s official release by a previously unknown individual, in what Halper suggests was an effort to reduce the impact of the book’s release.

"As bad as it is the folks above the President make the decisions. They may have decided on Trump. These things do not happen by accident." Thus spoke a high-level US business mover and shaker with secure transit in rarified Masters of the Universe-related circles, amidst the utter political chaos provoked by head of the FBI James Comey's latest bombshell. It's virtually established by now that US Attorney General Loretta Lynch told Comey not to release his letter to Congress. But Comey did it anyway. If he had not, and a scandal would - inevitably - spring up after the US presidential election, Lynch would be perfectly positioned to deny she knew anything, and Comey would be on the firing line. Lynch is a certified Clinton machine asset. In 1999 then-President Bill Clinton appointed her to run the Brooklyn US Attorney's office. She left in 2002, taking the private practice revolving door. She was back to the Brooklyn office in 2010, urged by Obama. Five years later she became the 83rd US Attorney General, replacing the dodgy Eric Holder. A plausible case has been made that Comey took his fateful decision based on a serious internal revolt at the FBI - led by key people he trusts — as well as being egged-on by his wife. Yet one of the key questions that refuse to go away is why the FBI waited until 11 days before the US presidential election to supposedly "find" an email trove on certified sexting pervert Anthony Weiner's laptop.

     "As bad as it is the folks above the President make the decisions. They may have decided on Trump. These things do not happen by accident." Thus spoke a high-level US business mover and shaker with secure transit in rarified Masters of the Universe-related circles, amidst the utter political chaos provoked by head of the FBI James Comey's latest bombshell. It's virtually established by now that US Attorney General Loretta Lynch told Comey not to release his letter to Congress. But Comey did it anyway. If he had not, and a scandal would - inevitably - spring up after the US presidential election, Lynch would be perfectly positioned to deny she knew anything, and Comey would be on the firing line. Lynch is a certified Clinton machine asset. In 1999 then-President Bill Clinton appointed her to run the Brooklyn US Attorney's office. She left in 2002, taking the private practice revolving door. She was back to the Brooklyn office in 2010, urged by Obama. Five years later she became the 83rd US Attorney General, replacing the dodgy Eric Holder. A plausible case has been made that Comey took his fateful decision based on a serious internal revolt at the FBI - led by key people he trusts — as well as being egged-on by his wife. Yet one of the key questions that refuse to go away is why the FBI waited until 11 days before the US presidential election to supposedly "find" an email trove on certified sexting pervert Anthony Weiner's laptop.

The business source, although unsympathetic to the Clinton machine, especially in foreign policy, is a realpolitik practitioner, not a conspiracy theorist. He is adamant that, "the FBI reversal could not have happened without orders above the President. If the Masters [of the Universe] have changed their mind, then they will destroy Hillary." He adds, "they can make a deal with Donald just like anyone else; Donald wins; the Masters win; the people think that their voice has been heard. And then there will be some sort of (controlled) change." What's paramount in the whole soap opera is that faith in the US political system — as corrupt as it may be — must endure. That mirrors the faith in the US dollar; if confidence in the US dollar fails, the US as a hegemonic financial power is no more. The source is equally adamant that, "it is almost unprecedented to see a cover-up as extensive as Hillary's. A secret meeting between Bill Clinton and the Attorney General; the FBI ignoring all evidence and initially clearing Hillary to near rebellion of the whole of the FBI, attested to by Rudolf Giuliani whose reputation as a federal prosecutor is unquestioned; the Clinton "pay for play" foundation. The Masters are troubled that this is getting out of hand." The record shows that "the Masters do not usually have to go to such lengths to protect their own. They did manage to save Bill Clinton from the Monica Lewinsky perjury and keep him in the presidency. The Masters were not attacked in this case. They even got away with the 1987 cash settlement crash and the theft surrounding the Lehman debacle. In all these cases there were no overarching challenges to their control, as we see now open to the public by Trump. They antagonized and insulted the wrong man."

Just two days after news broke of an alleged poison-gas attack in northern Syria, President Trump brushed aside advice from some U.S. intelligence analysts doubting the Syrian regime’s guilt and launched a lethal retaliatory missile strike against a Syrian airfield.

Trump immediately won plaudits from Official Washington, especially from neoconservatives who have been trying to wrestle control of his foreign policy away from his nationalist and personal advisers since the days after his surprise victory on Nov. 8. There is also an internal dispute over the intelligence. On Thursday night, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the U.S. intelligence community assessed with a “high degree of confidence” that the Syrian government had dropped a poison gas bomb on civilians in Idlib province. But a number of intelligence sources have made contradictory assessments, saying the preponderance of evidence suggests that Al Qaeda-affiliated rebels were at fault, either by orchestrating an intentional release of a chemical agent as a provocation or by possessing containers of poison gas that ruptured during a conventional bombing raid. One intelligence source told me that the most likely scenario was a staged event by the rebels intended to force Trump to reverse a policy, announced only days earlier, that the U.S. government would no longer seek “regime change” in Syria and would focus on attacking the common enemy, Islamic terror groups that represent the core of the rebel forces.

The source said the Trump national security team split between the President’s close personal advisers, such as nationalist firebrand Steve Bannon and son-in-law Jared Kushner, on one side and old-line neocons who have regrouped under National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, an Army general who was a protégé of neocon favorite Gen. David Petraeus. White House Infighting In this telling, the earlier ouster of retired Gen. Michael Flynn as national security adviser and this week’s removal of Bannon from the National Security Council were key steps in the reassertion of neocon influence inside the Trump presidency. The strange personalities and ideological extremism of Flynn and Bannon made their ousters easier, but they were obstacles that the neocons wanted removed. Though Bannon and Kushner are often presented as rivals, the source said, they shared the belief that Trump should tell the truth about Syria, revealing the Obama administration’s CIA analysis that a fatal sarin gas attack in 2013 was a “false-flag” operation intended to sucker President Obama into fully joining the Syrian war on the side of the rebels — and the intelligence analysts’ similar beliefs about Tuesday’s incident. Instead, Trump went along with the idea of embracing the initial rush to judgment blaming Assad for the Idlib poison-gas event. The source added that Trump saw Thursday night’s missile assault as a way to change the conversation in Washington, where his administration has been under fierce attack from Democrats claiming that his election resulted from a Russian covert operation. If changing the narrative was Trump’s goal, it achieved some initial success with several of Trump’s fiercest neocon critics, such as neocon Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, praising the missile strike, as did Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The neocons and Israel have long sought “regime change” in Damascus even if the ouster of Assad might lead to a victory by Islamic extremists associated with Al Qaeda and/or the Islamic State.

The Hillary Clinton emails released last week include some telling exchanges about the June 2009 military coup that toppled democratically elected Honduran president Manuel Zelaya, a leftist who was seen as a threat by the Honduran establishment and U.S. business interests. At a time when the State Department strategized over how best to keep Zelaya out of power while not explicitly endorsing the coup, Clinton suggested using longtime Clinton confidant Lanny Davis as a back-channel to Roberto Micheletti, the interim president installed after the coup. During that period, Davis was working as a consultant to a group of Honduran businessmen who had supported the coup. In an email chain discussing a meeting between Davis and State Department officials, Clinton asked, “Can he help me talk w Micheletti?”

Davis rose to prominence as an adviser to the Clintons during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and has since served as a high-powered “crisis communications” adviser to a variety of people and organizations facing negative attention in the media, from scandal-plagued for-profit college companies to African dictators. His client list has elicited frequent accusations of hypocrisy. Davis was not the only foreign agent with access to Clinton. As The Guardian and Politico have reported, other emails point to lobbyists with direct access to Clinton’s personal email.

May 21, 2014 – The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit yesterday joined the CIA's cover-up of its Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961 by ruling that a 30-year-old volume of the CIA's draft "official history" could be withheld from the public under the "deliberative process" privilege, even though four of the five volumes have previously been released with no harm either to national security or any government deliberation. "The D.C. Circuit's decision throws a burqa over the bureaucracy," said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive (www.nsarchive.org), the plaintiff in the case. "Presidents only get 12 years after they leave office to withhold their deliberations," commented Blanton, "and the Federal Reserve Board releases its verbatim transcripts after five years. But here the D.C. Circuit has given the CIA's historical office immortality for its drafts, because, as the CIA argues, those drafts might 'confuse the public.'" "Applied to the contents of the National Archives of the United States, this decision would withdraw from the shelves more than half of what's there," Blanton concluded.

The 2-1 decision, authored by Judge Brett Kavanaugh (a George W. Bush appointee and co-author of the Kenneth Starr report that published extensive details of the Monica Lewinsky affair), agreed with Justice Department and CIA lawyers that because the history volume was a "pre-decisional and deliberative" draft, its release would "expose an agency's decision making process in such a way as to discourage candid discussion within the agency and thereby undermine the agency's ability to perform its functions." This language refers to the fifth exemption (known as b-5) in the Freedom of Information Act. The Kavanaugh opinion received its second and majority vote from Reagan appointee Stephen F. Williams, who has senior status on the court.

On the 50th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 2011, the National Security Archive's Cuba project director, Peter Kornbluh, requested, through the FOIA, the complete release of "The Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation" — a massive, five-volume study compiled by a CIA staff historian, Jack Pfeiffer, in the 1970s and early 1980s. Volume III had already been released under the Kennedy Assassination Records Act; and a censored version of Volume IV had been declassified years earlier pursuant to a request by Pfeiffer himself. The Archive's FOIA request pried loose Volumes I and II of the draft history, along with a less-redacted version of Volume IV, but the CIA refused to release Volume V, so the Archive filed suit under FOIA in 2012, represented by the expert FOIA litigator, David Sobel. In May 2012, U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler held that Volume V was covered by the deliberative process privilege, and refused to order any segregation of "non-deliberative" material, as required by FOIA.