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Former FBI Director James Comey drafted a statement exonerating former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for running her government emails through a private email server before completing the investigation, according to two Republican senators.

Comey prepared the draft exoneration for Clinton before conducting interviews with top Clinton aides who were offered immunity for their cooperation, Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley and Sen. Lindsey Graham said Thursday in a joint statement, citing transcripts of interviews with former Comey aides obtained by the Senate judiciary committee.
Comey would go on to announce in July 2016 that the FBI would not recommend charges against Clinton -- although he sharply chastised her decision to conduct State Department business through a private email server.

President Donald Trump commented on the senators' statement Friday morning: "Wow, looks like James Comey exonerated Hillary Clinton long before the investigation was over...and so much more. A rigged system!" he tweeted.

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/08/31/politics/comey-clinton-investigation/index.html

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ATLANTA | A Georgia Republican lawmaker warned a Democratic former colleague who criticized his support for Civil War monuments on Facebook that she won’t be “met with torches but something a lot more definitive” if she continues to call for the removal of statues in south Georgia.

>State Rep. Jason Spencer, a Woodbine Republican, also wrote former state Rep. LaDawn Jones that “people in South Georgia are people of action, not drama” and suggested some who don’t understand that “will go missing in the Okefenokee.”

>“Too many necks they are red around here,” he wrote. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you about ‘em.”

>Jones, who represented an Atlanta-based district from 2012 to 2016, responded that she saw his remarks as a “threat of physical violence” but said she was confident that future generations will abandon a “we are better than them” mentality.

>“Enjoy but know … WINTER IS COMING,” wrote Jones, who is black. “You know it too … otherwise you wouldn’t have found a need to even make this post or those hollow threats of not coming to south GA.”

>Spencer said in a text message that his words were not meant as a threat, but instead a “warning to her of how people can behave about this issue.”

>“She is from Atlanta — and the rest of Georgia sees this issue very differently,” said Spencer, who was elected in 2010 to represent the southeast Georgia district. “Just trying to keep her safe if she decided to come down and raise hell about the memorial in the back yards of folks who will see this as an unwelcome aggression from the left.”

>Jones said in an interview that Spencer sat next to her for four years in the Georgia House and that they developed a friendly, if sometimes testy, relationship.

http://onlineathens.com/local-news/2017-08-31/georgia-lawmaker-talk-ditching-confederate-statues-could-cause-democrat-go

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www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/2108678/concerns-over-planned-law-prevent-abuse-chinese-national

macaudailytimes.com.mo/anthem-law-officially-proposed-msar.html

>Malicious revisions to the lyrics or derogatory performances may also be punished under the proposed legislation by up to 15 days in detention

>those at events are required to stand up straight solemnly when the anthem is played.

Everybody make fun of the anthem

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UctriMuXYS0

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http://theweek.com/speedreads/722200/trump-attorneys-reportedly-made-case-against-obstruction-justice-mueller

>Special counsel Robert Mueller has had several meeting with attorneys representing President Trump, who have argued in memos that Trump did not obstruct justice when he fired former FBI Director James Comey this spring and the investigation should be closed, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal.

>The team sent Mueller several memos in June, including one that said Comey was an unsuitable witness because he leaked information to the media and exaggerated stories, and another that claimed Trump as president, Trump has the constitutional authority to hire and fire any officials in the executive branch as he sees fit, the Journal reports. Mueller was reportedly open to accepting these legal submissions, but has not responded to them.

>Before Comey was fired in May, he was running the probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. John Dowd, the leader of Trump's outside legal team, told the Journal he didn't think it was "appropriate" to share information about his discussions with Mueller, adding, "Why should I rupture a relationship with the special counsel?" Catherine Garcia

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http://dailycaller.com/2017/08/31/harry-reid-asked-obama-wh-to-help-menendezs-donor/

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http://www.businessinsider.com/ivanka-trump-supports-ending-of-obama-era-equal-pay-intiative-2017-8?utm_source=feedburner&amp%3Butm_medium=referral&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+businessinsider+%28Business+Insider%29

>Ivanka Trump, assistant to and daughter of US President Donald Trump, supports ending an Obama-era equal pay initiative.


>The Wall Street Journal's Ted Mann reported earlier this week that the White House will stop an intiative proposed by the Obama administration in 2016 intended to narrow gender, race, and ethnic group wage gaps.

>In its announcement, the White House issued a statement from Ivanka.

>“Ultimately, while I believe the intention was good and agree that pay transparency is important, the proposed policy would not yield the intended results,” she said.

>“We look forward to continuing to work with EEOC, OMB, Congress and all relevant stakeholders on robust policies aimed at eliminating the gender wage gap.”

>The Obama-era intiative directed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to collect wage and pay data from private companies with 100 or more employees and federal contractors with 50 or more. The idea, in short, was to collect more data in order to better analyze wage gaps based on gender, race, and ethnic groups.

>Neomi Rao, the administrator of the Office and Information and Regulatory Affairs, said the policy is "enormously burdensome," adding: "We don't believe it would actually help us gather information about wage and employment discrimination."

>Ivanka, who has made challenges faced by working women one of her central missions before and during her association with the White House, did not propose an alternative initiative in her statement.

The gender gap has narrowed but still remains

>The gender wage gap has narrowed since the 1980s — in particular, among younger workers — but still remains, according to an analysis from the Pew Research Center.

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As FBI director last year, James Comey began writing drafts of a statement exonerating Hillary Clinton, even before all witnesses in the investigation — including Clinton herself — had been interviewed.

The Senate Judiciary Committee obtained the Comey memos as part of its investigation into his firing by President Trump, which occurred on May 9.

The revelation that Comey had begun drafting memos of his exoneration statement comes from transcripts of interviews given last fall by two FBI officials.

James Rybicki, Comey’s chief of staff, and Trisha Anderson, the principal deputy general counsel of national security and cyberlaw at the FBI, gave the interviews as part of an investigation conducted by the Office of Special Counsel into the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email investigation.

In a July 5, 2016, press conference, Comey said that he would not be recommending charges against Clinton for mishandling classified information despite her use of a private email server as secretary of state.

While the transcripts of those interviews are heavily redacted, they indicate that Comey started working on an announcement clearing Clinton in April or May of last year, before the FBI interviewed 17 witnesses in the case, including Clinton and some of her top aides.

Clinton was interviewed for several hours on July 2, just three days before Comey’s announcement.

In a letter to the FBI, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham also noted that Comey’s draft was prepared even before two Clinton aides, Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, had reached what the two Republicans called a “highly unusual” immunity deal with the Justice Department.
http://dailycaller.com/2017/08/31/comey-drafted-statement-clearing-hillary-before-interviewing-key-witnesses/

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http://theweek.com/speedreads/722163/paul-manafort-reportedly-took-notes-about-donations-meeting-russian-lawyer

>On Thursday, NBC News revealed some alleged details of the notes that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort took during the June 2016 meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer, arranged by Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower. Two people familiar with the evidence claim that Manafort's notes contain the words "donations" and "RNC" (which could stand for either "Republican National Committee" or "Republican National Convention") in "close proximity," NBC News reported.

>The complete context of Manafort's notes is unclear, but there are implications to be made. Manafort's spokesperson Jason Maloni wholeheartedly denied that Manafort's notes suggested any discussion of donations to the Republican Party by the Russians took place, and he also noted that Manafort handed his notes over to the Senate Intelligence Committee. "It is 100 percent false to suggest this meeting included any discussion of donations from Russian sources to either the Trump campaign or the Republican Party," Maloni told Talking Points Memo. "This speculation and conjecture is pointless and wrong."

>While the meaning of Manafort's notes remains in doubt, it was previously reported by Mother Jones that "the head of the American subsidiary of a Russian conglomerate owned by a Russian oligarch with close ties to President Vladimir Putin" made donations to President Trump — and to the Republican National Committee. Becca Stanek

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An Alberta university says it has been defrauded of $11.8-million in a so-called phishing attack, admitting it didn't have safeguards in place as staffers unwittingly paid out millions of dollars online.

"This is an administrative error," David Beharry, spokesman for MacEwan University, said Tuesday.

"We have ensured that there will now be a secondary and tertiary level of approval."

Beharry was asked why safeguards were not in place beforehand.

"That is something we are seriously looking at," he said.

He said the scam occurred when fraudsters created a website that resembled the domain site of one of the university's major vendors.

Using that site, the fraudsters impersonated the vendors, asking the university to transfer accounts payable to a new bank account the fraudsters controlled.

Three staffers at MacEwan made three payments to the bogus account over a nine-day period ending Aug. 19. The university paid out $1.9-million, $22,000, and finally $9.9-million.

The university did not realize what had happened until days later when the vendor called asking to be paid.

https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/news/alberta/albertas-macewan-university-scammed-of-118-million-in-phishing-attack/

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Glenn Beck announced that he laid off a sizable portion of the workforce at his production company and conservative-learning news outlet on Thursday, citing the "structural challenges facing media companies today."

He laid off slightly more than 20 percent of the combined workforce of The Blaze, a right-wing multiplatform news organization, and Mercury Radio Arts, his production company.

Under the heading "disrupt, or be disrupted," Beck noted that the past year has been hard on his business and emphasized the necessity of innovation.

"This year has been one of the hardest years of my life," he wrote. "I’ve learned so much about myself, my friends and coworkers, and basic human nature. I have also learned a lot about my business and what I believe it will take to succeed in tomorrow’s America. The industrial revolution took 100 years to unfold; industry-altering change now occurs in days, not centuries."

Beck did not elaborate on the specific hurdles facing his companies except to say that "the structural challenges facing media companies today are real" and that "no government institution is going to write us a giant check."

The Blaze, which was founded by Beck in 2011, broadcasts on regional cable networks across the United States and offers text- and video-based content online at TheBlaze.com. It has given rise to high-profile right-wing personalities such as Tomi Lahren, a current Fox News contributor who sued Beck and The Blaze for wrongful termination this year.

https://www.poynter.org/news/glenn-beck-makes-big-cuts-blaze-mercury-radio-arts

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>And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/08/31/us/harvey-houston-texas-flood/index.html
>More chemical fires possible as city loses clean water

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According to a recent report by the Daily Caller, Imran Awan, the embattled Democratic House IT aide, still has an active email account on the House computer system. Awan’s email address, [email protected], is linked to Nathan Bennett, who works for Representative André Carson (D-IN).

Bennett currently works as Rep. Carson’s Deputy Chief of Staff. Currently, Carson is a member of the House Intelligence Committee, the House Homeland Security Committees, and is a ranking member of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Emerging Threats.

When questioned about the email address, Bennett stated that he has no control over that account. Bennett went on to add that: “However this happened, it was not with my consent or control…For the record, I do not, nor have I ever, had control of the [email protected] email account or any other account connected with Imran Awan or his family.”

According to one Democratic IT aide, Awan and Carson were very close, and used to play video games together in Carson’s office. The aide added that Awan had been teaching Carson a foreign language.

This comes just weeks after reports emerged indicating that federal authorities had opened an investigation as to whether the Awans stolen sensitive data, which they may have then sold to Russian or Pakistani intelligence. Disobedient Media previously reported that the scope of the scandal may be much wider than has been covered thus far by establishment press, with intelligence potentially having being passed to countries including Israel, Saudi Arabia and China via Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI.

http://archive.is/jTPPI

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13,000 year old skeleton found in north america.

https://www.inverse.com/article/35987-oldest-americans-archeology-pleistocene

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http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-41066685

"Where is Santiago Maldonado?" Social media in Argentina is chiming with the same phrase, loaded with anger and frustration.

The protester, 28, went missing at an indigenous-rights demonstration in Patagonia at the start of August.

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In the aftermath of a right-wing rally Sunday that ended with anarchists chasing attendees from a downtown park, Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin urged UC Berkeley on Monday to cancel conservatives’ plans for a Free Speech Week next month to avoid making the city the center of more violent unrest. “I don’t want Berkeley being used as a punching bag,” said Arreguin, whose city has been the site of several showdowns this year between, on the one hand, the left and its fringe anarchist wing, and on the other, supporters of President Trump who at times have included white nationalists. “I am concerned about these groups using large protests to create mayhem,” Arreguin said. “It’s something we have seen in Oakland and in Berkeley.” The mayor wants UC Berkeley to halt plans by a conservative campus group, the Berkeley Patriot, to host right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos during its scheduled Free Speech Week from Sept. 24-27...
“I’m very concerned about Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter and some of these other right-wing speakers coming to the Berkeley campus, because it’s just a target for black bloc to come out and commit mayhem on the Berkeley campus and have that potentially spill out on the street,” Arreguin said, referring to militants who have also been called anti-fascists or antifa. The anti-Yiannopoulos protesters inflicted $100,000 worth of damage to the school’s student union in February before taking to the streets of Berkeley, where several businesses’ windows were smashed...“I obviously believe in freedom of speech, but there is a line between freedom of speech and then posing a risk to public safety,” the mayor said. “That is where we have to really be very careful — that while protecting people’s free-speech rights, we are not putting our citizens in a potentially dangerous situation and costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars fixing the windows of businesses.”

http://archive.is/kW1vb