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Turkish lobbyist Michael Flynn kept his FBI interview concealed from White House, Trump

January 24, 2018 By administrator

President Donald Trump was unaware that Flynn, then his national security adviser, had spoken with the FBI until two days after the Jan. 24, 2017, interview took place, according to two people familiar with the matter. The first senior official to learn about Flynn’s interview with the FBI was White House counsel Don McGahn, who was told about it by then-acting attorney general Sally Yates.

Two people said Flynn did not include his own personal lawyer, speaking with federal agents alone. “No one knew that any of this was happening,” said another senior White House official. That meeting, a year ago today, would set off an unparalleled sequence of events that has involved the cooperation of many of the president’s top law and intelligence officials — including CIA Director Mike Pompeo and Yates — with the special counsel’s investigation.

Read more on this story at NBCNews.com

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: FBI, Michael Flynn, Trump

FBI drops fresh bombshell on Clinton camp, releases files on Bill Clinton’s pardon of fugitive Marc Rich

November 2, 2016 By administrator

bill-clinton-and-marc-richThe FBI has dealt another blow to the campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, this time by releasing documents concerning her husband, former President Bill Clinton.

Just one week from Election Day, the bureau released 129 pages of documents related to a controversial pardon Bill Clinton granted fugitive trader Marc Rich on his last day in office almost 16 years ago.

The disclosure of the heavily redacted report over the pardon of Rich, an investigation that was closed in 2005 without charges, further angered Democrats who are already outraged by the FBI’s probe into hundreds of thousands of newly uncovered emails linked to the former first lady.

The FBI released the Bill Clinton files on Monday which received little attention, but the agency drew more attention on Tuesday when it posted a statement on Twitter.

“This initial release consists of material from the FBI’s files related to the William J. Clinton Foundation, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization,” reads the statement on the FBI records vault website. “The bulk of these records come from a 2001 FBI investigation into the pardon of Marc Rich (1934-2013), aka Marcell David Reich, by President Clinton in 2001; it was closed in 2005. The material is heavily redacted due to personal privacy protections and grand jury secrecy rules.”

Rich, who died in 2013, was a financier who fled to Switzerland after being indicted on numerous federal charges, including tax evasion, wire fraud and racketeering in 1983.

The former president’s motive for pardoning Rich was questioned because Rich’s ex-wife, Denise Rich, was an affluent Democratic donor who donated $450,000 to Clinton’s presidential library foundation and more than $100,000 to Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign.

The FBI said that material requested three or more times under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is automatically made public online.

“The FBI’s Records Management Division receives thousands of FOIA requests annually which are processed on a first in, first out (FIFO) basis,” it said in a statement.

“Per the standard procedure for FOIA, these materials became available for release and were posted automatically and electronically to the FBI’s public reading room in accordance with the law and established procedures.”

Clinton’s campaign criticized the shock move, with her spokesman Brian Fallon saying that “absent a FOIA litigation deadline, this is odd.”

Referring to Republican nominee Donald Trump, Fallon asked, “Will FBI be posting docs on Trump’s housing discrimination in ’70s?”

On Friday, FBI Director James Comey announced that it was looking into a new trove of hundreds of thousands of emails that may be connected to Hillary Clinton.

In his letter to Congress, Comey said those emails should be reviewed since they could be related to an earlier probe into Clinton’s use of a private server while she served as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.

Comey had concluded in July that there was not enough evidence to bring criminal charges against Clinton.

The move by Comey departed from decisions in recent months to keep quiet two separate investigations, The New York Times reported Tuesday. It was against longstanding policy not to publicize investigations that were likely to affect major elections, the report said.

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: bill clinton, FBI, fugitive, Marc Rich

Obama implicated in Clinton email scandal – New FBI docs

September 24, 2016 By administrator

obama-implicatedPresident Barack Obama used a pseudonym when communicating with then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by email, while her IT company referred to her email deleting as a “cover-up”, new FBI documents reveal.

The heavily-redacted documents, almost 200 pages, include summaries of interviews with senior Clinton aides concerning the private email server, and brings to light details previously unknown.

During the interview with Huma Abedin, who served as deputy chief of staff under Clinton, the FBI reportedly presented her with an email exchange between Clinton and a person she did not recognize. The FBI then revealed the unknown person’s name was believed to be a pseudonym used by Obama. Abedin reacted by saying, “How is this not classified?”

This exchange could expose Obama as having mislead the public on the issue, given his 2015 statement that he found out about Clinton’s use of a private email server “the same time everybody else learned it, through news reports.”

The State Department will not make public the emails Clinton exchanged with Obama, citing “presidential communications privilege,” as reason to withhold the emails under the Freedom of Information Act, Politico reports.

FBI report reveals that Obama used a secret pseudonym to send emails Clinton and these emails ended up on her private server.

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) September 24, 2016

The documents also include interview notes with other senior Clinton aides; Cheryl Mills, Jake Sullivan and former Bill Clinton advisor Justin Cooper, who registered the clintonemail.com domain. Romanian hacker Guccifer and a number of state department officials were also interviewed.

The latest FBI document cache also refers to the engineer who used BleachBit to permanently delete emails from Clinton’s server soon after the House Benghazi Committee issued a subpoena for documents relating to the 2012 attack on the US embassy in Libya. According to the engineer, he did this “of his own accord based on his normal practices as an engineer.”

Documents show employees from Platte River Networks, the IT company who managed Clinton’s emails, referring to a request to wipe emails in 2014 as the “Hilary [sic] cover-up operation”. An employee told the FBI this was a joke.

Clinton aide, Bryan Pagliano, said concerns were raised about whether Clinton’s server created a “federal records retention issue” by state department officials in 2009 or 2010. When he communicated these concerns to Mills, however, she said that Clinton’s  predecessor, Colin Powell, had also used private email.

The reports further reveal Clinton’s alleged ineptitude with technology, with aides claiming she “could not use a computer,” and didn’t know her email password.

Abedin said she had two computers in her State Department office, one for unclassified communications and another for classified communications. She did most of her work on the unclassified computer and would go “days or weeks without logging into the classified system.”

One redacted interviewee described himself as a “Clintonista” and said he has a relationship with the Clintons dating back years. He said he would meet with Clinton four or five times a day and initially traveled with her until she was comfortable with the position of secretary of state.

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Clinton, email, FBI, implicated, Obama, scandal

Turkey Says FBI and CIA Behind Failed Coup, Gulen ‘Only a Pawn’

July 31, 2016 By administrator

Turkish PMThe Erdogan regime continues to play with fire renewing accusations that the United States spearheaded a complex conspiracy to overthrow the Turkish government.

A Turkish prosecutor claims that the CIA and FBI provided training to followers of US-based Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara initially called the “mastermind” of the failed attempt to overthrow the Erdogan regime on July 15 that left hundreds dead and thousands more wounded.

An indictment, prepared by the Edirne Public Prosecutor’s office and submitted to the local Second Heavy Penal Court, seeks the harshest possible punishment for 43 suspected coup plotters. In the indictment, the prosecutors allege that members of “the Fethullah Terrorist Organization” (FETO) were trained by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

“The CIA and FBI provided training in several subjects to the cadre raised in the culture centers belonging to the Gulen movement,” read the indictment. “The operations carried out by prosecutors and security officials during the Dec. 17 process can be taken as a good example of this.” The “Dec. 17 process” refers to a high profile corruption probe that targeted senior government officials in 2013.

“The [failed coup] attempt aimed to weaken the state with all its institutions by getting rid of the government completely,” stated the document. “Those in the Gulen movement who work in the judicial and security institutions and who received the aforementioned training, took on the task and moved into action.”

The prosecutor’s claims were alluded to in part by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who said Friday in response to criticism by US CENTCOM Commander four-star General Joseph Votel, “My people know who is behind this scheme… they know who the superior intelligence behind it is, and with these statements [condemning the post-coup purge] you are revealing yourselves, you are giving yourselves away.” The statement was interpreted as an accusation against US intelligence agencies.

On Saturday, the Turkish President continued the theme of subtle accusations calling US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen “a pawn” backed by a “mastermind” which has also been interpreted as suggesting that the US agencies supported the failed putsch.

US military and intelligence officials have been the target of scorn and accusation from Turkish leaders in the wake of the failed coup starting with the country’s Labor Minister who said on July 16 in an interview with HaberTurk that “the United States is behind the coup.”

These accusations were forcefully denounced by the State Department which called the claims “utterly false and harmful to our bilateral relations.” However, on July 17, Turkey’s Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said the country was ready to go to war with “any” country that backed Fethullah Gulen, viewed as a reference to America’s refusal to extradite the suspected coup leader.

These accusations have grown in recent weeks with Erdogan alleging that CENTCOM commander General Joseph Votel was siding with the coup plotters and with the country’s leading pro-Erdogan Islamist newspaper Yeni Safak printing a picture of American three-star General and commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) John F. Campbell under the headline “The Man Behind the Failed Coup in Turkey.”

The result of the shocking allegations has been an emboldening of anti-American fervor in the country with over 5,000 protesters marching towards the Incirlik Air Base on Thursday chanting “death to the US” and demanding that the United States leave. That incident came on the heels of a massive fire near NATO’s Izmir base with officials suggesting the cause was “anti-American sabotage” as reported by Turkey’s T24 News.

On Saturday, 7000 armed police officers supported by heavy vehicles blocked all access to NATO’s Incirlik Air Base. Turkish newspaper Hurriyet reported that Adana Police received a tip of a brewing second coup attempt, but the country’s European Affairs Minister Omer Celik downplayed the sudden show of force calling it a “general security check” and asserting that “nothing is wrong.”

During the temporary blockade of the Incirlik Air Base, a group of several hundred anti-American protesters assembled near the scene chanting for the base to be shut down as confirmed by video accounts on the scene although some Western outlets have provided conflicting reports that the protesters preceded the blockade and that Turkish police were there to disperse the crowd.

Source: http://sputniknews.com/middleeast/20160731/1043813275/erdogan-turkey-purge-gulen-coup.html

Filed Under: News Tagged With: CIA, coup, FBI, Gulen, Turkey, U.S

Breaking News Apple Doesn’t Have to Help FBI in New York iPhone Case, Judge Says

February 29, 2016 By administrator

New-Breaking-News-gagrule-2A New York judge says the U.S. Justice Department cannot force Apple to provide the FBI with access to locked iPhone data in a routine Brooklyn drug case.

U.S. Magistrate Judge James Orenstein ruled Monday. The decision follows a California magistrate judge’s order requiring Apple to create software to help the U.S. hack the iPhone of a shooter in the Dec. 2 killing of 14 people in San Bernardino, California.

 

Filed Under: News Tagged With: apple, FBI

The FBI points to possible corruption at the Turkish Imam Gulen charter School network,

January 15, 2016 By administrator

9720578366_0ed14b2f53_b-1024x681A Jacobin investigation finds widespread corruption at one of the nation’s largest charter school networks.

by George Joseph

Over the summer, FBI agents stormed nineteen charter schools as part of an ongoing investigation into Concept Charter Schools. They raided the buildings seeking information about companies the prominent Midwestern charter operator had contracted with under the federal E-Rate program.

The federal investigation points to possible corruption at the Gulen charter network, with which Concept is affiliated and which takes its name from the Turkish cleric Fetullah Gulen. And a Jacobin investigation found that malfeasance in the Gulen network, the second largest in the country, is more widespread than previously thought. Federal contracting documents suggest that the conflict-of-interest transactions occurring at Concept are a routine practice at other Gulen-affiliated charter school operators.

The Jacobin probe into Gulen-affiliated operators in Texas, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California found that roughly $4 million in E-Rate contract disbursements and $1.7 million in Department of Education Race to the Top grantee awards were given to what appear to be “related parties.” Awarding contracts to firms headed by related parties would seem to violate the FCC’s requirement that the school’s bidding process be “competitive” as well as “open and fair.”

Unlike most charter schools networks, the Gulen charter network has received significant scrutiny in the US press, primarily because of the international profile of its Islamic cleric leader and xenophobic fears of “education jihad.” Such coverage distracts from what appears to be systemic corruption at the public’s expense, a predictable consequence of the US charter school model. This has nothing to do with Fetullah Gulen’s religious teaching and everything to do with the private management of public education dollars.

Like most big-time charter operators, the Gulen charter network has developed a growth model more reminiscent of a Fortune 500 company than a public school district. As the sociologist Joshua David Hendrick told Jacobin, the Gulen charter school movement links “private Turkish capital with a shared sub-economy that builds upon an initial educational venture and then expands from there.”

Armed with startup capital from Turkish foundations, the charter school network has quickly grown to over 130 schools in twenty-five states while employing the same business strategy: invest in lawmakers to win charter school contracts, import Gulen adherents to staff schools on H-1B teaching visas, and award school contracts to education resource firms led by former employees.

The cycle can then repeat itself as enriched former school employees donate to the plethora of Turkish foundations, securing political influence for individual charter school operators.

A Suspect Bidding Process 

Records indicate that Gulen charter schools nationwide may be regularly violating federal competitive-bidding laws by disbursing contracts and grants to firms owned by other Gulen schools or former Gulen school employees.

In August, the Chicago Sun Times reported that in Chicago alone Concept management may have engaged in nearly a million dollars worth of related-party transactions with E-rate contractor Core Group, Inc. An analysis of Core Group’s E-Rate program disbursement shows their only successful bids have come from Concept charter schools across the Midwest and that these fifty-eight bids amount to over $3.2 million.

More obviously suspect are the contracting deals sometimes crafted between Gulen chains. Apex Educational Services, for example, presents itself as a stand-alone education technology firm, but a 2013 IRS file from a Chandler, Arizona, branch of the Gulen-affiliated Sonoran Science Academy chain lists Apex Educational Services, Inc. as one of its properties.

Hence it is no surprise that nearly all of Apex’s forty-eight E-Rate bids have gone to Gulen-affiliated chains across California, Nevada, and Utah, and all four of Apex’s successful bids have come from Magnolia Science Academies, one of the country’s largest Gulen charter chains. To date, Apex has earned about $114,000 from Magnolia’s E-Rate disbursement.

Ties between other Gulen-affiliated chains and their E-Rate providers may also violate the FCC’s competitive-bidding requirements.

There appears to be an intimate relationship, for example, between Harmony Public Schools, a Gulen-affiliated Texas charter chain, and the telecommunications firm Brighten Technologies, which from 2010 to 2014 earned roughly $670,000 off of twenty-three Harmony’s E-Rate contracts. Set up and staffed by former Harmony computer-science teachers, Brighten Technologies exists almost exclusively for Harmony contracts (94 percent of Brighten Technologies’ E-Rate applications have been for Harmony Public Schools).

In an email to Jacobin, Harmony denied these practices constitute a conflict of interest, claiming that their contracting approach to federal grants is “fair and open.” Nonetheless, despite being unaware of their close relationship, the Universal Service Administrative Company — the independent agency responsible for reviewing E-Rate applications — has rejected thirteen of Harmony’s applications to contract with Brighten Technologies for failing to prove it had a competitive-bidding process.

Regarding their contracting with Brighten Technologies, Harmony officials wrote, “A range of factors, including price, product availability, and demonstrated ability to deliver are evaluated in selecting vendors, and all the criteria for ‘best value’ have to be met, not just low price.”

Such a response is telling; rather than simply explaining why no conflict of interest exists with Brighten, Harmony officials stressed twice to Jacobin that “low price” is not their only contracting criterion, a line they used to justify what appeared to be overly generous contracts to Turkish-owned construction firms three years ago.

Additionally, federal data does not support Harmony’s claim that Brighten Technologies offered any “better value” in lieu of its overcharging. In fact, most of Brighten’s applications were rejected for failing to provide basic planning standards. To date, only twenty-six of Brighten’s ninety-eight applications have been accepted. Had Brighten been competent enough to meet USAC’s basic requirements when applying for Harmony contracts, it could have netted well over $5 million from past applications alone.

But Harmony’s apparent competitive-bidding violations go beyond the E-Rate program. In February 2014, Harmony’s school newspaper announced that the Cosmos Foundation had secured a $29.8 million Race to the Top grant from the Department of Education to purchase Google Chromebooks for over 16,000 students.

Brighten Technologies received a roughly $905,000 Department of Education Race to the Top grant, secured for them by Harmony Public Schools — another potential federal violation of Race to the Top grant rules, which stipulate that recipients must foster “full and open competition” when contracting for goods and services.

Further analysis of the same Race to the Top grant shows that Harmony also awarded $805,000 in contracts to the Gulen-affiliated Texas Gulf Foundation for various consulting and instructional services. But as the New York Times reported in 2011, the foundation, like Brighten Technologies, was started by former Harmony employees and used to have its offices on a Harmony campus.

Harmony officials denied that this contract award violated competitive-bidding guidelines; Brighten Technologies has not returned Jacobin requests for comment.

Building Influence, Building Schools

Gulen-affiliated chains have grown most rapidly in the Midwest, Texas, Arizona, and California, where, as in Chicago, stories abound of Gulen-affiliated charter officials appealing to state authorities to override the contracting decisions of local school districts.

In Illinois and Texas, Gulen-linked Turkish cultural foundations have invited lawmakers on numerous trips to Turkey, and consistently fund the campaigns of those in a position to expand their fast-growing network. When the Chicago Public Schools declined Concept’s offer to build two more schools, for example, Concept appealed to the Illinois State Charter School Commission, an agency formed by Illinois Democratic Chairman Michael Madigan, among others. The commission overturned the school board’s decision and approved Concept’s expansion.

Madigan had taken four trips to Turkey that were hosted by the Niagara Foundation, whose honorary president is none other than Fetullah Gulen. From 2010-2012, the Niagara foundation paid for at least thirty-two sojourns for Illinois lawmakers.

In New Orleans, two members of the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education traveled to Turkey at the invitation of the Gulen-affiliated Pelican Foundation. The trips prompted local rumors of a quid pro quo when one of these members was the sole dissenting vote against revoking Pelican’s right to operate Abramson Science and Technology Charter School, despite shocking stories of alleged mishandling of sexual-abuse cases.

Similarly, the Houston-based Turquoise Council of Americans and Eurasians, which a Stratfor email leaked by Wikileaks described as “definitely a nonprofit related to the larger Fethullah Gulen movement,” has been called into question for its lavish trips for Texas lawmakers. Prominent members of the nonprofit have close ties to Harmony Public Schools, Texas’s largest charter chain, and its 2012 IRS 990 form alone lists nearly $1.9 million in travel expenses.

The founder of Harmony Public Schools, Yetkin Yildirim, is also the Austin branch representative of the Turquoise Council of Americans and Eurasians, a position from which he regularly lobbies local politicians.

And their influence may extend beyond their regional bases. On February 9, 2010, Kemal Oksuz, the president of the Turquoise Council, and Yildirim, the founder of Harmony Public Schools, both attended a White House “Briefing for Turkish American Leaders.” In a statement to Jacobin, Harmony Public Schools claimed to have no affiliation with the Turquoise Council of Americans and Eurasians and denied any connection to the Gulen movement, despite several investigative reports that have linked the two.

Additionally, Buzzfeed reported this summer on the tens of thousands of dollars that Gulen adherents were pouring into Texas races, particularly to that of US Representative Sheila Jackson Lee. School officials denied these donations were part of a centrally coordinated influence-building effort. Nonetheless, in July, Harmony CFO Erdal Caglar admitted that Jackson Lee was helping the chain expand to a location in DC.

Education or Immigration?

Despite the financial success of many Gulen schools, several sites have driven themselves to bankruptcy, spending enormous amounts of public funding on immigration fees for fellow Gulenists. As the Atlantic recently reported, Utah’s Beehive Academy, a Gulen school, spent “about 50 cents to pay the immigration costs of foreign teachers for every dollar that it spent on textbooks.” This eventually caused the school to be temporarily shuttered.

In California, Magnolia Science Academies, a Gulen-affiliated chain, recently made headlines for allegedly misusing $3 million in public funds to cover the immigration costs of six non-employees. The Los Angeles Unified School District ordered the closure of two Magnolia schools, citing financial mismanagement, but a July court order reversed the decision.

For Gulen, it goes beyond financial impropriety. Gulen chains appear to use H-1B slots for teaching positions to facilitate immigration and further business expansion, rather than to improve teaching quality. According to Canadian consular officials, teachers being brought from Turkey to teach in Gulen schools on H-1B visas are often not credentialed. “While the H-1B petitions were for teaching positions at charter schools in the United States,” wrote one Canadian official, “most applicants had no prior teaching experience and the schools were listed as related to Fethullah Gulen.”

Records indicate that from 2001–10, Cosmos Foundation, the charter operator of Texas’s Harmony Public Schools, filed 1,157 H-1B visa applications and brought in 731 employees — higher than all other providers of secondary education combined.

In a statement to Jacobin, Harmony officials explained “the national shortage of math and science teachers” had pushed them to hire a “small percentage of international teachers” whose qualifications were “based primarily on academic professional credentials.”

The story of Brighten Technologies, the telecommunications provider closely linked to Harmony, illustrates how Gulen schools use H-1B visas not only to guarantee American residency to fellow Gulen adherents, but also to create in-house companies to profit off of federal and state grants.

Take Joseph Duzgun, the founder of Brighten Technologies, who came to the states sometime around 2002. According to his LinkedIn page, Duzgun studied mathematics at Ondokuz Mayis University in Samsun, Turkey, though his profile does not include any information regarding teacher training.

Nevertheless, Duzgun served a short teaching stint at Harmony Schools from as early as 2004 to at least 2006. Two years later, he started Brighten Technology Solutions (later called Brighten Technologies), which has benefitted from numerous publicly financed contracts from his former employer, Harmony Public Schools.

Likewise, Turkish immigrant Gökhan Sancar was a computer teacher and technology instructor at Harmony Science Academy Lubbock from 2008–9 and at the Harmony School of Ingenuity from 2009–10. He joined Brighten Technology Solutions in 2010. He currently lists his position as Brighten’s VP of Sales. Neither Duzgun nor Sancar responded to Jacobin requests for comment.

Brighten Technologies exemplifies the Gulenist corporate expansion strategy. School officials bring over fellow Gulenists on H-1B teaching visas, keep them in Harmony schools for a few years, then organize them to found companies — which are guaranteed a profit from providing services to Gulen schools, often at inflated costs.

A Charter to Steal

Harmony’s E-Rate and Race to the Top programs federal grants have netted Brighten Technologies over $1.57 million in dubiously legal related-party transactions. Such transactions appear to violate many federal grant application rules, and also occur at the state level, where such nepotistic practices are often even more difficult to regulate.

In Texas, where Harmony has quickly grown to become the largest charter school chain, nine regulators oversee the operations of 671 charter school campuses — a number that hasn’t changed since 2011, according to Texas Education Agency spokesperson DeEtta Culbertson. This regulatory force is so inadequate that in 2011, even Greg Richmond, president of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, admitted, “They don’t have the capacity at the state level to do the job.”

From 2009–11, Harmony awarded thirty-five contracts worth a total of $82 million to Turkish construction firms with close links to school officials. Despite offering substantially lower bids for the same jobs, competitor firms were shocked to find out they’d lost.

Investigation into Harmony Public Schools’ contracting practices from 2009-2013 indicates that tens of millions in public dollars have continued to flow to closely associated Turkish firms. Since 2009, TDM Construction has brought home over $45 million, Solidarity Construction over $45 million, and Atlas Construction over $3 million, totaling well over $95 million from Harmony contracts alone.

To finance their massive construction projects, Harmony Public Schools has also issued hundreds of millions in bonds, which will rely heavily on public financing to pay off. A 2012 New York Times report, for example, found that Harmony has been granted $200 million in bonds since 2007, making it Texas’ largest charter school bond issuer by far. Last July, the city of Houston alone issued Harmony a $101,555,000 bond to build two more schools, renovate four existing ones, and refinance some of Harmony’s existing debt.

Harmony’s plan to finance their overall debts is projected to cost nearly half a billion dollars over the course of twenty-nine years, a plan which could come back to haunt taxpayers, given that in the last five years the Texas Education Agency has shut down eleven Harmony schools. And unfortunately for the people of Texas, the state’s permanent school fund will guarantee the principal and interest of these bonds, thus exposing Texas higher education funding to considerable risk.

While these sweetheart deals, guaranteed windfalls, and potential financial collapses are troubling, they are endemic to the charter school movement nationwide. The widespread corruption at Gulen charter schools is not due to the religion of Gulen charter school executives, but rather because doling out millions in public funding to private education operators with little to no oversight protects and encourages such fraudulent practices.

Indeed, despite the FBI raids this summer, Chicago’s Board of Education authorized Concept to expand to two more sites just one month later.

The move came as a shock to many Chicagoans, still recovering from the Chicago Board of Education’s historic move to shut down fifty schools last year, mostly in working-class black and Latino neighborhoods. As Chicago NBC reporter Mark Anderson lamented, “a federal raid on a company doesn’t seem to mean much anymore, especially if that firm is a politically connected charter school operator ready to take millions in taxpayer dollars to stay in business.”

The contracting practices of Gulen-affiliated charter schools appear to be not just nepotistic, but illegal. Such corruption, however, must not be ascribed to the ideologies of the Gulen movement, but rather to the structure of the charter school sector, which it has successfully gamed.

In addition, the Gulen expansion strategy should be viewed not as an outlier within the charter school movement, but as its most successful example. Gulen foundations invest in politicians to win charter contracts, and use the resulting public funding to import Gulen adherents on H-1B teaching visas. Though these employees do not necessarily have teaching credentials, they are often qualified to form education resource firms, which consistently earn generous contracts from Gulen schools across the country. The cycle then expands as employees of these firms give back to the very foundations that initiated the process.

It’s a process that enriches private actors and hurts students. But as long as US lawmakers push for private control over public education, the corruption and public plunder that Gulen schools exemplify will only continue.

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: charter, FBI, Gulen, school

Vanity fair: An Inconvenient Patriot become victim of Turkish nationals illicit activity in FBI

June 13, 2015 By administrator

By David Rose,
sibel-admondLove of country led Sibel Edmonds to become a translator for the F.B.I. following 9/11. But everything changed when she accused a colleague of covering up alleged illicit activity involving Turkish nationals. Fired after sounding the alarm, she’s now preparing a Supreme Court appeal—and threatening some very powerful people.

In Washington, D.C., and its suburbs, December 2, 2001, was fine but cool, the start of the slide into winter after a spell of unseasonable warmth. At 10 o’clock that morning, Sibel and Matthew Edmonds were still in their pajamas, sipping coffee in the kitchen of their waterfront town house in Alexandria, Virginia, and looking forward to a well-deserved lazy Sunday.

Since mid-September, nine days after the 9/11 attacks, Sibel had been exploiting her fluency in Turkish, Farsi, and Azerbaijani as a translator at the F.B.I. It was arduous, demanding work, and Edmonds—who had two bachelor’s degrees, was about to begin studying for a master’s, and had plans for a doctorate—could have been considered overqualified. But as a naturalized Turkish-American, she saw the job as her patriotic duty.

The Edmondses’ thoughts were turning to brunch when Matthew answered the telephone. The caller was a woman he barely knew—Melek Can Dickerson, who worked with Sibel at the F.B.I. “I’m in the area with my husband and I’d love you to meet him,” Dickerson said. “Is it O.K. if we come by?” Taken by surprise, Sibel and Matthew hurried to shower and dress. Their guests arrived 30 minutes later. Matthew, a big man with a fuzz of gray beard, who at 60 was nearly twice the age of his petite, vivacious wife, showed them into the kitchen. They sat at a round, faux-marble table while Sibel brewed tea.

Melek’s husband, Douglas, a U.S. Air Force major who had spent several years as a military attaché in the Turkish capital of Ankara, did most of the talking, Matthew recalls. “He was pretty outspoken, pretty outgoing—about meeting his wife in Turkey, and about his job. He was in weapons procurement.” Like Matthew, he was older than his wife, who had been born about a year before Sibel.

According to Sibel, Douglas asked if she and Matthew were involved with the local Turkish community, and whether they were members of two of its organized groups—the American-Turkish Council (A.T.C.) and the Assembly of Turkish American Associations (A.T.A.A.). “He said the A.T.C. was a good organization to belong to,” Matthew says. “It could help to ensure that we could retire early and live well, which was just what he and his wife planned to do. I said I was aware of the organization, but I thought you had to be in a relevant business in order to join.

“Then he pointed at Sibel and said, ‘All you have to do is tell them who you work for and what you do and you will get in very quickly.’” Matthew could see that his wife was far from comfortable: “She tried to change the conversation to the weather and suchlike.” But the Dickersons, says Matthew, steered it back to what they called their “network of high-level friends.” Some, they said, worked at the Turkish Embassy in Washington. “They said they even went shopping weekly for [one of them] at a Mediterranean market,” Matthew says. “They used to take him special Turkish bread.”

Before long, the Dickersons left. At the time, Matthew says, he found it “a strange conversation for the first time you meet a couple. Why would someone I’d never met say such things?”

Only Sibel knew just how strange. A large part of her work at the F.B.I. involved listening to the wiretapped conversations of people who were targets of counter-intelligence investigations. As she would later tell investigators from the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General (O.I.G.) and the U.S. Congress, some of those targets were Turkish officials the Dickersons had described as high-level friends. In Sibel’s view, the Dickersons had asked the Edmondses to befriend F.B.I. suspects. (In August 2002, Melek Can Dickerson called Sibel’s allegations “preposterous, ludicrous and slanderous.”)

Sibel also recalled hearing wiretaps indicating that Turkish Embassy targets frequently spoke to staff members at the A.T.C., one of the organizations the Dickersons allegedly wanted her and her husband to join. Sibel later told the O.I.G. she assumed that the A.T.C.’s board—which is chaired by Brent Scowcroft, President George H. W. Bush’s national-security adviser—knew nothing of the use to which it was being put. But the wiretaps suggested to her that the Washington office of the A.T.C. was being used as a front for criminal activity.

Sibel and Matthew stood at the window of their oak-paneled hallway and watched the Dickersons leave. Sibel’s Sunday had been ruined.

Read more : http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2005/09/edmonds200509

Sibel Edmonds’ State Secrets Privilege Gallery
Sibel Edmonds Fights to Testify
Sibel Edmonds’ Deposition
Who’s Afraid of Sibel Edmonds?
Sibel Edmonds Speaks, But No One Is Listening

 

 

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: FBI, illicit activity, Turkey

Search warrants reveal details of FBI raid of Concept Schools

July 24, 2014 By administrator

By Dan Mihalopoulos
The recent FBI raid at the Des Plaines headquarters of Concept Schools focused on many of the politically connected charter-school operator’s top administrators and companies with close ties to Concept, according to EOCONCEPT-CST-072214-01_47790793federal documents obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.

Authorities last month said FBI agents carried out raids at 19 Concept locations in Illinois, Indiana and Ohio as part of an “ongoing white-collar crime matter” but declined to provide further details of their investigation.

Copies of the search warrants that FBI agents served in Des Plaines and a subpoena seeking records show investigators went hunting for a wide range of documents pertaining to Concept president Sedat Duman, founder Taner Ertekin and other current and former executives of the fast-growing charter network.

 

The investigators also sought documents about companies that were hired by Concept to perform work under the federal “E-Rate” program, which pays for schools to expand telecommunications and Internet access.

Concept is linked to the Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania, and has developed strong relationships with many local politicians, including state House Speaker Michael Madigan (D-Chicago).

Four of Concept’s 30 publicly financed schools are in Illinois, including the 600-student Chicago Math and Science Academy in Rogers Park and two campuses that opened a year ago in the Austin and McKinley Park neighborhoods. Chicago Public Schools officials approved another two Concept schools on the South Side for the 2014-15 school year.

For one of the two newest Concept sites, in Chatham, more than $528,000 in public funding was earmarked to pay rent for the coming school year to an arm of Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church. The church’s pastor, the Rev. Charles Jenkins, gave the invocation at Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s 2011 swearing-in and served on Emanuel’s transition team.

Work on the Chatham project stopped recently, although Ald. Howard Brookins – who initially supported the new school in his 21st Ward – said Jenkins told him federal authorities were probing an outside vendor of the charter network and “not investigating Concept itself.”

The federal documents obtained by the Sun-Times, however, reveal that the FBI is taking a close look at the operations of Concept.

Federal law enforcement authorities in Cleveland, who are leading the probe, sent a grand-jury subpoena to Concept on May 30. The subpoena gave the charter chain’s administrators until June 17 to provide a long list of records.

Concept did not receive the full time to turn over the records. Instead, shortly after 2 p.m. on June 4, a federal judge in Chicago approved three warrants to raid the charter network’s headquarters at 2250 E. Devon in the O’Hare Lake Office Complex.

Later that day, after normal business hours, agents arrived at the office park in Des Plaines where Concept has three suites.

The warrant gave agents the right to take any documents relating to Concept’s involvement in the E-Rate program as well as “all bank records,” “all general ledgers,” “all calendars,” “all documents related to employee travel” and “all telephone records, telephone lists and contact lists.”

At 9:29 p.m. on June 4, a Concept executive gave the key to a storage unit on Mannheim Road in Des Plaines to FBI agent Brian Murphy. From the storage unit, the agent seized “48 boxes of vendor records, business records and documents,” records show.

According to court records, investigators also were looking to take every record related to 13 Concept employees and companies. They included Duman, the current Concept president; chief information officer Huseyin Ulker, and Ertekin, who founded the charter chain in Ohio in the late 1990s. He now works in the United Arab Emirates, according to his online LinkedIn profile.

The warrant goes on to specify that the federal agents wanted “all personnel documents for Huseyin Ulker and Sedat Duman, including but not limited to documents reflecting their compensation packages.”

Among contractors mentioned in the warrant were:

  • Advanced Solutions for Education of Schaumburg and company founder Ozgur Balsoy, who used to be administrator of a Concept-run school in Columbus, Ohio. The company was the consultant to Concept on applications for E-Rate funding, according to the federal program’s records.
  • Arlington Heights-based Core Group Inc. and its president Ertugrul Gurbuz. Core is described in federal records as performing much of the work for Concept under the E-Rate program.
  • Signature Maker Inc. of Hoffman Estates and president Ergun Koyuncu.
  • Cambridge Technologies of Chesterland, Ohio and owner Stephen Draviam.

Balsoy and Koyuncu declined to comment Monday, Gurbuz did not return calls, and Draviam said he had been contacted late last year by FBI agents.

He said he provided records regarding E-Rate work his company performed for Concept more than five years ago, but the agents did not indicate the target of their investigation. The federal government’s guidelines for E-Rate state that schools must choose companies to do work under the program through a “competitive bidding process” that is “open and fair.”

Vicki Anderson, a special agent in the FBI’s office in Cleveland, declined to comment on the warrants.

At the time of the June 4 raids, Anderson had said all documents related to the investigation were sealed from public view. The Sun-Times obtained the warrants and other documents from the raid in Des Plaines through a state Freedom of Information Act request to Concept.

Concept officials have said they were cooperating with the investigation and would not make any further comment.

Source: suntimes.com

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: charter-school, FBI

FBI ‘raids 19 schools associated with Turkish Imam Gülen’

June 14, 2014 By administrator

By Doug Livingston
Beacon Journal education writer

U.S. federal agents have raided 19 charter schools, including three in Ohio, where an FBI criminal investigation in Cleveland has led to search warrants in Indiana and Illinois n_67788_1over the past week, Ohio-based Beacon Journal has reported.

Concept Schools, a charter school operator headquartered near Chicago, manages 19 charter schools in Ohio, second only to Texas with 44 such schools. There are nearly 140 charter schools, spread across 26 states, reportedly associated with Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen, an Islamic cleric exiled from Turkey, living in Pennsylvania.

Concept Schools, which emphasizes math and science, has been investigated previously by the U.S. Department of Labor for its use of foreign workers. Ohio audits found that public money for the schools had been used improperly for visas, according to the report.

The Turkish government has recently started an international campaign against the global network of schools affiliated with Gülen, the ruling Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) ally-turned-nemesis.

Source: www.ohio.com

Filed Under: News Tagged With: FBI, Gulen Movement, Schools

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