Democratic Ballot Fraud in Indiana Punished

Indiana Democrat official sentenced to prison for '08 ballot fraud in Obama-Clinton primary is a Report by Eric Shawn of FoxNews.com


As Hillary Clinton prepares for a possible presidential run in 2016, it appears that she could have knocked then-candidate Barack Obama off the 2008 primary ballot in Indiana.

If anyone, including her campaign, had challenged the names and signatures on the presidential petitions that put Obama on the ballot, election fraud would have been detected during the race.

But at the time, no one did.

On Monday, there was some closure to the case, though, as the four defendants who were convicted or pleaded guilty in the state's presidential petition fraud scandal were sentenced. Only one received prison time for the illegal scheme that touched the race for the White House.

"If there is a victim here, it is probably the Democratic Party," said St. Joseph Superior Court Judge John Marnocha. "The defendants who were saying, 'I was just following orders,' or 'I was just doing my duty,' that's no excuse. Through history a lot of evil has been done by those saying they were just following orders."

The plot successfully faked names and signatures on both the Obama and Clinton presidential petitions that were used to place the candidates on the ballot. So many names were forged -- an estimated 200 or more -- that prosecutor Stanley Levco said that had the fraud been caught during the primary, "the worst that would have happened, is maybe Barack Obama wouldn't have been on the ballot for the

"I think that Obama would still have been elected president, no matter what," he said.

In court, former longtime St. Joseph County Democratic Chairman Butch Morgan, Jr. was sentenced to one year behind bars, and is expected to serve half that, as well as Community Corrections and probation. Former St. Joseph County Board of Elections worker and Democratic volunteer Dustin Blythe received a sentence of one year in Community Corrections and probation, which means no jail time.

In April, a jury convicted Morgan and Blythe on numerous felony conspiracy counts to commit petition fraud and felony forgery counts.

Former St. Joseph County Board of Voter Registration Democratic board member Pam Brunette and Board of Voter Registration worker Beverly Shelton previously pleaded guilty and testified for prosecutors against Morgan and Blythe. They both received two years of probation.

"When you do something like this, we are going to find out and you're going to be held accountable," declared Levco. He called the sentences "appropriate."

Others disagreed.

"We would like to have seen more jail time for Morgan ... but it was more than we were expecting," said St. Joseph County Republican Party Executive Director Jake Teshka. He thinks the three other defendants "got off easy."

The election fraud was first uncovered by Yale University junior Ryan Nees, who wrote about the scheme for the independent political newsletter Howey Politics Indiana and the South Bend Tribune.

Nees has told Fox News that the fraud was clearly evident, "because page after page of signatures are all in the same handwriting."

He also noted that no one raised any red flags about the forgeries, and that the petitions sailed through the Board of Elections without any problems, "because election workers in charge of verifying their validity were the same people faking the signatures."

"The most amazing part about this voter fraud case involving the highest office in the United States is the fact that such a few number of people, because of laziness, arrogance or both did not do their job and thus could have affected the outcome of the election," noted St. Joseph County Republican Party Charwoman Dr. Deborah Fleming.

Morgan was accused of being the scheme's mastermind who ordered the petition fraud. Blythe, then a Board of Elections employee, was accused of forging multiple pages of the Obama petitions.

Under state law, presidential candidates need to qualify for the primary ballots with 500 signatures from each of the state's nine congressional districts. Indiana election officials say that in St. Joseph County, which is the 2nd Congressional district, the Obama campaign qualified with 534 signatures; Clinton's camp had 704.

Prosecutors said that in President Obama's case, nine of the petition pages were apparently forged. Each petition contains up to 10 names, making a possible total of 90 faked names, which could have brought the Obama total below the legal limit that was required for him to qualify for the ballot.

Prosecutors said 13 Clinton petitions were apparently forged, meaning up to 130 possibly fake signatures. Even if those names had been challenged, Clinton would still have been left with enough signatures to meet the 500-person threshold comfortably.

The scheme was hatched in January of 2008, four months before the primary, according to affidavits from investigators. Former Board of Registration worker and Democratic Party volunteer Lucas Burkett told them he forged signatures and was part of the forgery plan at first, but then became uneasy about what was going on and quit.

Burkett told investigators that "there were meetings at which several people explicitly agreed to forge these petitions," and that it was his job to "forge petitions for candidate Barack Obama." He told authorities that Shelton "was assigned to forge petitions for candidate Hillary Clinton" and Blythe "was assigned to forge petitions for candidate John Edwards." When Edwards dropped out of the race at the end of January 2008 and Burkett refused to continue the forgeries, Burkett said Morgan ordered Blythe to take over his job and forge the Obama petitions.

Numerous voters told Fox News that they never signed them.

"That's not my signature," Charity Rorie, a mother of four, told Fox News when showed the Obama petition with her name and signature on it. She was stunned, saying that it "absolutely" was a fake, as well as the name and signature of her husband, Jeff.

"It's scary, it's shocking. It definitely is illegal," she told us.

Robert Hunter, Jr. told Fox News that his name was faked, too.

"I did not sign for Barack Obama," he said, as he looked at the petition listing his name and signature.

Even a former Democratic governor of Indiana, Joe Kernan, told Fox News that his name was forged.

Clinton narrowly won the Indiana 2008 primary, and Obama barely won the state during the general election.

Democratic officials insist that the petition procedures involved in placing candidates on the ballot have since been cleaned up.

"The St. Joseph County Democratic Party has taken many steps to ensure that an incident of this sort never occurs again," insisted Indiana state Sen. John Broden, the St. Joseph County Democratic Party chairman. He notes that no Democratic elected officials or political candidates were implicated in the wrongdoing.

In a statement to Fox News, Broden explained that officials have taken a variety of steps to prevent a repeat of the 2008 election fraud.

During the recent 2012 presidential election, he said that those steps included examining and cross checking "every single signature ... with the voter's actual signature on file," as well as the Board of Elections working "in a bipartisan fashion to review the signatures submitted."

Broden said that since the new safeguards were put in place, "there has been no allegation of any impropriety concerning the 2012 ballot petitions."

When the Government Lies

Liz Sidoti of the Associated Press wrote this excellent article with the by-line: "When lying is acceptable, public loses"

WASHINGTON (AP) — A member of Congress asks the director of national intelligence if the National Security Agency collects data on millions of Americans. "No, sir," James Clapper responds. Pressed, he adds a caveat: "Not wittingly."

Then, NSA programs that do precisely that are disclosed.

It turns out that President Barack Obama's intelligence chief lied. Or as he put it last week: "I responded in what I thought was the most truthful or least most untruthful manner, by saying, 'No,' because the program was classified."

The White House stands by him. Press secretary Jay Carney says Obama "certainly believes that Director Clapper has been straight and direct in the answers that he's given." Congress, always adept at performing verbal gymnastics, seems generally unmiffed about Clapper's lack of candor. If there have been repercussions, the public doesn't know about them.

Welcome to the intelligence community, a shadowy network of secrets and lies reserved, apparently, not only for this country's enemies but also for its own citizens.

Sometimes it feels as if the government operates in a parallel universe where lying has no consequences and everyone but the people it represents is complicit in deception. Looking at episodes like this, it's unsurprising that people have lost faith in their elected leaders and the institution of government. This all reinforces what polls show people think: Washington plays by its own rules.

Since when is it acceptable for government — elected leaders or those they appoint — to be directly untruthful to Americans? Do people even care about the deception? Or is this kind of behavior expected these days? After all, most politicians parse words, tell half-truths and omit facts. Some lie outright. It's called spin.

And yet this feels different.

The government quite legitimately keeps loads of secrets from its people for security reasons, with gag orders in effect over top-secret information that adversaries could use against us. But does that authority also give the government permission to lie to its people in the name of their own safety without repercussions? Should Congress simply be accepting those falsehoods?

It wasn't always this way.

Congress was apoplectic when former aides to President Richard Nixon perjured themselves in the Watergate cover-up and when President Bill Clinton was less than truthful during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But in those cases, the issues divided over partisan lines, and classified information relating to national security wasn't involved.

In this instance, most Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill support the underlying NSA programs even though the public is divided over them. And lawmakers aren't quick to hold Clapper accountable because, when it comes to telling the truth to Americans, their hands are hardly clean.

The public, meanwhile, has responded to Clapper's falsehood with a collective shrug. Are we just resigned to this?

Consider the results of 2012 surveys.

One from the Public Affairs Council found that 57 percent of Americans felt that public officials in Washington had below-average honesty and ethical standards. Another from the Pew Research Center found 54 percent of Americans felt the federal government in Washington was mostly corrupt, while 31 percent rated it mostly honest.

Trust in government has dropped dramatically since the 1950s, when a majority of the country placed faith in it most of the time. But by April 2013, an Associated Press-GfK poll had found just 21 percent feeling that way. And people have even less faith in Congress; a new Gallup poll found just 10 percent of Americans say they have confidence in the House and Senate — the lowest level for any institution on record.

In this case, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, long had tried to raise concerns over the scope and breadth of post-9/11 intelligence gathering.

They were privy to the secret techniques but were barred by law from disclosing any classified information. So they had to be subtle.

Discussion on Capitol Hill about top-secret programs usually takes place in a secure room so opponents of the United States won't learn of the details.

Nevertheless, in March — before the programs the senator knew existed had been disclosed to the world — Wyden put Clapper on the spot. The senator asked about the classified intelligence operations, which Clapper was prohibited from talking openly about, in a public committee hearing.

"Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" Wyden asked.

"No, sir," Clapper answered.

"It does not?" asked Wyden.

"Not wittingly," Clapper said, offering a more nuanced response. "There are cases where they could, inadvertently perhaps, collect — but not wittingly."

Three months later, a former NSA contractor leaked information on top-secret surveillance programs that do, in fact, file away phone records on millions of Americans. Wittingly.

That, said Udall, "is the type of surveillance I have long said would shock the public if they knew about it."

Within days, Wyden — who says he gave Clapper a heads up a day earlier that he would be asking the question about classified information at an open hearing — accused Clapper of misleading the Senate committee in public and later in private when the intelligence director declined to change his answer from the firm "no" to the question.

"The American people have the right to expect straight answers from the intelligence leadership to the questions asked by their representatives," Wyden said.

Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., called for Clapper to resign and suggested perjury, saying he "lied under oath to Congress and the American people" and that "Congress can't make informed decisions on intelligence issues when the head of the intelligence community willfully makes false statements."

In interviews, Clapper tried to explain.

To National Journal, he said: "What I said was, the NSA does not voyeuristically pore through U.S. citizens' e-mail. I stand by that." But Clapper didn't tell the committee during the hearing that he was referring specifically to email, though he did indicate his reservations about being questioned in public on confidential matters.

Clapper also told NBC News that "I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner." He added that his response technically wasn't false because of semantics over the word "collection." But he also allowed that his response may have been "too cute by half."

Whatever else it does, the episode illuminates a conflict in our system — one that we dance around whenever the subject of secrets comes up.

The Obama administration says it wants the American people to allow the NSA to do what it must to protect the nation. The president himself has assured Americans that Congress has been in the loop, making sure the NSA isn't going too far. But it's hard to see how a real check on that power is possible if Congress is unable or unwilling to provide actual oversight, much less take action when a key official involved in the program isn't straight with lawmakers.

In this case, it nudges accountability further into the shadows — and gives the American public even less of a stake in the security of the open society that we say we hold so dear.

Obama's Political pick for Deputy CIA Director

Why Obama would chose a woman with no CIA experience for No. 2 CIA job can only be answered by his need to place political allies and those who share his ideology in these important positions. Avril Haines will be the first woman to be second in command at the CIA, but critics point not to her gender but her lack of CIA experience. Her choice screams loud about how Obama views his political survival over national security.

An article by Jennifer Skalka Tulumello of the Christian Science Monitor

Plucking from a collection of high-powered female lawyers serving the White House, President Obama has nominated Avril Haines as the next deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Ms. Haines is the first woman to hold the job. She replaces Michael Morell, who announced his retirement after more than three decades in the CIA to spend time with family. She’s an unexpected pick in that she hasn’t any background with the agency. In fact, Haines was slated just a couple months ago to move to the State Department as its legal adviser.

How unusual is it for a lawyer – and one without spook experience – to fill such a powerful agency job?

One former senior CIA official tells the Monitor that her nomination has prompted surprise among his former colleagues, not due to Haines’s gender, of course, but because she is a relative unknown in the community. He says the law is “not a typical track” for the deputy director job and that she’ll likely “face some skepticism among the ranks until she can prove that she has learned the intricacies of the organization and doesn’t automatically default to an overly legalistic, risk averse, view of everything.”

“She has the disadvantage of following Michael J. Morell who is much admired across the board,” the official adds. “Thirty-three years of experience being replaced by none. She faces quite an uphill climb.”

CIA Director John Brennan provided his full support for Haines, however, suggesting “she knows more about covert action than anyone in the US government outside of the CIA.”

"She has participated in virtually every Deputies and Principals Committee meeting over the past two years and chairs the Lawyers' Group that reviews the agency's most sensitive programs," he added, in a statement reported by UPI.

But the former senior CIA official says Haines’s experience doesn’t add up to the job. “Sitting in National Security Committee meetings on covert action is nice, but being deputy CIA director involves much, much more that covert action, and she has no known experience in those things,” he says.

Forget about the women angle, or the lawyer piece, or, for that matter, Haines’s lack of agency experience, says Philip Mudd, former deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center. With Mr. Brennan and Haines in the top two jobs, the CIA has a direct pipeline to the White House.

“I think this underscores the relevance of the CIA in the post-9/11 era,” Mudd says. “You want people with firepower there – and that’s political firepower. Because the White House needs that agency in ways they’ve never needed it before.”

Mudd says the CIA is a flat organization – it’s not military-oriented and it’s not hierarchical.

“The key question people on the inside are going to ask is, ‘Is she going to listen?’ ” Mudd says. “It’s a proud organization. They’re going to sniff her. ‘Is she going to ask us what we think?’ ”

At the White House, Haines served as deputy assistant to the president and deputy counsel to the president for national security affairs. According to her White House bio, the Georgetown University Law Center graduate formerly worked for the State Department as assistant legal adviser for treaty affairs and in the office of the legal adviser. And she served as deputy chief counsel for the majority on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. She holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Chicago.

Some are suggesting the Haines appointment is less about elevating her than ousting Mr. Morell for his role in extracting from official administration talking points references to the CIA’s warnings that terrorists could attack the Benghazi diplomatic compound.

The Benghazi controversy continues to dog the Obama administration politically.

Morell issued a statement pushing back on that speculation.

“Whenever someone involved in the rough and tumble of Washington decides to move on, there is speculation in various quarters about the ‘real reason,’” he said. “But when I say that it is time for my family, nothing could be more real than that.”

Morell’s last day is Aug. 9. Haines is not subject to Senate confirmation in the new post.