Former president Barack Obama lied when he claimed he knew nothing about his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, using a private, unsecured email server to conduct top-secret government business.

That's what the Obama-appointed Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, indicated in his 500-page report, where he found that numerous Obama holdovers in the upper ranks of the FBI were unprofessional and biased in their investigation of Hillary's email server.

Obama told CBS News in 2015 that he found out about Hillary's private email server at "same time everybody else learned it - through news reports." But the IG report shows that Obama had emailed Hillary on her private email server numerous times.

Moreover, the FBI scrubbed Obama's name from a report detailing its investigation of Hillary's server to shield Obama's identity. Otherwise, they would have to admit that not only did Obama know that Hillary had used a private, unsecured email server to conduct classified government business, but he participated in the reckless scheme.

James Comey once described his position in the Clinton investigation as being the victim of a "500-year flood." The point of the analogy was that he was unwittingly carried away by events rather than directly causing much of the damage to the FBI. His "500-year flood" just collided with the 500-page report of the Justice Department inspector general (IG) Michael Horowitz. The IG sinks Comey's narrative with a finding that he "deviated" from Justice Department rules and acted in open insubordination.

Rather than portraying Comey as carried away by his biblical flood, the report finds that he was the destructive force behind the controversy. The import of the report can be summed up in Comeyesque terms as the distinction between flotsam and jetsam. Comey portrayed the broken rules as mere flotsam, or debris that floats away after a shipwreck. The IG report suggests that this was really a case of jetsam, or rules intentionally tossed over the side by Comey to lighten his load. Comey's jetsam included rules protecting the integrity and professionalism of his agency, as represented by his public comments on the Clinton investigation.

It appears that the Pentagon's attempt to keep the record of civilian casualties in Raqqa swept under the rug has failed amid growing criticism from international human rights watchdogs, who insist that the US-led coalition's actions in Syria potentially amounted to a war crime.

While the Pentagon claims that it conducted a precision air campaign in Raqqa, the facts on the ground prove otherwise.

Amnesty International's report, released on June 5, exposed that the US-coalition's four-month military operation to oust Daesh (ISIS/ISIL) from Raqqa left hundreds of civilians dead, injured many more and left most of the city in ruins.

However, when responding to the human rights watchdog's criticism, the US Department of Defense claimed that "no one will ever know" how many civilians were killed.

"As far as how do we know how many civilians were killed, I am just being honest, no one will ever know. Anyone who claims they will know is lying, and there's no possible way," US Army Col. Thomas Veale, a spokesman for the US-led anti-Daesh coalition, told a Pentagon briefing via video link.

Europe, whether you think of it as the EU or as a collection of sovereign states, faces the most massive demographic challenge in its long history. On the one hand, the population of native Europeans (white, post-Christian) is declining, most obviously in Germany, Italy and Spain. On the other, millions of would-be immigrants from Africa and the Middle East are knocking at the door, determined to get in.

They may die in the attempt. The water around their sunken boats may turn the Mediterranean red with blood. But they will not stop coming.

Torn between their instinct for self-preservation and their need for cheap labour, the peoples of Europe have formed into two camps. The first, small, but socially liberal, insists that all those who wish to come here should be welcomed and then woven into the rotting fabric of our society. The second, much larger and increasingly angry, is rising up, demanding that the shutters be brought down and the drawbridges raised.

Governments, as ever, are resolutely two-faced on the issue. They don't want to be seen as aloof or uncaring, or racist. But they can also see what is going on and what their voters think about it. Having no solution to offer, they prefer to believe that other countries, preferably with borders far removed from their own, should bear the brunt of the burden.

For decades, the American people have been repeatedly told by their government and corporate-run media that acts of war ordered by their president have been largely motivated by the need to counter acts of aggression or oppression by "evil dictators." We were told we had to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator. We had to bomb Libya because Muammar Gaddafi was an evil dictator, bent on unleashing a "bloodbath" on his own people. Today, of course, we are told that we should support insurgents in Syria because Bashar al-Assad is an evil dictator, and we must repeatedly rattle our sabers at North Korea's Kim Jong-un and Russia's Vladimir Putin because they, too, are evil dictators.

This is part of the larger, usually unquestioned mainstream corporate media narrative that the US leads the "Western democracies" in a global struggle to combat terrorism and totalitarianism and promote democracy.

I set out to answer a simple question: Is it true? Does the US government actually oppose dictatorships and champion democracy around the world, as we are repeatedly told?

In an interview with broadcaster ORF 2, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz says that migrants should be helped locally and that every country has the right to refuse migrants.

"In my opinion every country should have the possibility to decide for themselves how many and what kind of people they want to accept," Kurz says.

Yesterday, Kurz announced that Austria wants to form an "axis of the willing" with Germany and Italy, to combat illegal migration.

And they won't be solved by whining about criticism.

What do you do with an FBI agent, sworn to uphold the law, who flagrantly violates the law in a rogue investigation aimed at making a name for himself by bringing down some high-profile targets?

Why . . . you promote him, of course.

At least that is the way the Justice Department answered that question in the case of David Chaves, an FBI agent who serially and lawlessly leaked grand-jury information, wiretap evidence, and other sensitive investigative intelligence to the media in his quest to make an insider-trading case against some celebrities. And when finally called on it, the Justice Department circled the wagons: proceeding with its tainted prosecution, referring the now-retired Chaves for an internal investigation that has gone exactly nowhere after nearly two years, and using legal maneuvers to block the courts and the public from scrutinizing the scope of the misconduct.

The ousted head of Germany's refugee agency was central to an unfolding asylum application fraud scandal, but firing her won't fix core "structural problems" in the country's migration system, a geopolitical analyst has told RT.

After serving just 18 months as head of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), Jutta Cordt was fired this week by Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, after an internal review discovered that the agency's branch in the city of Bremen had violated legal and internal regulations for the approval of asylum applications. The decision was quietly announced on Friday, and Rainer Rothfuss, a geopolitical analyst and professor at Tübingen University's Institute of Geography in Baden-Württemberg, feels the sacking was long overdue.

"It is quite late now that Horst Seehofer tries to find the responsible or the culpable person at the top of the BAMF organization," Rothfuss said. "He should have broken up the coalition already in 2015 to protest against Angela Merkel for breaking the German laws and letting migrants flow into our country."

In April, it was revealed that a former BAMF official at the Bremen office was under investigation on suspicion of taking bribes from at least 1,200 asylum seekers, starting in 2013. Other officials at the agency were also probed for possibly having taken part in the scheme. They include an interpreter and three lawyers. After reviewing some 1,371 asylum cases from 2013 to 2017, an internal audit allegedly found the Bremen branch responsible for violating the law in 142 instances, Der Spiegel reported. In 54 percent of the Bremen decisions there had been no admissible request. In about 40 percent of cases, the identity of the asylum seekers was not clarified, the report said.

But HIS emails!

There's a section of the Department of Justice Inspector General report which says that several FBI officials, including James Comey, used a personal email accounts to do government business.


The Washington Post reports that Michael Horowitz found five instances where Comey used a personal account to draft or forward emails on official matters. This development comes amid other portions of the report which state that even though he wasn't affected by "political bias," he broke with standard protocol when he oversaw the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

Someone might have some 'splaining to do.

There are mounting signals that Donald Trump's much-delayed Middle East peace plan - billed as the "deal of the century" - is about to be unveiled.

Even though Trump's officials have given away nothing publicly, the plan's contours are already evident, according to analysts.

They note that Israel has already started implementing the deal - entrenching "apartheid" rule over Palestinians - while Washington has spent the past six months dragging its heels on publishing the document.

"Netanyahu has simply got on with deepening his hold on the West Bank and East Jerusalem - and he knows the Americans aren't going to stand in his way," said Michel Warschawski, an Israeli analyst and head of the Alternative Information Centre in Jerusalem.

"He will be given free rein to do what he likes, whether they publish the plan or, in the end, it never sees the light of day," he told Middle East Eye.

Eran Etzion, a former Israeli foreign ministry official, agreed: "Israel has a much freer hand than it did in the past. It feels confident enough to continue its existing policies, knowing Trump won't stand in the way."