Photograph by Win McNamee/Getty Images

U.S. Ambassador to the Syrian Arab Republic, Robert Ford, testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Capitol Hill on April 11, 2013 in Washington, DC.

Ambassador Robert Ford, the Obama administration’s point person on efforts to organize the Syrian opposition, will step down in July after a grueling two years of work on the issue.

Ford, who was the ambassador in Damascus until violence forced him to relocate to Washington, D.C., is exhausted, a State Department aid said. The career diplomat is known as one of State’s top experts on the Arab world and speaks five languages.

Ford was the first ambassador to Syria that the U.S. had sent in five years when President Barack Obama nominated him in 2010.

The soft-spoken Ford, a Denver native, was confirmed in 2011. His departure isn’t surprising in a department where assignments change every few years.

Ford is now in Turkey, trying to help the fractious opposition diversify its membership. (Read the latest on the Syrian civil war here.)

It’s not clear who will replace Ford. The current ambassador to Egypt, Anne Patterson, is expected to be nominated as the department’s next assistant secretary of near Eastern affairs. Patterson previously held a critical diplomatic post representing the U.S. in Pakistan from July 2007 to October 2010.

Original post is U.S. Point Man on Syria to Step Down by Political Capital.

Photograph by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Gina McCarthy smiles during her nomination by President Barack Obama to run the Environmental Protection Agency on March 4, 2013 in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC.

The Americans for Limited Government, which declares itself to be “perpetually ahead of the issue curve,” announced today that Gina McCarthy’s nomination as head of the Environmental Protection Agency will die in the Senate.

The reason: EPA’s finding that the State Department analysis of the environmental risks of the Keystone XL pipeline was insufficient. That “obstruction,” as ALG said in a news release today, “puts a nail” in the coffin of McCarthy’s nomination.

“The EPA’s attempt to further delay this project on specious grounds is evidence of just how far this rogue agency will go, and how little they care about what Congress thinks,” Nathan Mehrens, ALG’s general counsel, said in a statement. “It is time for the Senate to send a clear message to the EPA that they need to get out of the way.”

The ALG was referring to a non-binding Senate vote last month endorsing the pipeline.

The group supports limited government and “core American liberties.” This is how ALG describes itself on its website, getliberty.org: “Never shying away from the big issues, ALG is perpetually ahead of the issue curve taking on issues like the $100 billion International Monetary Fund line of credit while others are still trying to spell IMF.”

The EPA filed written comments yesterday in response to a draft State Department analysis of the Keystone project, which would carry a heavy form of oil from Alberta to refineries in Texas.

The agency urged State to conduct a more complete study of how the Keystone XL pipeline would affect development of Alberta’s oil sands, and therefore its impact on climate change. It also said the State Department needed to  “acknowledge” that cleaning up a spill from the pipeline might be more difficult to than if Keystone was carrying conventional crude. Environmental groups like the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council said the EPA’s analysis shows why the administration should reject the pipeline.

ALG said it shows the Senate it needs to reject McCarthy, who is now the EPA’s assistant administrator for air pollution.

“Failure to reject McCarthy may effectively abdicate the last opportunity for Congress to rein in this power grabbing Agency that is sucking the life out of the U.S. economy.”

Original post is McCarthy’s EPA Confirmation Targeted by Political Capital.

Photograph by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton poses for a photo after making her farewell address on Feb. 1, 2013 in Washington.

Hillary Clinton, former first lady, former senator from New York and now former secretary of state, bade farewell at Foggy Bottom today with a sentimental talk in the lobby.

She’s gonna miss the place — and just may be calling in for updates at the Operations Center — as Bloomberg’s correspondents at State note.

Of course, should she run for president in 2016, she could get her own Situation Room.

#SecClinton jokes she’ll be calling @statedept Operations Ctr “just to talk,” says she’ll support their work from outside

— Indira Lakshmanan (@Indira_L) February 1, 2013

“I will miss you. I will probably call Ops just to talk” #SecClinton to #StateDept

— Nicole Gaouette (@nicolegaouette) February 1, 2013

Original post is Clinton’s Gonna Miss The Place — May Just Call ‘Ops’ to Talk by Political Capital.

Photograph by Echorouk Elyaoumi/AP Photo

Men look at the wreckage of a vehicle near Ain Amenas, Algeria. Algerian bomb squads scouring a gas plant where Islamist militants took dozens of foreign workers hostage found “numerous” new bodies on Jan. 20, 2013 as they searched for explosive traps left behind by the attackers, a security official said, a day after a bloody raid ended the four-day siege of the remote desert refinery.

The Abdallah Azzam Brigades, a militant organization based in Lebanon and the Arabian Peninsula, is a bad, bad group of terrorists.

So bad, in fact, that the U.S. has officially declared them a terrorist organization – for the second time in eight months.

The State Department today issued a press release stating that the brigade had been named a Foreign Terrorist Organization and a Specially Designated Global Terrorist group. It was the same media note, word-for-word, that the department issued first on May 24. The State Department didn’t respond to queries about why the designation was released again today.

The Abdallah Azzam Brigades claimed responsibility for a July 2010 attack on a Japanese-owned oil tanker in the Strait of  Hormuz. They’re also blamed for launching rocket attacks on Israelis from inside Lebanon. The State Department’s release said the group in 2010 had “expressed interest in kidnapping U.S. and British tourists in the Arabian Peninsula.”

The designations prohibit providing material support or resources to, or engaging in transactions with the group. It also freezes any property of the group in the U.S. or under the control of U.S. persons.

The administration must be paying heightened attention to terrorist groups operating in the Middle East and the Arabian Peninsula, especially after recent attacks in North Africa at a gas field in Algeria and at U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya.

Still, it’s unclear why the U.S. re-issued an old release.

Maybe the Abdallah Azzam Brigades didn’t get the first memo.

Original post is Terrorists Tagged Twice by State — In Case They Didn’t Get the Memo by Political Capital.

Photograph by Ouahab Hebbat/AP Photo

Algerian men look at national newspapers headlining the terrorist attack and kidnapping in Amenas at a news stand in Algiers, on Jan. 17, 2013.

In the aftermath of a bruising partisan battle over what the Obama administration knew about an extremist attack in Benghazi, Libya, and when it knew it, officials are rationing their words for a new crisis in Algeria.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney condemned “in the strongest terms a terrorist attack” on a remote gas field in Algeria, where the Algerian government said militants took dozens of foreign hostages yesterday, reportedly in retaliation for a French military operation against armed extremists in neighboring Mali.

Beyond saying that “the best information we have at this time” is that Americans are among those taken hostage, Carney wouldn’t elaborate on what more the U.S. government knows, or even when the White House learned about an Algerian government operation today to rescue the hostages. The State Department and Defense Department were equally reticent in their briefings today.

Carney admitted to journalists that he didn’t want to say something that could come back to bite him or the administration. “This is a fluid situation. I wouldn’t want to say something that turned out not to be true, so I’ll leave it at that,” Carney said.

He joked with one reporter that she knew hat he was talking about, prompting knowing laughter in the press room.

No one in Washington has forgotten the bitter partisan aftermath of the Benghazi tragedy. Although President Barack Obama referred to the attack as “an act of terror” twice in the two days after the attack, other administration officials - including Carney – said the U.S. had no evidence it was a pre-planned attack.

It was talking points based on preliminary intelligence – which turned out to be incorrect — that sank the chances of Susan Rice, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, a trusted advisor of President Barack Obama, to be nominated for secretary of state. At the behest of the White House, Rice appeared on Sunday television talk shows several days after the Benghazi killings, and described the attack as appearing to have started with protests over an offensive YouTube video.

Benghazi wasn’t the first time the administration briefed the media on initial reports that turned out to be incorrect. In May 2011, Carney was forced to revise the administration’s account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

John Brennan, Obama’s counter-terrorism adviser and his choice to be the next head of the CIA, initially told reporters that the al-Qaeda chief was armed, and that his wife had rushed at a Navy SEAL and tried to shield him from bullets. When setting the record straight, Carney said at the time: “What is true” is that “we provided a great deal of information with great haste.”

In refraining from saying too much about an evolving crisis this time, the administration seems to be taking the lessons of the messaging missteps after Abbottabad and Benghazi to heart.
 

Original post is Obama Administration Rations Words — Algerian Terrorism Post-Benghazi by Political Capital.

Photograph by Department of State

Secretary Clinton's gift.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had a gift awaiting her at work today.

At a meeting of the chief diplomat’s assistant secretaries, her first day back following a blood clot in her head suffered after a fall and a concussion while suffering from a flu that had sidelined her, Clinton had some unwrapping to do.

What she found inside should keep her on the playing field, though she soon will leave the State Department and government service.

President Barack Obama has chosen Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts to succeed the soon-retiring secretary of state.

And now the former first lady has a new number of her own.

Original post is Clinton’s Crash Helmet: State Gift by Political Capital.

Photograph by Department of State

Secretary Clinton chairs her weekly meeting of assistants.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is back at work.

Clinton, who suffered a blood clot in her head after suffering a reported concussion after a fall after suffering from a flu that cancelled her latest globe-trotting mission and postponed any Capitol Hill appearance before Congress on the question of the fatal raid at the diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, returned to Foggy Bottom this morning.

And what a crowd awaited the secretary, former senator from New York and former first lady, as this photo courtesy of the State Department shows. The entire leadership team was there to greet her at a weekly meeting of the assistant secretaries of state.

The angle of the state photo is curious, however.

Call it the view of the team, from the secretary’s perspective.

Original post is Clinton Back at Work — Facing It by Political Capital.

Photograph by Lucas Jackson -Pool/Getty Images

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton poses for a photograph prior to the tenth anniversary ceremonies of the September 11, 2001 at the World Trade Center.

Most people who meet Hillary Clinton on the street want a picture.

Snapping it is the hard part.

“Whenever I walk around New York, as I did yesterday at the conclusion of a week in New York for the UN General Assembly, I am greeted by people from all over the world — most of whom want to take a picture,” the secretary of state said today at a “Strategic Dialog on Travel and Tourism” at the State Department in Washington.

“And I don’t mind — if they just can figure out how to use their cameras,” she said to laughter.

“That is my big problem,” said Clinton, also a former first lady, senator from New York and candidate for her party’s presidential nomination in 2008. “I am more than happy to stop for 30 seconds to take a picture, but what happens invariably is, people get so nervous, they can’t figure out how to make the camera work, and then I’ve got people trying to help them to get their camera to work. ”

Terry Atlas contributed. 

Original post is Hillary Clinton Smiles: That Button! by Political Capital.

A lawsuit filed by a former Gallup Inc. employee and joined by the Justice Department says the venerable polling organization, billing itself as “the most trusted name in polling,” has been dishonest with the U.S. government.

The suit in U.S. District Court says Gallup overcharged the government for polling and promised a job to an official supervising a contract, Bloomberg’s Tom Schoenberg reports.

Gallup allegedly collected more than $10 million in overpayments by inflating the length of time it would take to complete contracts with the State Department, Mint and other agencies, according to the suit.

In addition, the company allegedly offered a job to an official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency in charge of its contract there, while also seeking additional money, according to the Justice Department.

The whistle-blower behind the suit is Michael Lindley, who was director of client services at Gallup from February 2008 until July 2009. He says he was fired by the company after complaining to a supervisor that Gallup was violating the False Claims Act, according to Lindley’s complaint.

A company spokeswoman, Alyssa Brown, said no one was available to immediately comment on the suit.

.

Original post is Gallup’s Margin of Error: $10 Million, According to Whistle-blower’s Suit by Political Capital.

Photograph by Yuri Gripas /UPI/Landov

JPMorgan Chase and Company CEO Jamie Dimon before a Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on June 13, 2012.

Here’s one review of JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon’s appearance on Capitol Hill.

From a former fellow banker in the Obama administration:

Dimon“did very well” in his appearance on Capitol Hill this week, says an administration official who competed against Dimon on Wall Street.

“He walked that balance between being contrite and taking responsibility and also pushing back where he needed to,” said Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Nides, who was Morgan Stanley’s chief operating officer until he joined the Obama administration in 2010.

In a Bloomberg Television interview, Nides said Dimon deserves credit for taking responsibility for more than $2 billion in losses incurred by a London-based unit that invested in derivatives.

“I think he’s a very, very strong executive, he’s run a very good institution,” said Nides. “He’s a hard competitor in my old life. He certainly is a tough competitor.”

In the interview, Nides also spoke about efforts the State Department has been making to help business. That includes economic talks at the G-20 meeting next week in Mexico, of course, but also efforts to lure tourists. The waiting time for a U.S. visa from Brazil has been reduced from 140 days to just four, he said.

Where do those Brazilians go?

“Florida,” he said. “I guess Disneyland is a very important place.”

That’s Walt Disney World outside of Orlando. Disneyland is California.

Original post is Dimon Walked Capitol Hill `Balance’ by Political Capital.