Obama Blindsided By Huge Investigation Into Who He Gave $48 MILLION To Hours Before Exiting White House
source: https://goo.gl/itLn2Q
Corruption until his very last day in office!
According to two sources and State Department grant records, in the final days of the Barack Hussein Obama administration, a $48 million State Department grant to a for-profit company for IED and other bomb removal services in Syria was rushed for approval. This grant has received scrutiny just a few weeks into Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s tenure.
This type of bombing and ordnance removal is considered extremely dangerous work but critically important for the safety of returning communities which were displaced by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Since these terrorist organizations tend to leave IED booby traps intended to maim or k**l returning families or government workers.
Late in the summer of 2016, a joint effort by foreign non-governmental organizations, NGOs, from Western Europe, local Iraqi groups, and Janus Global Operations, worked under State Department funding to clear bombs in Iraq. Janus, a for-profit company which is coined to be the largest munitions management and demining company in the world. And it present time the only American company which specializes in this type of work. In 2016 alone they cleared thousands of explosives planted by ISIS in Ramadi.
Then comes Optima which is a British company that calls itself the “leaders in explosive threat mitigation.” In mid-2016 Optima was surveying an area in Fallujah littered with IEDs and planning a major clearing operation.
Now here is where things get interesting. Despite the expertise and experience of these two companies and others operating in the region, in the final days of December 2016, as the Obama regime was coming to a end, state department officials in the Office of Near East Asia, Office of Assistance Coordination facilitated funding for a non-competitive grant to Tetra Tech.
Tetra Tech is an engineering company which specializes in construction management and has vastly limited experience in munitions and ordnance clearance than Janus, Optima, or NGOs such as HALO Trust, FSD/Crosstech, Mechem, and others. And this is the first time Tetra Tech has worked with The State Department’s PMWRA office. Needless to say all this has raised a few eyebrows.
Could this be another one of the Obama Regime’s kickbacks? We will just have to wait and see.
Here is more on this via The Free Beacon:
“According to the website USAspending.gov, the State Department’s PMWRA Office provided the grant money for “Syrian Conventional Weapons Destruction” with the funds doled out in tranches for work performed over the course of two years and two months.
The first award of $8 million was provided Dec. 29, 2016, with another $8 million coming March 29, 2017. The State Department doled out another $30 million May 5, 2017, and provided the final $2.4 million Sept. 21, 2017.
While the publicly available grant award information is currently listed for $48 million, it was eventually worth more than $150 million as Germany and other countries directed funds to Tetra Tech for Syria’s IED clean-up efforts, sources said.
A Defense One report in August 2016 noted that the State Department had just secured $86 million from 26 countries for demining efforts over the next three years.
The awarding of a “no-bid” grant, instead of allowing several companies to compete for a government contract through the paper-intensive and time-consuming government bidding process, raised immediate questions about the project’s selection process in the government contracting community, the sources said.
Patrick Kernan, a government contracting attorney who previously served as the chief of contract fiscal law for the Multinational Force in Iraq as a U.S. Army Judge Advocate General, said a U.S. government agency providing a grant to a large, for-profit company is unusual and raises legal red flags.
Whether it broke any laws or State Department procedures and rules, he said, would depend on internal paperwork and whether the officials involved precisely followed all the agency’s grant rules.
“[It] sounds like a way to circumvent the strict sole-source contracting rules by pushing money into a grant process,” which provides far less oversight than the regular contracts, he said in an email. “It sounds like a pretty broad problem that needs some legislation to fix.