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Hillary Clinton told advisor to strip classified markings off document and e-mail it unsecured

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Hillary Clinton look bored about the deaths of 4 Americans who asked for her help
Hillary Clinton: the affirmative action candidate for President of the United States

We have a lot of material showing that Hillary Clinton lacks the moral character and professional judgment to be President, but this latest revelation tops them all, in my opinion.

This is from the non-partisan The Hill.

In an email marked June 17, 2011, that was released by the State Department on Friday, Clinton informs aide Jake Sullivan that she has not yet received a set of talking points.

“They say they’ve had issues sending secure fax,” Sullivan says. “They’re working on it.”“If they can’t, turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure,” Clinton responds.

[…]The Clinton campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Ia.) chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called the email “disturbing.”

“The State Department’s latest Freedom of Information Act release contains a disturbing email that appears to show the former Secretary of State instructing a subordinate to remove the headings from a classified document and send it to her in an unsecure manner,” he said in a statement on Friday.

“It raises a host of serious questions and underscores the importance of the various inquiries into the transmittal of classified information through her non-government email server,” he added.

[…]The Democratic primary front-runner is under investigation by the FBI for using a private email server during her tenure at State.

Republicans have accused Clinton of compromising classified data and putting national security at risk by using a non-governmental device to transmit and receive her emails.

The State Department released a new batch of 3,007 emails on Friday, in which it said 66 were classified. The total number of classified messages received from Clinton’s server is now up to 1,340.

Reactions to this discovery from prominent conservatives show the impact of what she’s done to her presidential ambitions:

Guy Benson adds at Town Hall:

As Hillary herself has personally attested — is that none of the sensitive material that she wrongfully transmitted through her unsecure server was “marked classified” at the time. Again, this is meaningless, especially when it comes to highly secret material that she was obligated to recognize and protect as soon as it was produced. But the email chain referenced above includes an instruction from Hillary Clinton to a State Department aide (who now works on her campaign) to strip classified information — it remains redacted to this day — of its classified markings [“identifying heading”] and “send nonsecure.”

Which leads us to Ed Morrissey at Hot Air:

Has the State Department released a smoking gun in the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal? In a thread from June 2011, Hillary exchanges e-mails with Jake Sullivan, then her deputy chief of staff and now her campaign foreign-policy adviser, in which she impatiently waits for a set of talking points. When Sullivan tells her that the source is having trouble with the secure fax, Hillary then orders Sullivan to have the data stripped of its markings and sent through a non-secure channel.

That should be game, set, and match, yes?

“If they can’t, turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure.” That’s an order to violate the laws handling classified material. There is no other way to read that demand.

Game, set, match, indeed. Every single one of Hillary’s excuses has now evaporated, and this email is a clear instance of giving an order in violation of national security clearance rules.

Hillary Clinton, I don’t need to hasten to add, belongs in jail.

She really does have contempt for rules and regulations that are devised by experts for the good of her country. She does not understand things like encryption and information security. She does not respect the need for national security. She is not qualified to be President. Her only reason for wanting to be President is personal ambition, not the good of her country.

I doubt that she could even survive on her own in this world, without her army of government handlers and assistants driving her around, buying her groceries and showing her how to operate the hardware and software that any teenager can operate. She just hasn’t had the experience needed to be President – she doesn’t know how to do the job. Running around the world trying to push abortion and gay rights on other countries is not good experience for the job.

She needs to retire with her charming husband Bill and talk about the good old days when she was protecting him from the women he assaulted and abused. If she refuses to take responsibility for the terrible harm that she’s done to her country, then maybe she needs to spend the rest of her life in a federal prison.

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Hillary Clinton’s State Department ignored 600+ requests for more security in Benghazi

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Hillary Clinton look bored about the deaths of 4 Americans who asked for her help
Hillary Clinton bored by the deaths of 4 Americans who repeatedly asked for help

Moderate Republican Hugh Hewitt played the “smoking gun” clips on his radio show on Thursday night. The best questions came from Congressman Mike Pompeo and Congressman Jim Jordan.

CNS News has the full transcript of the Pompeo questions.

Mike Pompeo transcript:

POMPEO: “Do you know how many security requests there were in the 1st quarter of 2012?”

CLINTON: “For everyone or for Benghazi?”

POMPEO: “I’m sorry, yes ma’am. Related to Benghazi and Libya. Do you know how many there were?”

CLINTON: “No.”

POMPEO: “Ma’am, there were just over 100 plus. In the 2nd quarter, do you know how many there were?”

CLINTON: “No, I do not.”

POMPEO: “Ma’am there were 172ish – might have been 171 or 173. … How many were there in July and August and then in that week and few days before the attacks? Do you know?”

CLINTON: “There were a number of them. I know that.”

POMPEO: “Yes, ma’am – 83 by our count. That’s over 600 requests. You’ve testified this morning that you’ve had none of those reach your desk. Is that correct also?”

CLINTON: “That’s correct.”

POMPEO: “Madam Secretary, Mr. Blumenthal wrote you 150 emails. It appears from the materials that we’ve read that all of those reached your desk.

“Can you tell us why security requests from your professionals, the men that you just testified … are incredibly professional, incredibly capable people, trained in the art of keeping us all safe, none of those made it to you, but a man who was a friend of yours, who’d never been to Libya, didn’t know much about it – at least that’s his testimony – didn’t know much about it, every one of those reports that he sent on to you that had to do with situations on the ground in Libya, those made it to your desk?

“You asked for more of them. You read them. You corresponded with him, and yet the folks that worked for you didn’t have the same courtesy.”

Full recording (10 minutes):

Here are the details of Jim Jordan’s questioning from the Washington Free Beacon:

On the night of the attack, Jordan said, Clinton had a phone call with the president of Libya where she told him Ansar al-Sharia was claiming responsibility.

The next day, Jordan said, Clinton told the Egyptian prime minister something “significant,” where she acknowledged they knew the attack in Libya had nothing to do with any video.

“We know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film,” Jordan read out from Clinton’s email. “It was a planned attack. Not a protest. Let me read that one more time. We know, not we think, not it might be, we know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with a film. It was a planned attack. Not a protest. State Department experts knew the truth. You knew the truth, but that’s not what the American people got. Again, the American people want to know why. Why didn’t you tell the American people exactly what you told the Egyptian prime minister?”

[…]Jordan showed with other emails that her top staffers were already discussing the political ramifications of the attack and how to respond. He said Clinton picked the option of a “video narrative” “with no evidence” because she wanted the Libya situation to be a key success story for the Obama administration.

“You did it because Libya was supposed to be this great success story for the Obama White House and the Clinton State Department, and a key campaign theme that year was GM’s alive, bin Laden’s dead, al-Qaeda’s on the run,” Jordan said. “Now you have a terrorist attack, and it’s a terrorist attack in Libya and it’s just 56 days before an election. You can live with the protest about a video. That won’t hurt you, but a terrorist attack will. So you can’t be square with the American people.”

Full recording (10 minutes):

Now, you will hear a lot in the mainstream media that Hillary Clinton took no damage and did a great job in the hearings. But that is a lie. And I’m going to cite Chuck Todd to explain what really happened in the hearings:

NBC’s Chuck Todd said former secretary of state Hillary Clinton “has no good answers” to offer Thursday on the Libya policy she was part of in the Obama administration when she testifies before the Benghazi Select Committee.

[…]“There’s two tough things that she has to deal with,” Todd said. “One is for 15 years, the State Department was told it had to improve embassy security. 15 years. This is four secretaries of state, and she along with three other secretaries of state didn’t do that. And second, it’s about Libya and the decision to go into Libya. That’s where she has no good answers.”

So two points. First, the State Department refused to respond to 600+ requests for additional security leading up to the attack. And even more important, Hillary Clinton told multiple people that the attack was a terrorist attack, days before she came out and said that the attack was a spontaneous demonstration caused by “an Internet video”. She told this to the family of the victims, when she knew that the truth was different. Why is this woman leading the Democrat primary? Do Democrat voters not pay attention to national security and foreign policy?

UPDATE: Stephen Hayes has a Weekly Standard podcast episode to comment on the hearings.

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Why did Hillary Clinton blame the Benghazi terrorist attack on an “Internet video”?

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What difference does national security make?
What difference does national security make?

Who should I link to to prepare us to understand and discuss the showdown between the Benghazi Select Committee and Hillary Clinton? How about Stephen Hayes from the Weekly Standard – you can’t do better than that.

He says:

Critics of Clinton on Benghazi are most angry about the exchange she had with surviving family members at the solemn ceremony held to receive the bodies of the victims. Pat Smith, the mother of information specialist Sean Smith, who was killed in the attacks, says Clinton told her that the Obama administration would bring to justice the man who made the anti-Islam video that the administration initially blamed for the attacks. “She blamed the video just like all the rest of them did and she also told me she was going to get back to me.”

Charles Woods, father of Tyrone Woods, a NAVY Seal killed in the attacks, says Clinton told him the same thing. “She said we’re going to have the person responsible for that video arrested. I knew she was lying. Her body language, the look in her eyes…I could tell she wasn’t telling the truth.”

But contemporaneous documents and testimony from US officials who were in Libya during the attacks make no mention of the video that would become the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s public narrative about the attacks. Indeed, in messages as the attacks unfolded and in the hours and days that followed, show security and intelligence officials immediately placing blame on al Qaeda and affiliated fighters and pushing back on suggestions from Washington that the video had played a role. Senior State Department officials, including Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, were copied on emails indicating Ansar al Sharia had claimed responsibility for the attacks.

Michael Morell, deputy CIA director at the time of the attacks, and a loyal water-carrier for the administration on Benghazi, testified that the video was simply not part of the intelligence picture during and after the attacks. “There was no mention of the video defaming the Prophet Muhammad as a motivation for the attacks in Benghazi. In fact, there was no mention of the video at all.”

Why did Clinton promise to pursue the filmmaker after the US government understood that the attacks were not a result of an out-of-control protest over the video?

Recall that Hillary Clinton blamed the Benghazi attack on “an Internet video”:

However, we now know that the top Democrats knew from the beginning that this was a terrorist attack:

Judicial Watch announced today that on February 11, 2015, it uncovered documents from the U.S. Department of State revealing that top aides for then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, including her then-chief of staff Cheryl Mills, knew from the outset that the Benghazi mission compound was under attack by armed assailants tied to a terrorist group.  The documents were produced as a result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the State Department (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State ((No. 1:14-cv-01511).  The documents make no reference to a spontaneous demonstration or Internet video, except in an official statement issued by Hillary Clinton.

The Benghazi Select Committee was finally able to get 1300 e-mails sent by Ambassador Stevens (after two years of asking for them). Many of those e-mails requested additional security right before the attack, and they were ignored:

Two months before the fatal 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, then-Ambassador Chris Stevens requested 13 security personnel to help him safely travel around Libya… but he was turned down.

In the July 9, 2012 cable, Stevens reported that, “Overall security conditions continue to be unpredictable, with large numbers of armed groups and individuals not under control of the central government, and frequent clashes in Tripoli and other major population centers.” The cable said 13 security personnel would be the “minimum” needed for “transportation security and incident response capability.”

But a congressional source said Patrick Kennedy, a deputy to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, turned down the request. 

The cable sent under Stevens’ electronic signature shows that he was advocating for additional security and warning that the set-up did not meet State Department standards, as conditions deteriorated in the run-up to the attack that killed Stevens and three other Americans.

This hearing is about finding out why four people were left to die, even after repeatedly requesting additional security from the State Department. The same State Department that Hillary Clinton was in charge of. I hope we can find out why Hillary had so much time to read e-mails from Sidney Blumenthal, and apparently no time to read e-mails from Ambassador Stevens.

UPDATE: The Weekly Standard has posted a new podcast episode with Stephen Hayes on this topic.

UPDATE: Trey Gowdy’s opening statement:

Why did we need this investigation? Because previous “investigations” failed to find Ambassador Stevens’ e-mails, failed to find Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, and failed to interview people on the ground who had direct knowledge of the Benghazi security situation.

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