Tag Archives: Benghazi

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E-mails released by Clinton: there are “months, and months, and months” missing

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The Daily Signal reports:

During an appearance on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” today, Rep. Trey Gowdy said there are “huge gaps” in the emails he has received from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton related to the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012.

“There are gaps of months and months and months,” Gowdy told CBS News’ Bob Schieffer.

The South Carolina Republican, who is leading the House’s Benghazi investigation, said he has nearly 800 pages of Clinton’s emails, but none from her 2011 trip to Libya.

Gowdy mentioned the “iconic” photo of then-Secretary Clinton during that trip, looking at her “handheld device.”

“We have no emails from that day. In fact, we have no emails from that trip. So, it strains credibility to believe that if you’re on your way to Libya to discuss Libyan policy that there’s not a single document that’s been turned over to Congress. So there are huge gaps,” said Gowdy.

Gowdy said Clinton doesn’t get to determine what does or does not constitute “public record.”

“I continue to naively believe that people have a right to expect their government to tell them the truth in the aftermath of a tragedy,” said Gowdy.

Gowdy said in the absence of “all” of Clinton’s emails, he wouldn’t be making a “selective release” of the ones he does have.

The important thing to realize about this is that because the e-mails were stored on Clinton’s servers, she can just delete the ones she doesn’t want us to see and we will never see them. There are no back-ups. Now unless you believe she is some sort of saint who couldn’t misuse this situation to hide immoral and or illegal actions, this is very disturbing. Remember that the Clinton Foundation is taking in millions of dollars from foreign governments, as I wrote about before. Who knows what she was offering in exchange for these donations? Since we have no access to her e-mails, we will probably never know. That’s why federal employees are obligated by law to use their secure, backed-up e-mail accounts – to avoid corruption and fraud.

Obama is saying he had no idea that her e-mail address was not a secure, backed-up State Department e-mail address:

President Obama says he first learned from news reports that his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, used a private email account during her tenure, amid reports the White House and State Department may have known as far back as last August that Clinton did not use government email.

“The same time everybody else learned it, through news reports,” Obama told CBS’ Bill Plante, in response to a question of when the president learned of Clinton’s use of a private email account for conducting government business.

This is actually the same line he has used for the many, many scandals afflicting his corrupt administration:

The Obama administration has been engulfed in an unending stream of scandals — and President Barack Obama learned of most of them through news reports.

From the 2012 Benghazi attacks that killed four Americans, to the IRS targeting conservative nonprofit groups, to the revelations about veterans dying while waiting for care because of falsified lists at the Department of Veterans Affairs, the president and his top aides have admitted that they found out about them in the media.

“I first learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this,” Obama said in June 2013 when he was asked about the IRS scandal. “I think it was on Friday.”

Is this corruption a problem?

I think if you are one of the people who vote Democrat because they are essentially paying you to vote for them through government programs, then this isn’t a problem. It’s not even a problem for the clueless millennials who also vote for him, even though they are the ones who are going to be stuck with the bill for the bribes. If you’re a single mother by choice who is getting welfare from the government, then you’ll keep voting Democrat to keep the money coming. But the loan will be paid back by your fatherless child. What a world.

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Hillary Clinton used her private e-mail account to conduct State Department business

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Wow. The ultra leftist New York Times just dropped a bomb on Hillary’s 2016 hopes.

Read it:

Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.

Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.

It was only two months ago, in response to a new State Department effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices, that Mrs. Clinton’s advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal emails and decided which ones to turn over to the State Department. All told, 55,000 pages of emails were given to the department. Mrs. Clinton stepped down from the secretary’s post in early 2013.

Her expansive use of the private account was alarming to current and former National Archives and Records Administration officials and government watchdogs, who called it a serious breach.

“It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business,” said Jason R. Baron, a lawyer at Drinker Biddle & Reath who is a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration.

[…]Under federal law, however, letters and emails written and received by federal officials, such as the secretary of state, are considered government records and are supposed to be retained so that congressional committees, historians and members of the news media can find them. There are exceptions to the law for certain classified and sensitive materials.

The problem is, of course, that personal e-mails are not securely transmitted or securely stored. This is an incredible blunder that put our national security at risk.

Why did she do it? The leftist Washington Post has the answer:

The New York Times reported Monday night that, during her tenure at the State Department, Hillary Clinton never used her official email account to conduct communications, relying instead on a private email account. As the Times notes, only official accounts are automatically retained under the Federal Records Act, meaning that none of Clinton’s email communication was preserved.

She did it so that there would be no record of her e-mail communications should there be any investigations or inquiries. It’s sort of like Lois Lerner claiming that the dog ate her hard drive, and the hard drives of all her friends in the IRS. Only this is worse than that. At least we could get the Lois Lerner e-mails back from back-ups.

Ed Morrissey of Hot Air reacts:

According to the New York Times, Hillary Clinton never used the official e-mail system at all. When the time came to produce e-mails for the Benghazi probe, her aides “found” 300 or so that they chose to reveal years after the event — with no guarantee that these represent the entire record, or even a significant portion of it.

Clearly, Hillary had contempt for the mechanisms that provide transparency and accountability for government operations and officials. If any of her communications involved sensitive or classified material, Hillary may have broken more laws than just those dealing with archival of official records. This could very well be huge, and not just in relation to the 2016 election. Just what may have been gleaned by hostile intelligence services? What else may Hillary have been doing while at State? Congress needs to get to the bottom of this ASAP — and the Benghazi select committee should put Hillary Clinton under oath to demand answers about this.

Morrissey notes that the personal e-mail was set up the day of her Senate confirmation hearings for Secretary of State. This was not an accident, this was intentional. Planned. Deliberate. She did not want her e-mails to be on record. And we would never know about this except because Republicans set up a select committee to investigate. We are only finding these things out because of Trey Gowdy’s ongoing Benghazi investigation. Give the man credit. He was the right man for the job, and we are finally getting the answers we sought… a little bit at a time.

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E-mails: Hillary Clinton’s top aides knew in minutes that Benghazi was a terrorist attack

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National Review reports on released e-mails from a FOIA request by Judicial Watch.

He says:

From the very first moments of the terrorist attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her top aides were advised that the compound was under a terrorist attack. In fact, less than two hours into the attack, they were told that the al-Qaeda affiliate in Libya, Ansar al-Sharia, had claimed responsibility.

These revelations and others are disclosed by a trove of e-mails and other documents pried from the State Department by Judicial Watch in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The FOIA litigation focuses on Mrs. Clinton’s involvement in the government actions before, during, and after the Benghazi attack, in which Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, was murdered by terrorists. Also killed in the attack were State Department information management officer Sean Smith, and two former Navy SEALs, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, who were contract security employees and who had fought heroically, saving numerous American lives. At least ten other Americans were wounded, some quite seriously.

At 4:07 p.m., just minutes after the terrorist attack began, Cheryl Mills, Secretary Clinton’s chief-of-staff, and Joseph McManus, Mrs. Clinton’s executive assistant, received an e-mail from the State Department’s operations center (forwarded to her by Maria Sand, a special assistant to Secretary Clinton). It contained a report from the State Department’s regional security officer (RSO), entitled “U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi is Under Attack.” The e-mail explained that approximately 20 armed people had fired shots at the diplomatic mission, that explosions had been heard as well, and that Ambassador Stevens was believed to be in the compound with at least four other State Department officials.

About a half-hour later, another e-mail — this one from Scott Bultrowicz, then director of diplomatic security (DSCC) — related:

15 armed individuals were attacking the compound and trying to gain entrance. The Ambassador is present in Benghazi and currently is barricaded within the compound. There are no injuries at this time and it is unknown what the intent of the attackers is. At approximately 1600 [4 p.m.] DSCC received word from Benghazi that individuals had entered the compound. At 1614 [4:14 p.m.] RSO advised the Libyans had set fire to various buildings in the area, possibly the building that houses the Ambassador [REDACTED] is responding and taking fire.

At 6:06 p.m., another e-mail that went to top State Department officials explained that the local al-Qaeda affiliate had claimed responsibility for the attack:

Ansar al-Sharia Claims Responsibility for Benghazi Attack (SBU):  “(SBU) Embassy Tripoli reports the group claimed responsibility on Facebook and Twitter and call for an attack on Embassy Tripoli”

Despite this evidence that her top staffers were informed from the start that a terrorist attack was underway and that an al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group had claimed credit for it, Secretary Clinton issued an official statement claiming the assault may have been in “response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet.”

Here she is lying to the American people on camera about the nature and cause of the attack:

You’ll remember that she repeated the lie again to the family of the victims.

Should we elect a liar to be President in 2016?

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