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Joe Lieberman’s Benghazi Connection

Mother Jones

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As President Donald Trump escaped Washington on Friday for his first overseas trip, the White House announced that he wasn’t yet ready to reveal his pick to replace James Comey, the FBI director he brazenly fired the previous week. But one name on his list appeared to be ahead of the others: former Sen. Joe Lieberman, the onetime Democrat who was Vice President Al Gore’s running mate in the 2000 presidential campaign.

Lieberman may not be an odd choice for Trump. He finished up his Senate career as an independent. Perhaps more important, since leaving the Senate in 2013, Lieberman has been a senior counsel at the Kasowitz Benson Torres law firm, which has defended Trump in numerous disputes over the years. But as a member of that law firm, Lieberman also had the unusual job of promoting and representing a Libyan businessman and politician who tried to court an alleged terrorist accused of leading the 2012 attack on the Benghazi compound that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

In Lieberman’s final days as a senator, a reporter asked him if he would become a lobbyist. “No, I’m not going to do that,” he replied. But in November 2013, as Politico reported at the time, his law firm signed up as a foreign agent for Basit Igtet, a Libyan businessman and activist who was considering running for prime minister in Libya. Igtet made his money through assorted ventures in Switzerland, where his family had sought exile. He married Sara Bronfman, the daughter of Edgar Bronfman, who had been the billionaire chairman of Seagram and the president of the World Jewish Congress. The foreign agent registration form filed at the Justice Department noted that Lieberman would be part of the team handling this $100,000 project that would provide “government relations services” to Igtet.

A Benghazi native, Igtet was a long-shot candidate for prime minister. As Forbes noted, “Igtet believes he’s got the technocratic prowess to transform his country of six million people from the brink of civil war into the crown jewel of northern Africa. But skeptics say his status as a longtime expatriate and his lack of national security experience leave him ill-prepared to grasp control of deteriorating relations among warring rebel factions, police and the army.” And having a Jewish wife was probably not an asset.

As part of his campaign, Igtet emphasized his connections to the United States, pointing out his wife was involved with the US-Libya Chamber of Commerce and boasting that he personally knew Secretary of State John Kerry and Sen. John McCain. But Foreign Policy reported in early 2014 that as part of his campaign, he also sought out a terrorist suspect wanted by the United States for orchestrating the attack on the Benghazi facility:

Igtet not only has built ties with America’s friends, he’s also met with its enemies. He sat down last year with Ahmed Abu Khattala, the Benghazi militant charged by the Justice Department for his involvement in the 2012 attack on the American mission in Benghazi that killed US Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. The State Department declared Abu Khattala a specially designated global terrorist in January.

Igtet says he told Abu Khattala that he is opposed to Libyans “being kidnapped or transferred somewhere else”—a reference to the U.S. policy of rendition, which Libyans saw firsthand last year when US commandos snatched al Qaeda suspect Abu Anas al-Libi off a Tripoli street and eventually brought him to New York to stand trial. Abu Khattala fears this could be his own fate.

“We are Libyans, this is our country and if someone has done something wrong here, they have to be judged in this country,” said Igtet. “Abu Khattala told me he is sure of his innocence. He said he has no problem to go to the court in Benghazi and face these issues there.”

Khattala never made it to a Benghazi court. In June 2014, he was captured by US special forces in a villa south of Benghazi, interrogated on a Navy ship for 13 days, and brought to the United States. US prosecutors have accused him of being a ringleader of the Benghazi assault. He has denied the charge. His trial is scheduled to begin in September.

Contacted by Mother Jones, Lieberman’s office said he was not available for comment.

When Khattala was nabbed, he was one of the FBI’s most-wanted terrorists, and bureau agents participated in the mission that grabbed him. Yet months earlier, Lieberman was working for a Libyan who had reached out to Khattala. Now, Lieberman may be Trump’s choice for FBI chief. If Lieberman does end up in the job, it will certainly be a first: an FBI director who once was a foreign agent for an overseas politician who cozied up to an alleged terrorist accused of killing Americans.

Will Republicans and conservatives care about this Benghazi connection?

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Joe Lieberman’s Benghazi Connection

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Jason Chaffetz Is Fleeing Scandal—But Maybe Not His Own

Mother Jones

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Jason Chaffetz is so ambitious that his last name is a verb.

In the political world, to Chaffetz means to throw a former mentor under the bus in order to get ahead, and various prominent Republicans, from former Utah governor and presidential candidate Jon Huntsman Jr. to House Majority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy, have experienced what it’s like to get Chaffetzed. But the five-term Utah Republican and powerful chairman of the House oversight committee shocked Washington on Wednesday when he announced he would not seek reelection in 2018 or run for any other political office that year in order to spend more time with his family.

“I am healthy. I am confident I would continue to be re-elected by large margins,” he said in a statement. “I have the full support of Speaker Paul Ryan to continue as Chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. That said, I have made a personal decision to return to the private sector.”

His surprise announcement has fueled speculation of a possible scandal, though Chaffetz told Politico there’s nothing to the rumors about a skeleton in his closet: “I’ve been given more enemas by more people over the last eight years than you can possibly imagine… If they had something really scandalous, it would’ve come out a long, long time ago.”

Top House Republican Won’t Respond to Call to Probe Trump’s Conflicts of Interest

Chaffetz, who on Thursday said he might not finish out his term, has been considered a contender for Utah governor in 2020 and perhaps one day for the presidency. But the early days of the Trump administration haven’t been easy for him. The once-brash congressional inquisitor has twisted himself into a pretzel trying to explain why he hasn’t been investigating President Trump, the most conflict-ridden commander-in-chief in modern US history. And the 50-year-old congressman has experienced an unexpected level of outrage in his own deep red district.

By heading back to the private sector Chaffetz risks lowering his public profile, which could impede any gubernatorial effort. No one knows this better than Chaffetz, who sought the spotlight in DC and who built a career in public relations before running for Congress in 2008.

But Chaffetz’s rise in politics was hardly conventional, and it was aided by a publicist’s eye for reputational pitfalls and opportunities. His curious retreat should not lead any political observers to count him out of future contests. In fact, it’s probably best interpreted as a sign that he’s very carefully planning his political future—not abandoning it.

From the beginning, Chaffetz didn’t chart an obvious path to political power. The great-grandson of Russian immigrants, he was born in California and raised Jewish. He converted to Mormonism during his college years at Brigham Young University, the Mormon Church-owned school where he played on the football team as a place kicker.

Chaffetz majored in business and minored in communications, and after graduating he went to work for a local multilevel marketing company—think Amway—called Nu Skin, where he worked in PR. At the time that he joined, the company had some pretty significant public-relations needs. It was facing class-action lawsuits and investigations by state attorneys general and the Federal Trade Commission, all related to allegations that the company was operating as a pyramid scheme. (The company has been Chaffetz’s biggest campaign donor.)

Chaffetz spent more than a decade at Nu Skin before leaving the company abruptly in 2000 without any obvious next stop. He worked briefly in the coal industry, unsuccessfully applied to join the Secret Service, and eventually started a marketing firm with his brother called Maxtera.

In 2004, when Jon Huntsman Jr. ran for Utah governor, Chaffetz volunteered for his campaign; Chaffetz, whose mother died of breast cancer in 1995, says he was impressed with the work Huntsman had done to advance cancer treatment. Huntsman eventually asked Chaffetz to become his campaign’s communications director, and then his campaign manager. When Huntsman won the election, he appointed Chaffetz as his chief of staff. But Chaffetz only lasted a year in the job.

For the next two years, Chaffetz doggedly laid the groundwork to challenge Chris Cannon, a six-term incumbent Republican congressman—a politician whose campaigns Chaffetz had previously volunteered for. Cannon, who hailed from a well-connected political family, was conservative, but he was firmly in the Republican camp that supported immigration reform. This stance put him in the crosshairs of anti-immigration activists, as well as the grassroots agitators who would become members of the tea party. Conservative pundit Michelle Malkin dubbed Cannon a “shamnesty Republican.”

Chaffetz saw an opening, and he was aided by the somewhat arcane system through which Utah Republicans, until recently, selected their congressional candidates. Districts elected about 4,000 delegates, who in turn voted for their desired candidates at the state party’s convention. The top two winners moved on to the primary, unless one marshaled 60 percent of the vote, in which case that person became the GOP nominee. The system, it turned out, was well suited to a poorly funded upstart like Chaffetz, who could initially concentrate on winning a small group of delegates rather than tens of thousands of voters.

When Chaffetz decided to run, he invited Kirk Jowers, then the director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah, to breakfast. Jowers was a veteran of dozens of GOP campaigns and Chaffetz asked him if he’d help with his long-shot race against Cannon. “I said no,” Jowers recalls. “He then asked, ‘Would you be willing to be part of the campaign in any capacity?’ I said no. He said, ‘Do you think I have any chance to win?’ and I said no. He said, ‘Do you mind if I just give you a call to talk about politics and policy?’ and I said no. I couldn’t have been worse to him,” Jowers says with a laugh.

But Chaffetz persisted, calling Jowers every two weeks for the next year and a half to update him on his progress. The former place-kicker campaigned largely on a harsh, anti-immigration platform. With an army of volunteer staffers, he worked each delegate heading to the convention—twisting arms and otherwise persuading them to vote for him, though he refused to succumb to the long-standing tradition of plying them with free food. Jowers slowly realized that the determined upstart actually had a shot.

Chaffetz’s lobbying blitz was overlooked by most polls, which until the GOP convention put him at a mere 3 percent in the race, a number so small he didn’t qualify to participate in the GOP’s televised debate. When the moderator asked Jowers afterward how he thought the debate went, Jowers responded, “It was great, except you didn’t have the one who was going to win.”

Jowers was right: Chaffetz won the convention, gaining nearly 60 percent of the delegate vote and very nearly knocking out Cannon in the first round. He went on to handily beat Cannon in the primary, even though the incumbent had a more than 4-to-1 spending advantage and had been endorsed by virtually the entire Republican establishment, including then-President George W. Bush. The loss so angered Cannon that he reportedly refused to talk to Chaffetz during the transition.

Barely had Chaffetz been elected to his first term in the House when he registered a new domain name: ChaffetzforSenate.com.

Even before he was sworn in, Chaffetz managed to vault himself from the House’s backbench into the national spotlight, albeit through an unusual route: leg wrestling Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report. The goofy segment—the type of unscripted moment that politicians typically avoid—was the beginning of a media charm offensive that would make Chaffetz popular among journalists, whom he cultivated assiduously by passing out his personal cellphone number to reporters and accepting almost any interview request. It’s all about “old-fashioned human relationships,” he told National Journal in 2015. “You’ve got to get out there and invest the time. Work with the media!” (Apparently that rule doesn’t apply to Mother Jones. Chaffetz told me twice that he’d be happy to sit for an interview for this story but then never made himself available.)

The freshman congressman also scored an early PR coup by starring in a short-lived show, Freshman Year, produced by CNN on incoming members of Congress. He was shown unfolding a cot in his office, a sign of his commitment to living in Utah rather than Washington, DC, where he refused to rent an apartment.

Even as he courted reporters and TV bookers, Chaffetz warned the GOP establishment that his election was a warning sign. In the online diary that accompanied the CNN show, Chaffetz recounted how, during his first weeks in office in January 2009, he had gotten up before a House Republican strategy session and told the assembled members, “I am your worst nightmare.” He explained how the advent of social media had allowed him to bypass the mainstream media and, with very little funding, knock off an establishment candidate.

Chaffetz’s reading of the political winds proved prescient. His election foreshadowed the rise of the tea party movement that took over the GOP in 2010, prompting the ouster of many more incumbent Republicans, including House Minority Whip Eric Cantor.

Watch Jason Chaffetz Tell Poor Americans to Choose Between iPhones and Health Care

By 2011, it looked like Chaffetz was going to need that ChaffetzforSenate.com web address. He was talking openly of challenging his state’s most venerable senior statesman, Sen. Orrin Hatch, currently the longest-serving Republican in the Senate. Despite his powerful position in Washington, Hatch was vulnerable at home. Polls showed Chaffetz had a decent chance. And another upstart tea party conservative, Mike Lee, had just knocked off the state’s other elder Republican senator, Bob Bennett, by challenging him from the right.

For months, Chaffetz held meetings and events that gave every impression he planned to challenge Hatch. The Salt Lake Tribune declared that Chaffetz had even picked a date to unveil his candidacy, September 27. But shortly before Labor Day, Chaffetz hastily organized a press conference and announced that he would not run for Senate. He said the race would be a “multimillion-dollar bloodbath” and that he’d rather spend the next 18 months doing the job he was elected to do. Still, even as he put himself out of contention, he jabbed Hatch, declaring the Utah congressional delegation “dysfunctional” and lacking leadership from the senior senator.

Tim Chambless, a University of Utah political-science professor, says the announcement caught many in Utah off guard. “That has been mystifying to us.” It suggested that something in Chaffetz’s well-laid plans had gone seriously awry.

Ultimately, Chaffetz may have underestimated Hatch, whose mild-mannered exterior belies a ruthless political operator. There’s a reason he’s served longer than any Republican senator since Strom Thurmond. Cherilyn Eagar a conservative Republican activist and local talk radio host who lives in Chaffetz’s district, echoes what various sources told me. She says Utah political insiders suspect “the Hatch campaign had gotten heavy-handed. There was a bit of information they were going to disclose if he ran. Things were going to get ugly.” (Hatch’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)

Instead of running against Hatch, Chaffetz stapled himself to Mitt Romney, serving as a regular campaign surrogate for the failed GOP presidential nominee, whom he endorsed over his former mentor, Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr.

Chaffetz, now running for reelection in 2012, quickly found other ways to nab the spotlight. Before the FBI had secured the Benghazi compound following the September 11 attacks that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, Chaffetz demanded to visit the scene in his capacity as the chairman of the House oversight subcommittee on national security and foreign operations. He dashed off to Libya less than a month later—without any Democrats, as the oversight committee’s policy dictates—to supposedly conduct an independent investigation.

The closest he got to the crime scene was Tripoli, 400 miles away. Chaffetz, who had previously voted to cut $300 million from the State Department’s budget for embassy security, claimed the purpose of his trip was to discern whether the Obama administration had denied requests for more security for the Benghazi compound. He uncovered little of substance, other than discovering that the State Department was a bit lax in allowing neighbors to throw trash over the embassy wall in Tripoli. The overeager gumshoe also managed to disclose the existence of a secret CIA base on the Benghazi compound during a subsequent hearing on the attacks.

Chaffetz’s Benghazi grandstanding helped to make him a right-wing hero, but it didn’t earn him the spot he desired on the select committee created by the Republican-led Congress in 2014 to investigate the Benghazi attacks.

By then, Chaffetz had already set his sights higher. He launched a campaign to win the chairmanship of the House oversight committee, then run by the bellicose Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), whose term on the panel was expiring in 2015. Issa had seen potential in Chaffetz and had helped him early in his congressional career by making him the chairman of the national security subcommittee. Chaffetz wasn’t in line for the oversight job by seniority, so launching a bid for this plumb post—a platform for politicians seeking to grab headlines—took some chutzpah.

Within the Republican caucus, Chaffetz campaigned for the chairmanship as the anti-Issa, implicitly critiquing the oversight chairman’s combative style and suggesting that he could bring to the committee an element of media savvy that Issa lacked. Once again, Chaffetz stabbed a mentor in the back and won. In 2015, he became one of the most junior members of the House ever to chair the high-profile committee.

“Do Your Job!” Hundreds of People Shout Down Jason Chaffetz Over Lack of Trump Probe

After assuming the chairmanship, one of his first moves was taking down the portraits of past chairmen, including Issa, that hung in the hearing room. Issa was not pleased. “It’s not a big deal, but it’s just indicative of what his mindset was and how self-centered he is,” says Kurt Bardella, who worked for Issa as the committee’s spokesman. Fellow lawmakers, Bardella notes, were repelled that “Jason would be so willing to throw under the bus someone who really tried to help mentor him, for his own gain.”

Running over people who helped him on the way up was becoming something of a pattern for Chaffetz. He’d chaired the oversight committee for less than year before launching an audacious bid for speaker of the House when John Boehner retired. Aside from being a very junior member of Congress, Chaffetz’s bid for the speakership also meant he would be running against his friend and former champion, Rep. Kevin McCarthy. As House Majority Leader, McCarthy had helped to launch Chaffetz’s rise in the House, dispensing with old seniority rules and working to promote telegenic young legislators, including Chaffetz. Hearing the news about the Chaffetz challenge, Jon Huntsman tweeted: “.@GOPLeader McCarthy just got “Chaffetzed.” Something I know a little something about. #selfpromoter #powerhungry

Chaffetz dropped his bid for speaker after Rep. Paul Ryan was cajoled into entering the race. He returned to his oversight committee work with a renewed zeal, threatening to impeach the head of the IRS over his handling of the nonprofit status of tea party groups and suggesting there might be grounds to remove President Barack Obama from office over Benghazi. He devoted a portion of the oversight committee’s website to enumerating the bureaucrats he claimed to have gotten fired—Salt Lake Tribune columnist Paul Rolly described this list as a “trophy case.”

Not all his targets have gone quietly into the night. In 2015, Chaffetz launched an investigation into problems with the Secret Service after a pair of drunk senior agents crashed a car into a White House barricade. Not long afterward, the Daily Beast reported that Chaffetz had been a wannabe agent himself prior to his career in politics but his application had been rejected in favor of a “BQA,” or “better qualified applicant”—a revelation leaked from inside the agency. Chaffetz told the Daily Beast that he believed he was rejected because he was too old. (He was in his mid-30s at the time, and the agency cutoff for agents was 37.)

A later investigation found that more than 45 people within the Secret Service had taken a look at his protected personnel file. Referring to the file, then-Assistant Director Edward Lowery emailed another director that March, saying, “Some information that he might find embarrassing needs to get out. Just to be fair.”

The election of Donald Trump seriously interfered with Chaffetz’s plans.

During the campaign, Chaffetz couldn’t make up his mind about the GOP nominee. After audio of Trump bragging about sexual assault during an Access Hollywood taping was published, Chaffetz disavowed the real estate mogul. “I can no longer in good conscience endorse this person for president. It is some of the most abhorrent and offensive comments that you can possibly imagine,” Chaffetz said. “My wife and I, we have a 15-year-old daughter, and if I can’t look her in the eye and tell her these things, I can’t endorse this person.” But Chaffetz soon reversed his stance, writing on Twitter that he’d still be voting for Trump. “HRC is that bad,” he wrote. “HRC is bad for the USA.”

HRC, a.k.a. Hillary Rodham Clinton, would have been good for Chaffetz’s political fortunes, however. He had been expecting to use his remaining tenure on the oversight committee, which expired in 2019, tormenting President Clinton. The month before the 2016 election, Chaffetz told the Washington Post that Clinton had provided him with “a target-rich environment. Even before we get to Day One, we’ve got two years’ worth of material already lined up.”

But after Trump won, Chaffetz seemed slow to acclimate to the new political environment. The day of Trump’s inauguration, Chaffetz Instagrammed a screen grab from Fox News, showing him shaking hands with Clinton at the ceremony. Under the photo he wrote, “So pleased she is not the President. I thanked her for her service and wished her luck. The investigation continues.”

The post—which earned him widespread scorn—may have been the first sign that Chaffetz was misreading the national mood and especially the attitudes of his largely Mormon constituents. While they largely disliked Clinton—she won a mere 23 percent of the vote in his district—they also harbored concerns about Trump, whose ethical conflicts and curious associations with Russia were rapidly piling up.

On February 9, Chaffetz got a wake-up call when he returned to Utah for a town hall, where he was besieged by a hostile, heckling crowd, shouting “Do your job,” and “We want to get rid you.” These listening sessions are typically subdued affairs, but this one drew hundreds of angry constituents, who demanded to know why the chairman of the House oversight committee was not doing more to investigate President Trump. (A pair of Utah Republicans recently bought a billboard on the highway to Chaffetz’s Utah office that asks, “Why won’t Chaffetz investigate the Trump-Russia connection?”)

So pleased she is not the President. I thanked her for her service and wished her luck. The investigation continues.

A post shared by Jason Chaffetz (@jasoninthehouse) on Jan 20, 2017 at 12:31pm PST

Chaffetz, who during the Obama administration reveled in launching headline-grabbing investigations, suddenly seemed reluctant to unleash his committee’s typically aggressive investigative powers. Trump’s conflicts of interest, he claimed, fell largely outside his jurisdiction. “I know it’s surprising and frustrating to Democrats, but the president is exempt from these conflicts of interest,” he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. As for the Russia connections, particularly those related to former national security adviser Michael Flynn, Chaffetz said there was no need to further probe Flynn because he’d been fired. “It’s taking care of itself.”

“He is in an unenviable position,” Chris Karpowitz, a political-science professor at Brigham Young University, told me weeks before Chaffetz’s surprise announcement that he was giving up his seat. “He’s still trying to figure out what his role is in a government in which Republicans control everything. I think he used the fact that he could investigate an administration of an opposing party to his advantage during the Obama years that allowed him to be in front of the cameras repeatedly, and to be seen as pursuing the interests of the Republican Party. But I think what has people, or at least some people, in his district concerned is the appearance of a double standard, that he was very eager to investigate Hillary Clinton and has been extremely hesitant to pursue serious questions about the Trump administration.”

Chaffetz’s district is one of the reddest in the nation, and he’s used to being popular at home. He was reelected last November with nearly 75 percent of the vote. But after four easy reelection campaigns, his poll numbers have plunged to their lowest levels ever. Before he announced that he would not seek reelection, opponents on his left and the right were lining up to take him on. Trump nemesis Rosie O’Donnell recently donated $2,700—the maximum allowed by law—to Chaffetz’s Democratic opponent, Kathryn Allen, giving her fledgling campaign a Twitter boost that has helped Allen rake in more than $500,000 in contributions. The former independent presidential candidate, Evan McMullin, who launched his anti-Trump effort in Utah, had suggested he might consider challenging Chaffetz or Hatch.

Even so, Chaffetz would likely prevail in a reelection bid. But that doesn’t mean the next two years would be a breeze for the ambitious congressman.

“I told him on election night that he just miraculously had gone to having the best job in America to the worst job in America, and that has been prophetic,” says Utah political expert Kirk Jowers, who now serves as a corporate vice president for doTERRA, a Provo-based multilevel marketing company. “He has almost the perfect rainbow of hate. Liberals will never think he’s doing enough in that position. And of course the alt-right may think anything he does against President Trump is feeding into this frenzy against their president. It has put him in a place where it’s very tough to do right by anyone.”

The current political atmosphere, in which Republicans control Congress and the White House, mainly holds downsides for Chaffetz, who has flourished as an opposition figure. Historically, the president’s party often suffers big losses in midterm elections, and early signs show that Democrats are gaining momentum in unexpected places, including deep-red Kansas.

Chaffetz, a canny political operator, has surely read the tea leaves, wagering that it is in his best interests to sit out the bruising political fights of the Trump administration’s first term lest Trump bring Chaffetz down with him. Given Chaffetz’s talent for self-promotion, it’s likely that he won’t veer too far from the public eye. Talk on Capitol Hill is that he may take the path of other high-profile members of Congress and nab a lucrative contract with one of the networks, where he can maintain his visibility, build up his bank account, and bide his time for the right moment to get back in the political game. Chaffetz has been less than subtle in hinting he’s interested. “I’d be thrilled to have a television relationship,” Chaffetz told Politico on Thursday.

But even as he announced that he was stepping away from politics, Chaffetz and his supporters seemed to be quietly planning his political future. In early April, his campaign committee registered the domains Jason2028.com and JasonChaffetz2028.com.

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Jason Chaffetz Is Fleeing Scandal—But Maybe Not His Own

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The Lesson of 2016: Rabid Congressional Investigations Work

Mother Jones

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So what did we learn this year? That America is more susceptible to authoritarian populism than we thought? Not really. Trump’s victory was a fluke, driven by Russian hacking, James Comey, and some bad polls in a few states.

That racism is on the rise? There’s really no evidence of that.

That Democrats need to pay more attention to the white working class? Maybe, but no matter how many times people say otherwise, that really wasn’t a root cause of Hillary Clinton’s defeat.

I could go on, but instead I want to suggest something the 2016 election does teach us: persistent, obsessive investigations pay off. In the 90s, Republicans started investigating Whitewater. Even Ken Starr knew there was nothing to this after a couple of years, but he was put under pressure to keep at it, and eventually he hit some fluke paydirt: Monica Lewinsky. This had nothing to do with Whitewater, but who cares? Scandal is scandal, and it rubbed off enough on Al Gore that Republicans took back the presidency in 2000.

Fast forward to 2012. Hillary Clinton did nothing wrong related to Benghazi. That was clear pretty quickly, but Republicans kept at it. I laughed at them at the time, but they had the last laugh when they once again hit a fluke bit of paydirt: Clinton’s private email server. Clinton didn’t really do anything seriously wrong here either, but it didn’t matter. Republicans kept at it for the next year and a half, and that was enough to convince a lot of people that Clinton was, somehow, corrupt and untrustworthy. That allowed Republicans to retake the presidency.

There was lots of other stuff going on too, but this is now twice that maniacal dedication to an investigation has paid off for Republicans. It’s basically a way of hacking the media, which feels like it has no choice but to cover congressional investigations on a daily basis. It’s news, after all, no matter how you define news.

So that’s a lesson for sure. I’m just not sure what the solution is.

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The Lesson of 2016: Rabid Congressional Investigations Work

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Timid Liberals Blew the Election by Flinching at Hillary Clinton’s Email Server

Mother Jones

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A couple of recent conversations about Hillary Clinton’s email server have prompted me to think that I should write about it one more time. Maybe for the last time. You might wonder why. After all, the damage is done, it’s in the past, and no cares anymore. But I continue to think there’s a lesson here that we haven’t all come to grips with yet.

Here it is: As near as I can tell, Hillary Clinton did nothing wrong. Period. No shilly-shallying, no caveats. It’s true that the optics were sometimes bad, and the whole affair showed off Clinton’s political instincts at their worst. But that’s it. Both legally and ethically, she did nothing wrong. And liberals should have been willing to say so.

But a lot of them weren’t. Both in print and on TV, our defense of Clinton was often tepid and full of qualifications. I noticed the same thing after the Benghazi attack. Conservatives went on the attack literally within a few hours. Some liberals fought back, but an awful lot either said nothing or else mounted half-hearted defenses. Why? Were they worried about looking like hacks even though the plain truth was all they needed to defend? Were they worried that some future revelation might make them look stupid? I’m not sure. But I don’t think anyone will argue when I say that this kind of attitude doesn’t work well in contemporary America.

So here’s a timeline of the email server affair. FAIR WARNING: It’s not a complete timeline. Google has plenty of those for you. It’s a timeline that highlights a few very specific things that I think even a lot of liberals never quite understood. Let’s start:

March 2009: Two months after being confirmed as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton makes the fateful decision to host her unclassified email on a private server.

THIS IS IMPORTANT. Everybody at the State Department has an unclassified email account. In the aughts, most used state.gov alone, but lots of people also used Gmail or another commercial email service. These accounts are used routinely for day-to-day business, but only for unclassified material. There is an entirely different system for classified communications. The only way that Clinton’s email account differed from a state.gov account is that it was hosted on a private server.

September 12, 2012: The American consulate in Benghazi is attacked. Even though Clinton is literally faultless in this,1 conservatives begin a four-year campaign of investigations, subpoenas, and conspiracy theories that are plainly little more than partisan attacks designed to smear Clinton.

February 2013: Clinton steps down as secretary of state.

September 2013: The National Archives updates its regulations on the handling of email and other public records.

October 2014: After yet another records request in the Benghazi affair, the State Department asks all former secretaries of state for any official records in their possession.

December 2014: After removing her personal emails, Clinton delivers all her official emails to the State Department. Her staff asks Clinton what they should do with the personal emails, and she tells them she no longer needs them. The hosting company in Colorado, Platte River Networks, is instructed to delete Clinton’s existing email archives and to thenceforth preserve new emails for 60 days before deleting them.

March 2015: The New York Times reveals that Clinton’s emails were hosted on a private server. The Benghazi zealots immediately subpoena her email server.

March 2015: A Platte River tech discovers that he never deleted the email archives. At this point, even though Clinton’s staff has notified him not to make any changes (due to the subpoena), he deletes the old archive.

THIS IS IMPORTANT. It is now six years since Clinton began her tenure at the State Department and two years since she left. In that entire time, there was never any concern over the possibility that Clinton sent or received classified material over unclassified channels. In fact, I don’t think there has ever been any official concern about any secretary of state sending classified information over unclassified channels.

March 2015: Republicans in Congress ask the inspectors general of both the State Department and the intelligence community to review Clinton’s email practices. Their letter states, “We are concerned that diplomatically sensitive, and possibly classified, information may have been transmitted and stored in an insecure manner.”

July 2015: The IC inspector general tells Congress that it found classified information in a small sample of Clinton’s email that it reviewed. Both inspectors general ask the Justice Department to review all of Clinton’s email for a “potential compromise of classified information.” This is the start of the FBI investigation.

THIS IS IMPORTANT: Although the referral came from both IGs, the underlying issue is an ancient feud between the State Department and the CIA. The CIA basically wants to classify everything. The State Department, which has to work in the real world, takes the pragmatic view that classified information sometimes has to be discussed over unclassified channels. It just has to done carefully and circuitously.

July 2016: After a full year, the FBI finally concludes its investigation. Normally, FBI officials merely turn over their recommendations to prosecutors at the Justice Department, but this time FBI Director James Comey decides to host a detailed press conference about the investigation. He says Clinton did nothing illegal, a conclusion that he later describes as “not even a close call.” However, he also declares that Clinton was “extremely careless” with her email.

August 2016: The FBI releases its interview notes, which make it clear that Comey exaggerated wildly in his press conference. Clinton’s archives contained only three trivial emails that were marked classified. A couple of thousand more emails were retroactively classified. Should they have been? The CIA says yes. Clinton says no: They were carefully worded discussions between professionals who knew perfectly well how to conduct conversations like this. Comments from other State Department officials back up Clinton’s view. There was, it turns out, little evidence that anyone was careless, let alone “extremely careless,” but since the emails are now classified, no one will ever know for sure.2

October 2016: Two weeks before Election Day, Comey writes a letter announcing that the FBI has discovered records of emails between Clinton and her aide, Huma Abedin, on the computer of Abedin’s estranged husband, Anthony Weiner. There is nothing unexpected about this. All of Clinton’s aides probably have copies of emails from her, and as we now know, the FBI had no reason to think Abedin’s emails were anything they hadn’t already seen. But Comey declines to say any of this in his letter and the press goes nuts.

November 6, 2016: Comey announces that the investigation is over and none of the Abedin emails were relevant.

November 8, 2016: Donald Trump is elected president of the United States.

So here’s what we’ve got. Clinton used a private server for her unclassified emails. However, that doesn’t provide any reason to think she was any more careless about discussing classified information than any other secretary of state. Nevertheless, Republicans used the excuse of the Benghazi investigation to demand an inspector general’s audit of her emails. The intelligence community, naturally, concluded that Clinton’s archives contained thousands of discussions of classified programs. They would most likely conclude the same thing if they audited the email account of any ranking State Department official. It’s just a fact of life that State and CIA disagree about this stuff.

Comey certainly knew this, and he also knew that Clinton had done nothing out of the ordinary. However, in an attempt to appease congressional Republicans, who were sure to go ballistic when their hopes of putting Clinton in the dock failed yet again, he held a press conference where he called her actions “extremely careless.” Then, three months later, with absolutely no justification, he announced that more emails had been discovered—and he announced it in the most damaging possible way.

This is the meat of the whole affair. The rest is chaff. Did Clinton violate the Federal Records Act by holding her email on a private server? Was she trying to evade FOIA requests? Did she lie about wanting to use one email device? Did she violate agency regulations because she used an outside mail account for all her communications, rather than just part of them, as others have routinely done? Etc. etc. We can argue about this stuff forever and we’ll never know the answer. If you hate Clinton, you’ll insist that these are major felonies that should have landed her in a Supermax for life. But if you don’t hate Clinton in the first place, none of these will strike you as anything more than minor infractions at best and ungrounded speculation at worst. Plus there’s this: No one ever came close to investigating any of this, let alone trying to bring charges. Among the folks who know the most about these things, there was never so much as a hint that there was anything illegal among all the sensational accusations.3

The bottom line is simple: There was never any real reason for either the IG investigations or the FBI investigation. And in the end, the FBI found nothing out of the ordinary—just the usual State-CIA squabbling. Nevertheless, under pressure from Republicans, Comey spent a full year on the investigation; reported its conclusions in the most damaging possible way; and then did it again two weeks before the election. Because of this, Clinton lost about 2 percent of the vote, and the presidency.

Liberals should have defended her with gusto from the start. There was never anything here and no evidence that Clinton did anything seriously wrong. And yet we didn’t. Many liberals just steered clear of the whole thing. Others—including me sometimes—felt like every defense had to contain a series of caveats acknowledging that, yes, the private server was a bad idea, harumph harumph. And some others didn’t even go that far. The result was that in the public eye, both liberals and conservatives were more or less agreeing that there was a lot of smoke here. So smoke there was. And now Donald Trump is a month away from being president.

1I mean literally. She was not responsible for the fact that the Benghazi consulate had too few guards. She was not responsible for Chris Stevens taking a big risk that he was well aware of. She was not responsible for the nearby CIA compound. She did not lie about the attacks afterward. Susan Rice did not lie about them afterward. There was no “stand-down” order. Etc. There were lessons to be learned from the attack, but nothing that points to negligence on Clinton’s part.

2As long as we’re on the subject, I’ve long had another beef with Comey’s presentation. He said it was “possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account,” but he based that on literally nothing. There was no evidence of any successful hack. None. There was no more possibility of Clinton being hacked than anyone else who did the kinds of things she did.

3The only thing the FBI investigated was whether national security had been compromised. Neither the FBI nor anyone else ever investigated anything else.

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Timid Liberals Blew the Election by Flinching at Hillary Clinton’s Email Server

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Lock Her Up! Lock Her Up!

Mother Jones

Oh FFS:

Let me guess: someone at the State Department wrote a note to Huma Abedin asking if someone at the Clinton Foundation could loan them a hammer so that Hillary Clinton’s latest broken BlackBerry could be smashed. And the kicker: It turned out to be a hammer from Benghazi!

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Lock Her Up! Lock Her Up!

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Is This Donald Trump’s Most Outlandish Fundraising Email Yet?

Mother Jones

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The subject heading on the email is eye-popping: “Have you heard about the Hillary indictment?”

But when you click on the email, which on Tuesday afternoon hit the inboxes of people on conservative lists (hours after House Republicans released their Benghazi report), the news is not that the feds have dropped the hammer on the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Instead, it’s Donald Trump, the apparent GOP nominee, begging for campaign cash.

In this email, he calls on voters to indict Clinton:

On November 8th, the American people will finally have the chance to do what the authorities have been too afraid to do over these last 2 decades: INDICT HILLARY CLINTON AND FIND HER GUILTY OF ALL CHARGES.

Trump goes on to ask the recipient to donate five bucks—or 10, or 20, or 50, or more—to “indict.”

For what? He doesn’t specify. But he suggests there are many options:

As I highlighted in my speech last week, during the Clinton Presidency, there were many, many scandals. TravelGate, Whitewater. The personal destruction of Monica Lewinsky. The Rose Law Firm scandal. And, of course, anything involving Sydney Blumenthal.

Actually, that’s Sidney-with-an-i Blumenthal, a longtime aide and associate of Clinton. And it’s quite a move for a candidate to insinuate that someone associated with a political foe has engaged in illegal conduct, without offering any details.

But, wait, there’s more, Trump says:

Benghazi…Her illegal email server…The donations from terrorist nations to the Clinton Foundation. The list goes on and on.

Perhaps he missed this headline: “House Benghazi Report Finds No New Evidence of Wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton.”

In the past few decades of American politics, there has often been fierce rhetoric exchanged between presidential campaigns and their advocates, but the candidates have usually stayed within certain respectful boundaries. The dirty work has generally been done by surrogates and side groups. (Think of the Swift Boat outfit that went after John Kerry in 2004.) Trump has cast aside all notions of civil debate. He resorts to name-calling and schoolyard taunting. And now he’s raising money with a misleadingly titled email aimed at conservatives that suggests Clinton has been indicted. That’s sure to get them to click.

In the email, Trump repeatedly asks for a contribution. But he also claims that Clinton is lying when she says she is “crushing” Trump in fundraising. He adds, “This claim is laughable. i can write my campaign a check at any time.”

Perhaps. But then why is he resorting to such an unconventional measure to raise money?

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Is This Donald Trump’s Most Outlandish Fundraising Email Yet?

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Benghazi Committee Passes 700-Day Milestone

Mother Jones

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House Democrats pointed out today that the Select Committee on Benghazi has now been cranking along for 700 days. Steve Benen comments:

To put this in context, the 9/11 Commission, investigating every possible angle to the worst terrorist attack in the history of the country, worked for 604 days and created a bipartisan report endorsed by each of the commission’s members….Rep. Trey Gowdy’s (R-S.C.) Benghazi panel has also lasted longer than the investigations into the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the assassination of President Kennedy, the Iran-Contra scandal, Church Committee, and the Watergate probe.

What Steve fails to acknowledge, of course, is that Benghazi is far more important than any of these other events. So naturally it’s going to take longer. I’m guessing that 914 days should just about do the trick.

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Benghazi Committee Passes 700-Day Milestone

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Hillary Clinton’s Trust Gap Is Killing Her With Millennials

Mother Jones

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Earlier today I was musing over a tweet from a guy who said that his daughter’s friends all loathed Hillary Clinton. Just really, really couldn’t stand her. This is obviously a fairly common sentiment. Bernie Sanders didn’t win 80 percent of the millennial vote in Michigan just because he’s an idealistic liberal. The only way you get to a number like that is against an opponent who’s pretty seriously disliked.

But why? The most obvious reason millennials dislike Hillary so strongly is that they think she’s too slippery. “I feel like Clinton lies a lot,” a college student told PBS a few weeks ago. “She changes her views for every group she speaks to. I can’t trust her.” Quotes like that litter the internet, and in tonight’s debate Karen Tumulty asked about it yet again. “Is there anything in your own actions and the decisions that you yourself have made that would foster this kind of mistrust?”

People of my age find all this a little peculiar. After all, we’re the ones who experienced the full storm of the 90s. There was a new Hillary “scandal” on practically a monthly basis back then, and even if you later learned there was virtually nothing to any of them, that kind of nonstop mudslinging leaves a mark. It’s hard to hear this stuff over and over and not think that maybe there’s something there. Smoke and fire, you know. But millennials went through none of that. So why do they distrust her?

Unfortunately, Hillary has fostered a lot of this mistrust herself. I’m going to be wildly unfair here and cherry pick a bunch of quotes from Hillary and Bernie Sanders. First up, here’s Bernie:

On whether he supports fracking: “My answer is a lot shorter. No, I do not support fracking.”
On reforming Wall Street: “If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist….Within one year, my administration will break these institutions up so that they no longer pose a grave threat to the economy.”
On whether there’s even a “single circumstance” in which abortion should be illegal: “That is a decision to be made by the woman, her physician and her family. That’s my view.”
On prison reform: “I promise at the end of my first term we won’t have more people in jail than in any other country.”

There’s no nuance here, no shading. Bernie has simple, crowd-pleasing answers to every question. He’s for X, full stop. He’s against Y, end of story.

At this point I should compare these answers to the more gray-shaded responses Hillary gives on policy questions. But I’m not being fair, so instead you get this:

On whether she lied to the Benghazi families (from tonight’s debate): “You know, look, I feel a great deal of sympathy for the families of the four brave Americans that we lost at Benghazi….”
On releasing transcripts of her speeches: “Let everybody who’s ever given a speech to any private group under any circumstances release them—we’ll all release them at the same time.”
On her private email server: “Everything I did was permitted. There was no law. There was no regulation. There was nothing that did not give me the full authority to decide how I was going to communicate.”
On getting money from big Wall Street donors: “I represented New York on 9/11 when we were attacked. Where were we attacked? We were attacked in downtown Manhattan where Wall Street is. I did spend a whole lot of time and effort helping them rebuild. That was good for New York. It was good for the economy and it was a way to rebuke the terrorists who had attacked our country.”
On her super PAC: “You’re referring to a super PAC that we don’t coordinate with….It’s not my PAC.”

These are terrible answers. Tonight, Jorge Ramos brought up allegations by the Benghazi families that Hillary had deceived them, and asked, “Secretary Clinton, did you lie to them?” The only answer to this question is “Of course not.” But Hillary started by expressing her sympathy for the Benghazi families and only then said of her accuser, “She’s wrong.” Maybe this seems like nitpicking, but it’s not. Unless the very first words out of her mouth are “Of course not,” she’s going to leave an immediate impression that she’s about to tap dance around the whole thing. I like Hillary, and even I sighed when she began delivering that answer.

The other quotes are similar. It doesn’t even matter if they’re the truth. They don’t sound like the truth. People my age might forgive Hillary a bit of this lawyerlyness because we remember the 90s and understand the damage that even a slightly misplaced word can cause. But millennials don’t. They just see another tired establishment pol who never gives a straight answer about anything.

Life isn’t fair. Politics isn’t fair. I think Hillary Clinton is careful, a little bit paranoid, and, ironically, congenitally honest on policy issues. She just can’t bring herself to give simple-minded answers when she knows perfectly well the truth is more complicated. But especially this year, when her competition is a guy like Bernie Sanders, this just makes her look evasive and insincere.

After 40 years in the public eye, I don’t know why Hillary is still so bad at this. But she is. For a long time, liberals mostly forgave her wary speaking style because they were keenly aware of the Republican smear campaign that birthed it. Now, for the first time, there’s a generation of liberals who don’t care about any of that. And an awful lot of them loathe her.

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Hillary Clinton’s Trust Gap Is Killing Her With Millennials

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The Very Best of the Benghazi Hearing

Mother Jones

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Congressional hearings are partisan by nature. In the abstract, there’s nothing wrong with that: the strongest oversight is often performed by political opponents who are motivated to find problems.

So on Thursday, when Republicans on the Benghazi committee peppered Hillary Clinton with questions about why she didn’t respond to requests for more security in the months before the 2012 attacks, that was fair game. We can argue about whether they harped on it too much or spent too much time grandstanding, but basically there’s nothing wrong with it. Like it or not, grandstanding is part of what politicians do.

But Republicans insist that the committee is solely about Benghazi and a search for the truth, not about attacking Hillary Clinton. So when the questioning and the grandstanding veer off into areas that clearly have no motivation except to smear Clinton, it gives the game away.

Every single Republican on the committee went there on Thursday. What’s especially remarkable about this is that they had just endured weeks of criticism on exactly this point. They had a strong incentive to stay tightly focused on Benghazi and how to prevent future attacks on diplomatic facilities. But they didn’t. They couldn’t help themselves. And with that, they exposed what they really think this committee is about.

Here are each Republican member’s greatest hits: the obsessions and lines of questioning that unmask their true purpose. Enjoy.

CHAIRMAN TREY GOWDY was desperate to tie Clinton to her longtime friend and confidant Sidney Blumenthal. Why? Blumenthal is a Clinton loyalist who was a particular thorn in the GOP’s side during the scandal hunts of the 90s. So tying Hillary to Blumenthal offered obvious political benefits, despite the fact that he plainly had nothing to do with either diplomatic security in Benghazi or the attacks themselves:

Madam Secretary, regardless of where he ranked in the order of advisers, it is undisputed that a significant number of your e-mails were to or from a Sidney Blumenthal….He worked for the Clinton Foundation….He worked for Media Matters….He worked for Correct the Record.

….And Madam Secretary, he had unfettered access to you….I have this contrast in my mind. A ambassador newly in place. It’s a day after an attack on our facility. Your deputy chief of staff is sending him an e-mail from Sidney Blumenthal, asking him to take time to read and react to it. And then to the best of my recollection, that’s forwarded to you.

So help us understand how Sidney Blumenthal had that kind of access to you, Madame Secretary, but the ambassador did not.

MICHAEL POMPEO also jumped on the Sidney Blumenthal bandwagon. For obvious reasons, Blumenthal used Clinton’s personal email address to contact her, while security professionals in the State Department used official channels. Email records simply tell us nothing about who Clinton did and didn’t talk to. But Pompeo was nonetheless determined to accuse Clinton of caring more about her shady friend than she did about security in Benghazi:

Madam Secretary, Mr. Blumenthal wrote you 150 e-mails. It appears from the materials 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 — and which I agree, 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 had never been to Libya, didn’t know much about it, at least that was 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.

SUSAN BROOKS spent nearly an entire round of questions asking Clinton why there were so few emails about Libya in 2012. Clinton explained over and over that she conducted very little business via email, but Brooks didn’t care. She had spent a lot of time putting together what she thought was a devastating personal attack on Clinton’s priorities and personal character:

This pile represents the e-mails that you sent or received about Libya in 2011, from February through December of 2011. Points to pile of paper. This pile represents the e-mails you sent or received from early 2012 until the day of the attack. Points to another pile of paper. There are 795 e-mails in this pile. We’ve counted them. There’s 67 e-mails in this pile in 2012. And I’m troubled by what I see here.

….When I look at this pile in 2012, I only see a handful of e-mails to you from your senior staff about Benghazi….And I can only conclude by your own records that there was a lack of interest in Libya in 2012.

JIM JORDAN spent an entire round of questioning obsessing about why, in the first few days after the Benghazi attacks, Clinton and others in the Obama administration mentioned a scurrilous anti-Muslim YouTube video as one of the motivations for the attack. The short answer is (a) it was mentioned only briefly during the first week after the attacks, and (b) it really was one of the motivations. But Jordan didn’t care. This was his entree to outline his theory of Hillary Clinton as a serial liar:

If there’s no evidence for a video-inspired protest, then where did the false narrative start? It started with you, Madam Secretary.

….Here’s what I think is going on….A key campaign theme that year was: “GM’s alive, bin Laden’s dead,” Al Qaida’s on the run. And 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 a protest about a video. That won’t hurt you. But a terrorist attack will. So you can’t be square with the American people. You tell your family it’s a terrorist attack, but not the American people. You can tell the president of Libya it’s a terrorist attack, but not the American people. And you can tell the Egyptian prime minister it’s a terrorist attack, but you can’t tell your own people the truth.

PETER ROSKAM had prepared a long line of questioning that turned out to be a tortured attempt to somehow get Hillary to concede that there was such as thing as a “Clinton Doctrine.” She never did, but Roskam soldiered on anyway. He’d spent a lot of time on this, and he just had to get it off his chest:

Two months before the end of the Gadhafi regime and you’re already planning on how to make your statement dramatic to maximize political gains, isn’t that right?….Let me tell you what I think the Clinton doctrine is. I think it’s where an opportunity is seized to turn progress in Libya into a political win for Hillary Rodham Clinton, and at the precise moment when things look good, take a victory lap, like on all the Sunday shows three times that year before Gadhafi was killed. And then turn your attention to other things.

MARTHA ROBY was bound and determined to string out a long line of obviously immaterial questions designed solely to establish what a calculating, uncaring person Hillary Clinton is. She started by insisting that Clinton help her individually name each and every person who was still at work when Clinton left for home on the evening of 9/11/2012. Then she moved on to whether Clinton had personally spoken to the survivors of the Benghazi attacks:

ROBY: Your surviving agents were evacuated to Tripoli the morning of the 12th. Did you talk to the survivors either that night or once they arrived in Tripoli?

CLINTON: We did not speak to them directly. We obviously made arrangements for them to be safely evacuated, and then to be transported to a hospital facility that we thought was safe from any potential attacks.

ROBY: Did you talk to them the next day?

CLINTON: No.

ROBY: Did you talk to them later that week?

CLINTON: No, I did not.

ROBY: Did you talk to them when they first got back to the United States?

CLINTON: I did not talk to them until they had had an opportunity to be debriefed and to provide information that would help us understand what happened; help the intelligence community and help the FBI as they were trying to build their case.

ROBY: How would it have harmed the case that they were trying to build for you, secretary of state, just to check in on their well being?

CLINTON: I did check on their well being.

ROBY: No, personally.

CLINTON: Well, I did personally talk with the people who were taking care of them, transporting them….

ROBY: Again, the survivors — when did you talk to the survivors?

CLINTON: I talked to the survivors when they came back to the United States. And one who was for many months in Walter Reed on the telephone.

….ROBY: Your people were on the ground in harm’s way and you never had a conversation with them….I think, Mr. Chairman, there’s two messages here. I think the first message is the message that you sent to your personnel the night of the attack that you went home. They all stayed there and you didn’t go back until the next morning.

I think the second message that is sent is that you used the FBI’s inquiry as an excuse not to check in with your agents who were on the ground who survived that horrible night just to ask them how they were.

LYNN WESTMORELAND thought it was damn suspicious that other Secretaries of State had also used private email accounts when they were in office. After all, that conveniently helps Hillary make the case that she wasn’t doing anything very unusual. None of this has anything to do with Benghazi, but Westmoreland really, really wanted to offer up his home-brew theory about how that happened:

In August, the State Department met with your attorneys to talk about the lack of the e-mails that they had….Let me tell you what I thought. I think that your attorneys sat down with the State Department and they said, we got a problem. And so, we got to come up with something that this is not just the Secretary having these e-mails in a private server.

So I tell you what let’s do. Let’s go back and ask Madeleine Albright, who was Secretary of State in 1997, that never even had an e-mail account. Or let’s go back and ask, you know, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and me to find all this information. I’m just telling you, it smells — it doesn’t smell right.

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The Very Best of the Benghazi Hearing

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The Benghazi Charade Is Finally Melting Away

Mother Jones

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Republican congressman Richard Hanna talks about the Benghazi committee today:

This may not be politically correct, but I think that there was a big part of this investigation that was designed to go after people and an individual, Hillary Clinton.

Hanna supports gay rights, so I suppose that basically makes him a Democrat who can be ignored on this subject. Still, the evidence that Republican leaders viewed the committee as mostly a way of making trouble for Hillary Clinton is sure getting tough to dismiss. Greg Sargent comments on how Team Hillary is exploiting this:

It isn’t just that Clinton is using the new GOP quotes to tar it as a partisan exercise and attack its credibility, though that is a key goal….The idea is to turn the ongoing Benghazi battle with Republicans into an emblem of her willingness to fight on in the face of determined opposition — thus playing to one of her strengths, i.e., perceptions of her tenaciousness.

Maybe. But I’d say there’s something else at work here. Do you remember Mitt Romney’s big problem back in 2012? He was perceived as too moderate by the base of the Republican Party. He addressed this by endlessly making over-the-top attacks on President Obama. The calculus was simple: the base hated Obama more than they distrusted Romney, so he could gain their trust by showing that he hated Obama more than anyone else.

Hillary is playing a similar game here. The Democratic base distrusts her, but they hate Republicans more than they distrust Hillary. By making it clear that she’s the primary target of Republican attacks, she’s tapping into that. If Republicans hate her more than anyone, she must have something going for her. Plus there’s just the Pavlovian instinct to defend any Democrat against Republican attacks. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Republicans have screwed the pooch on Benghazi. The press can only play along with their faux investigation as long as they maintain plausible deniability about its partisan goals. But now we have (a) Kevin McCarthy spilling the beans, (b) news reports that John Boehner wanted to use the committee to attack Hillary, (c) Richard Hanna agreeing that it was mostly a partisan witch hunt, and (d) no less than the New York Times reporting that the committee has all but given up on Benghazi in favor of holding hearings on Hillary’s email server. We knew all along there was a man behind the curtain, but now he’s actually been exposed. It’s getting harder and harder to play along with the charade.

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The Benghazi Charade Is Finally Melting Away

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