Bengaaaazzziiiiiiiii. !!!!!!!!

[spence]

Originally Posted by PaulS

That is exactly it - expenses. They just said they would not even ask for any $ to cover their expenses now.

Now if only Carly would admit that her accusations where out and out lies.

I'm just surprised Jim could have been complaining so long about this and not taken the time to understand the key accusation.

As for Carly, it's scary to think someone who wants to be POTUS would bone up on the issues by buying into the equivalent of Facebook memes.

[JohnR]

One of the big issues is that entire gaps in her emails around Benghazi were missing. Before people were on to her having her own server (that she is not supposed to). Seeing that she may have conducted her own extragovernmental intelligence in Libya, hidden on her email server, outside of proper and official channels, where people died - yeh it is important.

Even if she is completely clean wrt Benghazi (in the realm of possibility) she may have been covering for her server that she should not have had.

[spence]

Originally Posted by JohnR

One of the big issues is that entire gaps in her emails around Benghazi were missing. Before people were on to her having her own server (that she is not supposed to). Seeing that she may have conducted her own extragovernmental intelligence in Libya, hidden on her email server, outside of proper and official channels, where people died - yeh it is important.

Curious as to why 7 previous investigations didn't find any gaps. Perhaps it's because the initial Daily Caller piece that made the accusation more recently ended up walking it back.

Actually the number of stories, let by many in the NYT have been corrected because they contained bad information.

The DOJ has made a statement her use of private email and choosing which emails to file was within the law.

The Blumenthal thing doesn't appear to implicate her. The one incident of him passing along a CIA source could get him in trouble but I don't see how she is tarnished.

[scottw]

Originally Posted by spence

I don't see how she is tarnished.

blind devotion

[Jim in CT]

Originally Posted by spence

I'm just surprised Jim could have been complaining so long about this and not taken the time to understand the key accusation.

As for Carly, it's scary to think someone who wants to be POTUS would bone up on the issues by buying into the equivalent of Facebook memes.

I understood that there was little if any evidence that they profited by it, but rather, just covered their expenses. My concern was how ghoulish they acted, and whether or not they altered abortion procedures to maximize the harvest.

Furthermore, I didn't like the way they claimed the tapes were "edited", yet never denied the accuracy of what was on the tapes.

Again, how do you take an organization seriously that says "those tapes were edited. Besides, what was shown on there, we promise not to do again".

It seems that what was on those tapes (as opposed to claims of profiteering) was exactly accurate. Yet you claimed the videos were "discredited". Since PP promises not to do it again, that seems to imply that they were engaged in that practice up until now, which seems to imply that the tapes were perfectly accurate.

[PaulS]

The unfortunate thing is that the committee has lost sight of what they were originally set up to do - look at the security for our overseas facilities.

[justplugit]

Originally Posted by PaulS

The unfortunate thing is that the committee has lost sight of what they were originally set up to do - look at the security for our overseas facilities.

No ,it's just the fact that the illegal server and e mails came up during the committee investigation. The FBI doesn't get involved in these things unless
they are sure there is really something to investigate.

[PaulS]

Originally Posted by justplugit

No ,it's just the fact that the illegal server and e mails came up during the committee investigation. The FBI doesn't get involved in these things unless
they are sure there is really something to investigate.

Illegal? I didn't know they were "illegal". Do you have a link to anything that says they were "illegal"?

So you don't care that nothing will be done to prevent the future death/destruction of our embassies and personnel?

[spence]

Originally Posted by PaulS

Illegal? I didn't know they were "illegal". Do you have a link to anything that says they were "illegal"?

I'm pretty sure Sean Hannity said it was illegal.

Oops...

http://democrats.benghazi.house.gov/...CIA_Source.pdf

[Jim in CT]

Originally Posted by PaulS

Illegal? I didn't know they were "illegal". Do you have a link to anything that says they were "illegal"?

So you don't care that nothing will be done to prevent the future death/destruction of our embassies and personnel?

The FBI, currently headed by Barack Obama (who last time I checked, was registered in the same party as Hilary), has decided that there's sufficient likelihood laws were broken, to launch an investigation.

The FBI doesn't launch an investigation just because one asks them to.

I cannot believe she's going to get indicted. But I really, really hope she does.

[Doover]

The KilderBeast stormed into Kissys office and demanded call off your dogs Biraq!
What other proof does one need to know this is a political WITCH hunt?

[spence]

Originally Posted by Jim in CT

I cannot believe she's going to get indicted. But I really, really hope she does.

I think our nation will be much better off if she's not...the partisan payback would be hell and just continue to rip this country apart.

Why is it that some seem to think bringing the Clinton's down will bring about the second coming of Jesus Christ?

[justplugit]

Originally Posted by PaulS

Illegal? I didn't know they were "illegal". Do you have a link to anything that says they were "illegal"?

Check out:
Slate March 3 2015
This will show all you need to know about the illegal vs should have known as it was Protocol.
IMHO she should have known the dangers of a private server vs a government server with all it's privacy, in her position. If she didn't I would have to question her decesion and
common sense.

[PaulS]

Servers aren't illegal. Agree using private email was stupid
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device

[Doover]

Jeepers? It looks like the State Department JUST turned over 1300 email documents concerning OUR dead Ambassador Chris Stevens.

I wonder if these papers where found in the same wash room as the KilderBeast Whitewater documents?

[Fishpart]

I think the Whitehouse and Hildabeast are protesting just a little too much hoping that Tyranny of the Press will make this go away..

[PaulS]

Did Gowdy really release the name of a CIA agent?

[spence]

Originally Posted by PaulS

Did Gowdy really release the name of a CIA agent?

He did reveal the name of a CIA source, but it doesn't matter because it was an accident right

Here's what it looks like actually happened.

The investigation found an email from Sid Blumenthal that named a CIA source in Libya, a source mind you that was publicly known at the time. Hillary forwarded that email to someone at State. In an attempt to provide proof to the media Clinton had indeed passed along "classified" information -- as well as likely trying to distract from all the Republicans admitting the investigation is a partisan hit job --Gowdy actually made his own redactions to the email and made it public.

After that blew up he then made public several more emails one of which had the CIA source's name uncensored.

The CIA has reviewed all the emails from Blumenthal and found none contained classified information. The State Department did redact the name of the CIA contact on most emails just so they wouldn't be pulled into the mess.

So Gowdy screwed up twice. 1) He manipulated a Clinton email in an attempt to mislead people and 2) He then accidentally revealed the source he wrongly stated was classified.

What a joke.

[PaulS]

Glad to hear it was an accident. Repubs. do have a history of revealing CIA agent names for political purposes.

[Doover]

Now look what THEY have done!

Those fachachin Pubes have exposed the KilderBeast's State Department had a California Company running guns in Libya!

Darn them.

[Doover]

Jeepers! Wikileaks also hacked into the CIA's emal account!

Wonder if he had one of those ILLEGAL servers in his barn too?

[spence]

Originally Posted by PaulS

Glad to hear it was an accident. Repubs. do have a history of revealing CIA agent names for political purposes.

But only for retribution which is OK in my book.

[scottw]

great article re: today's hearings from Andy McCarthy

Hillary Clinton’s Appearance Before the Benghazi Committee
By Andrew C. McCarthy — October 21, 2015

Hillary Clinton has done Trey Gowdy an enormous favor. In anticipation of her testimony on Thursday before the Benghazi select committee he chairs, and with a lot of Republican help, she has framed the committee as a partisan political witch-hunt obsessed with dashing her presidential ambitions.

To regain credibility, all Gowdy needs to do is demonstrate that it is not. Meaning: all Gowdy needs to do is focus on why the United States had its officials stationed in Benghazi, one of the world’s most dangerous places for Americans.

What mission was so essential that it was necessary to keep Americans on-site when the jihadist threat had become so intense that other nations and organizations were pulling their people out?

These questions implicate disastrous policy that was, very much, bipartisan policy: (a) withdrawing American support for the Qaddafi regime that our government was funding and allied with against jihadist terror; (b) switching sides to aid and arm the jihadist-rife “rebels” who opposed Qaddafi; (c) waging a war under false pretenses – i.e., working for Qaddafi’s ouster, without congressional authorization, under the guise of a U.N. mandate that only permitted the protection of civilians; and (d) transitioning from support of Libyan jihadists to support for Syrian jihadists – i.e., transitioning from the policy that has left Libya a failed state with a growing ISIS and al Qaeda foot print, to a policy that contributed to the ascendancy of ISIS – by among other things, abetting the shipment of weapons from Libya to Syria.

Getting answers on how and why these actions were taken is the business of statesmanship, not partisanship. It is a business for which the committee, to this point, has shown little zest.

Well, on Thursday, Chairman Gowdy will have the nation’s attention. It’s now or never.

Camp Clinton’s relentless attacks on the committee should have had little persuasive force. The Clintons exude partisan hardball, a fact only highlighted by the herculean efforts Mrs. Clinton has made to impede fact-finding. That she is nevertheless getting traction owes to three factors.

The first two are obvious. There is the stunning cluelessness of Congressman Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.), who discredited the committee by publicly suggesting – bragging might be a better way of putting it – that it has succeeded in damaging Clinton’s presidential campaign. Then there are committee Democrats, who have maintained from the start, in naked partisanship, that the GOP-ordained panel is a farce.

For the third, Gowdy has no one to blame but himself. He has insisted that the committee do almost all of its work behind the scenes, despite the fact that this is not a criminal investigation of private wrongdoing shrouded in grand jury secrecy rules but, rather, an investigation by the people’s representatives to establish public accountability for government derelictions of duty.

There is, of course, a place for doing private interviews. They can be more productive than the posturing and sometime-circus atmosphere of open congressional hearings. But if you do virtually everything in secret, you give your opposition the opportunity to define your actions and motives without adequate rebuttal – a lesson a lawyer as sharp as Gowdy should have learned from the number Camp Clinton did on Ken Starr.

In the absence of open committee hearings that could have proved the good faith of committee Republicans to the public, we got months upon months of silence. Gowdy, inadvertently or not, then fueled the witch-hunt accusations by seeming to come to life only after news of Clinton’s lawless private server system surfaced in the spring.

There are extraordinarily good reasons for pouncing on Clinton’s obstruction: No fact-finding investigation can be competent and complete unless the investigators get access to the relevant evidence – and obstruction by key players is itself important evidence of their state of mind, shedding critical light on their actions.

Gowdy, however, did not stir until the Clinton private email scheme surfaced – a lapse compounded when the chairman conceded that he’d known about private system for months before news of it broke publicly, yet had failed either to (a) use his subpoena power to compel production of the emails, or (b) raise holy hell in Congress and the media – something he is quite good at – that would have shamed the Justice Department into seizing the private servers months earlier.

By doing next to nothing in public for over a year and then quite publicly complaining about the emails only after they became a subject of controversy, Gowdy has helped Democrats portray his investigation as political opportunism only tangentially related to the only thing that makes the emails pertinent – what they tell us about the security failures that led to the Benghazi massacre and the “blame the video” fraud that followed it.

Thursday, Chairman Gowdy has the chance to make things right. He will fail, however, if he does not tightly focus on the flawed policies and serious errors in judgment for which not only Mrs. Clinton but the Obama administration and congressional leaders of both parties are responsible.

Six more pieces of unsolicited advice for the committee:

1. The Accountability Review Board: be ready to destroy its credibility in the first five minutes, or just adjourn the hearing.

Mrs. Clinton is nothing if not utterly predictable. She and the State Department have been touting the ARB to anyone who would listen – from the time its report was issued in 2012 through her most recent dismissive comments about Gowdy’s committee. But the ARB investigation is a patent joke. It was the State Department investigating itself: Giving the ARB the undeserved benefit of the doubt, its purpose was not to establish accountability but to posit curative steps that would prevent a similar debacle from happening in the future. So even if the ARB were not a farce, it had a very different purpose from the Gowdy committee’s.

But it was a farce. Mrs. Clinton hand-picked the investigators, who conveniently and compliantly did not bother to interview her and other key Benghazi players. Moreover, it is abundantly clear that Mrs. Clinton withheld hundreds of her own emails from the ARB and that it did not have access to other highly relevant information. Further, a top State Department official has publicly stated that he walked in on an effort led by then-secretary Clinton’s staff to conceal unflattering information from the files being amassed for review by the ARB.

Clinton is going to keep hammering at the talking-point that there is nothing to see here because the ARB already did a thorough investigation, which – surprise! – cleared her. Gowdy and other committee Republicans have to be prepared to destroy the ARB as a sham. If, in the Washington way, they tip-toe around the sham because Hillary’s carefully chosen investigators were – surprise! – old Washington hands, the ballgame is over. The ARB can’t just be bruised; it has to be, and deserves to be, beaten to a pulp.

2. Mrs. Clinton’s soliloquies have to be mocked.

One of the reasons Clinton shrewdly declined to submit to a private committee interview is the calculation that she can control the public forum. There is no judge at a congressional hearing – no impartial presiding official who can order and shame witnesses (or, for that matter, questioners) to stick to the subject and not use the proceeding as a soap box. The former secretary and senator figures she can run the clock making long speeches spiced with faux indignation (“What difference, at this point, does it make …?”), with the Congress critters eventually becoming bored, frustrated, and ready to pack it in.

The way good trial lawyers deal with this tactic is to mock it. When Clinton starts this routine, probably in the first few minutes, somebody has to be ready to ask her how many times she practiced that speech in front of the mirror before coming to the hearing. They have to be ready to remind her of the question she has failed to answer – and that she has failed to answer it. Either the questioners control the witness or the witness controls the hearing. There’s no middle ground.

3. Similarly, committee Republicans have to be ready for the shenanigans of committee Democrats in service of Mrs. Clinton’s evasions.

Someone needs to be armed with the number of witness interviews committee Democrats have skipped, the documents they’ve not bothered to review.

Gowdy has said the reason for all the committee’s behind the scenes work was to assemble and master the facts of the case. Well, now’s the time to show you’ve mastered them: call your adversaries on their misstatements, show everyone that there is a real investigation here that they are trying to obscure. Be ready with the endorsements of Clinton’s candidacy they’ve touted. And while marshaling all this information, it would be effective to remind people that this is about murdered Americans who deserved the Democrats’ attention, not their gamesmanship.

4. The thousands of recently produced emails and documents.

As late as this week, the Obama State Department dumped 1300 of Ambassador Stevens’ emails on the committee. This stonewalling has gone on for years.

Mrs. Clinton is going to be ready to catalogue the investigations by the executive branch and several congressional committees in order to suggest that Benghazi has already been exhaustively probed. Gowdy’s committee, she’ll repeat, is unnecessary – just a Republican stunt to derail her campaign.

To refute this effectively, committee Republicans have to be ready to list, in exacting detail, the mounds upon mounds of evidence that was never reviewed – emails hidden, witnesses ignored – in those investigations. Incomplete, incompetent investigations get to the bottom of nothing, no matter how impressive-sounding the investigative body. And again, the Americans killed and wounded, their loved ones, and the country deserved better from Washington.

5. Remember Gregory Hicks.

Mrs. Clinton, the State Department, and the White House have their story down on the “Blame the Video” fraud they perpetrated: “We had determined that the anti-Muslim video was responsible for the rioting at the American embassy in Egypt earlier on September 11, 2012; in the fog of war, it was reasonable to presume that the video had the same instigating effect when it came to the violence in Libya.”

Committee Republicans must be armed with the facts that show the White House and State Department knew from the first minutes that the Benghazi siege was a terrorist attack, and that intelligence community talking points were willfully edited to conceal that fact. The CIA did not believe the video had anything to do with the violence. More significantly, Greg Hicks – the senior State Department official on the ground in Libya that night after Stevens was killed – was categorical is asserting that the video “was a non-event” in Libya. The video story appears to have been concocted for public consumption late on the night of the attacks … very shortly after Secretary Clinton and President Obama spoke on the phone.

6. Leave the criminal investigation to the FBI.

Mrs. Clinton’s reckless mishandling of national defense information is not the subject of the committee’s inquiry. Congress does not have the legal means or authority to resolve whether laws were broken. To give the appearance that this is what the committee is trying to do would play into the Clinton narrative that the committee is a partisan witch-hunt.

The emails are relevant to the cause of political accountability: showing what actually happened in the key Benghazi events and illustrating that Mrs. Clinton and the State Department had a motive – their disastrous performance of their duties – to withhold evidence. That’s what the committee is there to explore. Leave the criminal case to the FBI and the Justice Department.

[spence]

Hillary Clinton has done Trey Gowdy an enormous favor. In anticipation of her testimony on Thursday before the Benghazi select committee he chairs, and with a lot of Republican help, she has framed the committee as a partisan political witch-hunt obsessed with dashing her presidential ambitions.

I love it, so Hillary is in cahoots with the Republicans to discredit the committee.

To give the appearance that this is what the committee is trying to do would play into the Clinton narrative that the committee is a partisan witch-hunt.

Which Gowdy has been caught red handed doing...

[Jim in CT]

Spence, you have said, maybe with some merit, that there is no valid reason for th ehearing today, because there are no unanswered questions, no new additional information.

From Gowdy's opening statement...

"Just last month, three years after Benghazi, top aides finally returned documents to the State Department. A month ago, this Committee received 1500 new pages of Secretary Clinton's emails related to Libya and Benghazi. 3 years after the attacks. A little over two weeks ago, this Committee received roughly 1400 pages of Ambassador Stevens' emails. 3 years after the attacks"

Is Gowdy lying here? Or were you, as always, putting your personal spin on your statements?

If Gowdy isn't lying, why does it take 3 years to get that information to the Committee?

[spence]

Originally Posted by Jim in CT

Spence, you have said, maybe with some merit, that there is no valid reason for th ehearing today, because there are no unanswered questions, no new additional information.

I've listened to a lot of the hearing today and have yet to see any new information from any new emails. The Republicans are very angry though. I thought this wasn't supposed to be about Hillary but wow, they sure have mounted a carefully planned attack against her character. I'm glad my tax dollars are paying for this.

They have been fruitlessly trying to push the Blumenthal conspiracy theory of what I don't really understand.

It's not over but Clinton is winning here big time.

[Nebe]

6 hours of interrogation with hopes of Hillary providing some magical sound bites to use against her.
What a joke and what a dishonor to those who made the ultimate sacrifice.
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device

[Doover]

And then just like ground hog day the kilderbeast regurgitates the horrible video lie!

[JohnR]

Ahhh but the email to her daughter states the attack in Libya was known to be an AQ affiliate and not video based, on the night of the event, and in the weeks before the debates. So there was emails from HRC regarding Benghazi.

So, 1400 emails/documents (with more reportedly on the way) dumped the night before the testimony. Yes, this the previous investigations have all been above board with all of the information made available /sarc

[spence]

Originally Posted by JohnR

Ahhh but the email to her daughter states the attack in Libya was known to be an AQ affiliate and not video based, on the night of the event,

Did you listen to her response?
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device