Author Topic: Hillary Clinton: Incompetence, Corruption, Sleeze, Lies, Deceit, Theft Thread  (Read 45501 times)

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EXCLUSIVE: HILLARY CLINTON AND HER STAFF MAY HAVE COMPROMISED COUNTERTERRORISM OPS WITH ‘SLOPPY’ COMMUNICATIONS

http://www.newsweek.com/hillary-clinton-email-terrorism-sloppy-communications-463605

Updated | A retired senior State Department military adviser claims that Hillary Clinton’s “sloppy communications with her senior staff” when she was secretary of state may have compromised at least two counterterrorism operations.

Bill Johnson, who was the State Department’s political adviser to the special operations section of the U.S. Pacific Command, or PACOM, in 2010 and 2011, says secret plans to eliminate the leader of a Filipino Islamist separatist group and intercept Chinese-made weapons components being smuggled into Iraq were repeatedly foiled.

Johnson says he and his team eliminated the possibility of other security leaks before settling on the unprotected telephone calls of the secretary of state and her aides as the likely source—though he quickly adds they have “no proof.” 

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“I had several missions that went inexplicably wrong, with the targets one step ahead of us,” Johnson tells Newsweek in an exclusive interview.

Clinton’s spokesman Nick Merrill calls the allegations "patently false."

RTSFXHB
Hillary Clinton speaks at the UFCW Union Local 324 in Buena Park, California, on May 25.
REUTERS/LUCY NICHOLSON

Johnson's target in the Philippines was Umbra Jumdail, also known as Dr. Abu, the founder of the Muslim militant group Abu Sayyaf, which the State Department officially designated a terrorist organization in 1997. U.S. advisers were assisting Filipino military units. 

“We had good intel. We knew where he was,” says Johnson, who worked in U.S. Air Force special operations with Army Green Beret and Navy SEAL units for more than 25 years before joining the State Department in 1999. “He would be gone three hours before, sometimes as little as a half-hour before” the counterterrorism teams moved in. “We knew he was getting tipped off somehow. We just didn’t know why.”

They began to investigate. The U.S. team advising the Filipino forces swapped out one local counterterrorism unit it was working with for another in an effort to locate the source of the leaks, Johnson says. But Dr. Abu still managed to elude them. The reason, he believes: unsecure chatter between Washington and the U.S. Embassy in Manila.

“Anyone can just sit outside the embassy and listen,” with off-the-shelf eavesdropping devices, he says. “We suspected the leaks [came from] somewhere at State at the time.”

As a dramatic solution, the Special Operations Command stopped giving advance warning to senior State Department officials about raids, Johnson says. Whatever the cause, the leaks stopped. In February 2012, Dr. Abu and two other senior militants were eventually killed in what was described as “a U.S.-backed airstrike.”

Around the same time, a U.S. special operations unit was tracking agents from the United Arab Emirates, who were suspected of buying advanced remote-control bomb devices from China to use against U.S. troops in Iraq. Their main smuggling route led through Thailand. U.S. counterterrorism agents set a trap for them in Bangkok, Johnson says, but “word of it leaked.” He suspected the “sloppy” communication habits of Clinton and senior State Department staff were to blame, but again, he admits, “I had no proof.”

Johnson, who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and now supports Senator Bernie Sanders, says he had previously witnessed the lax communications habits of Clinton and her aides. In January 2010, Clinton was in Honolulu to give a speech on the administration’s “pivot” to Asia when news of the Haiti earthquake broke. She retreated to the secure communications facility in the basement of Pacific Command headquarters to make calls to various military officials and humanitarian groups to help organize a response to the catastrophe. But she also “needed to talk to her senior staff on Mahogany Row,” her seventh-floor executive suite back in Washington, Johnson recalls.

The only problem: She did not readily have any secure telephone numbers or email addresses for her staff members because they were all using personal servers and phones. Security had prevented her traveling aides from bringing their personal cellphones into PACOM headquarters. They appealed to Johnson for an exception, but he refused, citing alarms and lockdowns that would be automatically triggered by any attempt to bring unauthorized signal-emitting units into the building.

Clinton came up with a work-around, Johnson says. “She had her aides go out, retrieve their phones and call the seventh floor from outside”—on open, unsecure lines, he says.

“My relationship with that group started downhill when I refused to let them bring phones and computers into my office [at the Special Operations Command],” Johnson recalls. “It was really an eye-opener to watch them stand outside using nonsecure comms [communications] and then bring messages to the secretary so she could then conduct a secure [call] with the military” and the State Department.

State Department security officials warned Clinton’s senior aides about the risks of using unsecure devices right after they came into office in January 2009, according multiple media accounts and the department’s inspector general report, which was published on Tuesday. The security briefing would hardly have seemed necessary after decades of revelations that foreign intelligence services and hackers were breaking into U.S. government computer networks. But the State Department’s devices and systems were “so antiquated,” according to a former top official quoted in the report, “that NO ONE uses a State-issued laptop and even high officials routinely end up using their home email accounts to be able to get their work done quickly and effectively.”

So it was with Clinton and her staff. Plus, they were “dedicated [BlackBerry] addicts,” according to one of many such accounts in The Washington Post and elsewhere over the past year. 

Johnson says the email scandal dogging Clinton “could've been avoided if the CIA gave her a secure phone. She requested one,” he adds, “but they turned it down.”

A CIA spokesman said the agency could not immediately comment without studying the matter further.

The inspector general’s report does not have Clinton’s name in its title, but Tuesday’s headlines leave the impression it’s all about her. In fact, as the report notes in depth, her immediate predecessors and their staffs ignored the security rules too.

“For instance,” it says, “more than 90 department employees who served on the immediate staffs” of her immediate predecessors Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell "periodically used personal email accounts” to conduct official business. The report also fingered Jonathan Scott Gration, a former U.S. ambassador to Kenya, for using “non-Departmental systems on an exclusive basis for day-to-day operations.”

Powell, secretary of state during the first term of President George W. Bush, admitted to the inspector general “that he accessed [his personal] email account via his personal laptop computer in his office, while traveling, and at his residence, but not through a mobile device.” Rice, who succeeded Powell, “did not use either personal or Department email accounts for official business,” the inspector general reported. As for her staff, “only one acknowledged the use of personal email,” the report said.

Yet the use of personal email for government purposes seemed to explode in the second year of Clinton’s tenure when “more than 9,200 emails were sent within one week from [senior State Department executives] via “16 web-based email domains, including gmail.com, hotmail.com, and att.net,” the inspector general reported.

With more than six months to go until the presidential election, the FBI investigation into Clinton’s handling of classified material is continuing with no “external deadline,” according to FBI Director James Comey. He has, however, “acknowledged that there is pressure to wrap up the matter promptly and thoroughly,” The Washington Post reported.

For her part, Clinton has toggled between admitting she made “a mistake” with her handling of emails and insisting that “what I did was allowed. It was allowed by the State Department," she said last September. “The State Department has confirmed that.”

All of which disturbs Bill Johnson, now retired in Florida after nearly 40 years of military and State Department service.

“For the most part, my work with Secretary Clinton was spent working on common goals,” he says. “She once told me that when she spoke of ‘smart power,’ it was me she had in mind.”

Today, he says, “I wouldn't be so hard on her if she had simply admitted that what she did was wrong."

“But to insist she's done nothing wrong,” he adds, “is beyond the pale.”

This story has been updated to include a comment from Clinton's spokesman.


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We Now Know Hillary Lied Multiple Times About Her Email Server
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May 26, 2016

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Ever since news broke that Hillary Clinton used an unauthorized and unsecured private e-mail server for all of her correspondence as secretary of state, she has defended herself with several arguments. None of the information transmitted through the server was classified, Clinton insisted at first, a claim that has been proven false in well over a thousand instances.

Even after that fell apart, Clinton claimed that the use of private e-mail for official business fell within the rules of the State Department and that she had ensured that the server met the department’s security requirements.

Related: Clinton’s Staff Ignored Investigators as They Looked Into Her Emails

Finally, Clinton insisted that she and her team complied with the Federal Records Act by making sure that their correspondence got copied to other State Department addresses. Clinton explained this decision by insisting that she wanted the most efficient method of handling electronic communications, even if in retrospect that decision turned out to be regrettable.

Regrets should be coming, but not in the way Clinton has suggested. State’s Inspector General released the long-awaited report into Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server – and it contradicts every excuse Clinton has offered over the last fifteen months.

The use of private e-mail might have been interpreted to be acceptable prior to 2009, when Clinton first assumed office as secretary of state, but by then, “the department’s guidance was considerably more detailed and sophisticated,” the IG concludes. From 2005 forward and for at least two years into her tenure, State had issued a number of memoranda detailing the need – nay, the “obligation” – to use the department’s own communications systems, even for sensitive-but-unclassifed (SBU) material.

Related: How the FBI Could Derail Hillary Clinton’s Presidential Run

If a need arose to use an outside communications channel to transmit SBU data, then Clinton should have “requested a solution” from within the department. Instead, the IG found “no evidence that Secretary Clinton ever requested such a solution, despite the fact that emails exchanged on her personal account regularly contained information marked as SBU.”

The IG also rebutted claims that Clinton ever put “robust protections” on her server, claims that appear on Clinton’s website. State’s information-management groups told the IG that Clinton had never checked with them at all. Neither her server nor the mobile device Clinton used to access it had ever been certified to meet standards established before Clinton took office. Furthermore, no official recalled Clinton ever checking to ensure that the use of the server was acceptable – and that such a request would have been rejected outright had she made one.

Perhaps most notably, officials at State issued multiple warnings about records retention in relation to Clinton’s use of the private server, especially given the need for FOIA and Congressional access to official State business. In 2010 and in 2011, the issue arose, but in both cases the discussion got shut down.

The first query was dismissed by Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, claiming that the requirement to use two devices for official and personal e-mail “didn’t make a lot of sense.” Staffers raised concerns again the next January, but were told by a director that Clinton had received approval for her private server, even though she never requested it. Furthermore, the same official “instructed the staff never to speak of the Secretary’s personal e-mail system again.”

Related: Another Batch of Clinton State Dept. Emails Included ‘Top Secret’ Material

To recap: Clinton lied about having approval for the system. She lied about saying it was within the rules to use it, and that she had brought the server up to State Department security standards. Contrary to multiple statements from her team, not only did warnings arise about the use of that system during her tenure, those who raised the red flags were told to shut up about them.  And despite assurances that Clinton would cooperate in reviews of her use of the private e-mail system, the IG report pointedly notes that “[t]hrough her counsel, Secretary Clinton declined OIG’s request for an interview.”

For someone who’s been insisting since the beginning that she was allowed to operate her own e-mail system, that refusal is stunning all on its own.

That also contradicts more recent Clinton statements. The FBI has begun to interview Clinton’s inner circle, a sign that the investigation is coming to a conclusion. Two weeks ago, Clinton told CBS News’ Face the Nation host John Dickerson that the FBI had not yet requested an interview, but that she would be “more than ready to talk to anyone, anytime.” The IG report clearly shows that as another lie, and if her attorneys kept her from talking with State Department investigators, it’s almost certain that she’d pass on an FBI “interview” as well.

Related: If Clinton Loses Her Security Clearance, Could She Still Be President?

The new IG report gives clarity to the screamingly obvious. Hillary Clinton used an unauthorized and unsecured private e-mail server to avoid compliance with legitimate Congressional oversight and Freedom of Information Act requests. Under her leadership, the State Department misled several courts and a number of Congressional inquiries about the existence of Clinton’s e-mails.

In doing so, she allowed the system to transmit and retain highly classified information relating to intelligence and national security, putting that data and those responsible for collecting it in danger. Clinton did so recklessly, negligently, and in violation of 18 USC 793 and 18 USC 1924 – statutes that identify such transgressions as felonies.

What happens if the FBI investigation goes to a grand jury? We might have the spectacle of a major-party nominee getting subpoenaed to testify in a criminal inquiry – and taking the Fifth to avoid self-incrimination. And that might be the most honest statement that Clinton would have made about her secret e-mail server in the past fifteen months.

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WTF?  Soul Crusher's back?  Man, we're ya been?

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WTF?  Soul Crusher's back?  Man, we're ya been?

Training hard - real hard.  Been killing it. 

Big goals for 2017

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/opinion/hillary-clinton-drowning-in-email.html?ref=opinion


Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency just got harder with the release of the State Department inspector general’s finding that “significant security risks” were posed by her decision to use a private email server for personal and official business while she was secretary of state. Contrary to Mrs. Clinton’s claims that the department had “allowed” the arrangement, the inspector general also found that she had not sought or received approval to use the server.

So far, no security breaches have been reported; a separate F.B.I. investigation is looking into that. But above and beyond security questions, the inspector general’s report is certain to fuel doubts about Mrs. Clinton’s trustworthiness, lately measured as a significant problem for her in public polls.



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Training hard - real hard.  Been killing it. 

Big goals for 2017

So you can open a water bottle now?  :)

Welcome back!

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So you can open a water bottle now?  :)

Welcome back!

Bro - since I left - ask grape ape - ive been wrecking shit training wise,. 

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Russia Is Reportedly Set To Release Clinton's Intercepted Emails
oilprice.com ^ | Jun 13, 2016, 2:37 PM | By Defense & Foreign Affairs Staff
Posted on 6/14/2016, 3:53:12 PM by Red Badger

Reliable intelligence sources in the West have indicated that warnings had been received that the Russian Government could in the near future release the text of email messages intercepted from U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server from the time she was U.S. Secretary of State. The release would, the messaging indicated, prove that Secretary Clinton had, in fact, laid open U.S. secrets to foreign interception by putting highly-classified Government reports onto a private server in violation of U.S. law, and that, as suspected, the server had been targeted and hacked by foreign intelligence services.

The reports indicated that the decision as to whether to reveal the intercepts would be made by Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin, and it was possible that the release would, if made, be through a third party, such as Wikileaks. The apparent message from Moscow, through the intelligence community, seemed to indicate frustration with the pace of the official U.S. Department of Justice investigation into the so-called server scandal, which seemed to offer prima facie evidence that U.S. law had been violated by Mrs Clinton’s decision to use a private server through which to conduct official and often highly-secret communications during her time as Secretary of State. U.S. sources indicated that the extensive Deptartment of Justice probe was more focused on the possibility that the private server was used to protect messaging in which Secretary Clinton allegedly discussed quid pro quo transactions with private donors to the Clinton Foundation in exchange for influence on U.S. policy.

(Excerpt) Read more at oilprice.com ...


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Sources: Russian Government Intercepted and Will Release Hillary’s Emails
Breitbart ^ | June 14,2016
Posted on 6/14/2016, 4:00:00 PM by chuckee

WASHINGTON DC – Sources are reporting that the Russian government is prepared to release private emails that it obtained from Hillary Clinton’s email server, proving Clinton allowed classified information to end up in the hands of foreign adversaries.

Intelligence sources are bracing for the Russian release of Clinton’s intercepted emails, according to a report in the trade publication Oilprice.com:

Reliable intelligence sources in the West have indicated that warnings had been received that the Russian Government could in the near future release the text of email messages intercepted from U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server from the time she was U.S. Secretary of State. The release would, the messaging indicated, prove that Secretary Clinton had, in fact, laid open U.S. secrets to foreign interception by putting highly-classified Government reports onto a private server in violation of U.S. law, and that, as suspected, the server had been targeted and hacked by foreign intelligence services. These sources echo similar reports that Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service has numerous Clinton emails, which it obtained by monitoring the hacker Guccifer, who broke into Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal’s email account.

Clinton exchanged highly classified national defense information on her private server and kept her own State Department IT desk in the dark about her use of private email. Clinton could be found guilty of violating the Espionage Act if she is found to have allowed....

(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...

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they said a month ago that they'd release them.  maybe 3 weeks.

what are they waiting for? 

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My big fear in all of this is that now I'm going to have to hear an additional 8 years of ranting from a lunatic over Hillary..... :D

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My big fear in all of this is that now I'm going to have to hear an additional 8 years of ranting from a lunatic over Hillary..... :D

When Obama transition to a woman - will you try to date her?   :D

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When Obama transition to a woman - will you try to date her?   :D

will you?...you seem to be the one obsessed with trannies and gays



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Jun 24, 3:36 AM EDT

CLINTON FAILED TO HAND OVER KEY EMAIL TO STATE DEPARTMENT
BY MICHAEL BIESECKER
ASSOCIATED PRESS

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WASHINGTON (AP) -- Former Secretary Hillary Clinton failed to turn over a copy of a key message involving problems caused by her use of a private homebrew email server, the State Department confirmed Thursday. The disclosure makes it unclear what other work-related emails may have been deleted by the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

The email was included within messages exchanged Nov. 13, 2010, between Clinton and one of her closest aides, Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin. At the time, emails sent from Clinton's BlackBerry device and routed through her private clintonemail.com server in the basement of her New York home were being blocked by the State Department's spam filter. A suggested remedy was for Clinton to obtain a state.gov email account.

"Let's get separate address or device but I don't want any risk of the personal being accessible," Clinton responded to Abedin.

Clinton never used a government account that was set up for her, instead continuing to rely on her private server until leaving office.

The email was not among the tens of thousands of emails Clinton turned over to the agency in response to public records lawsuits seeking copies of her official correspondence. Abedin, who also used a private account on Clinton's server, provided a copy from her own inbox after the State Department asked her to return any work-related emails. That copy of the email was publicly cited last month in a blistering audit by the State Department's inspector general that concluded Clinton and her team ignored clear internal guidance that her email setup violated federal standards and could have left sensitive material vulnerable to hackers.

"While this exchange was not part of the approximately 55,000 pages provided to the State Department by former Secretary Clinton, the exchange was included within the set of documents Ms. Abedin provided the department in response to our March 2015 request," State Department spokesman John Kirby told The Associated Press on Thursday.

Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said she provided "all potentially work-related emails" that were still in her possession when she received the 2014 request from the State Department.

"Secretary Clinton had some emails with Huma that Huma did not have, and Huma had some emails with Secretary Clinton that Secretary Clinton did not have," Fallon said.

Fallon declined to say whether Clinton deleted any work-related emails before they were reviewed by her legal team. Clinton's lead lawyer, David Kendall, did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.

The November 2010 email was among documents released under court order Wednesday to the conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch, which has sued the State Department over access to public records related to the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee's service as the nation's top diplomat between 2009 and 2013. The case is one of about three dozen lawsuits over access to records related to Clinton, including one filed by the AP.

Before turning over her emails to the department for review and potential public release, Clinton and her lawyers withheld thousands of additional emails she said were clearly personal, such as those involving what she described as "planning Chelsea's wedding or my mother's funeral arrangements, condolence notes to friends as well as yoga routines, family vacations."

Clinton has never outlined in detail what criteria she and her lawyers used to determine which emails to release and which to delete, but her 2010 email with Abedin appears clearly work-related under the State Department's own criteria for agency records under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.

Dozens of the emails sent or received by Clinton through her private server were later determined to contain classified material. The FBI has been investigating for months whether Clinton's use of the private email server imperiled government secrets. Agents recently interviewed several of Clinton's top aides, including Abedin.

As part of the probe, Clinton turned over the hard drive from her email server to the FBI. It had been wiped clean, and Clinton has said she did not keep copies of the emails she choose to withhold.

On Wednesday, lawyers from Judicial Watch, a conservative legal organization, questioned under oath Bryan Pagliano, the computer technician who set up Clinton's private server. A transcript released Thursday shows Pagliano repeatedly responded to detailed questions by invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, as he did last year before a congressional committee.

Dozens of questions Pagiliano declined to answer included who paid for the system, whether there was technical help to support its users and who else at the State Department used email accounts on it. Pagliano also would not answer whether he discussed setting up a home server with Clinton prior to her tenure as secretary of state, according to the transcript.

Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said the November 2010 email cited in the inspector general audit was one of more than a dozen work-related emails that his group identified that Clinton sent or received but later failed to turn over the State Department.

"Contrary to her statement under oath suggesting otherwise, Mrs. Clinton did not return all her government emails to the State Department," Fitton said. "Our goal is to find out what other emails Mrs. Clinton and the State Department are hiding."

---

Associated Press reporters Stephen Braun and Jack Gillum contributed from Washington.

---

Follow Michael Biesecker at https://twitter.com/mbieseck

© 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This materi

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Dozens of Clinton meetings left off State schedule: report
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By Julian Hattem - 06/24/16 03:19 PM EDT
Hillary Clinton held dozens of meetings with political donors and other operatives during her time as secretary of State that were left off her official schedule, a new report found, and the State Department Friday refused to defend the apparent omissions.

Documents obtained by the Associated Press as part of a lawsuit involving the Obama administration showed at least 75 meetings with longtime backers of her political efforts, the Clinton Foundation or other interests that were either not included on her official calendar or whose names were not disclosed.

There were at least 114 non-governmental officials who attended those meetings and meals with Clinton, the AP found.

On Friday, State Department spokesman John Kirby refused to defend the discrepancies, citing both the ongoing AP lawsuit and the passage of time.

“Regardless of the ongoing litigation I am not in a position — nor should I be expected to — to speak of the scheduling habits of a previous secretary of State,” Kirby told reporters. “I’m not able to do that.”

“It’s a case of ongoing litigation and I’m simply not able to discuss it further.”

The AP located the discrepancies with Clinton’s schedule by comparing a 1,500-page official calendar with separate plans compiled by Clinton’s aides each day.

The omissions would not amount to violations of the law, and many can be explained by changing circumstances or differing levels of detail between the two records, according to Clinton’s campaign.

But Clinton’s critics are likely to view the episode as an example of excessive secrecy and a questionable mix of government business with outside interests.

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News of the differing calendars comes on top of the intense focus on Clinton’s exclusive use of a personal computer server to send and receive emails while in office, which is now the target of a federal investigation. Critics have also viewed skeptically the web of relationships that Clinton had with outsiders while serving as secretary of State, and how they might have interacted with her family foundation.

During the State Department’s daily press briefing on Friday, Kirby said that Secretary John Kerry’s calendars “are being maintained and preserved as they should be.”

“I can’t speak to how it was done in the past,” he sad. “But the secretary’s calendars are being properly preserved and maintained, and that includes who he’s meeting with.”

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OPINION EDITORIAL
Only thing transparent about Hillary is her dishonesty
By Post Editorial Board June 26, 2016 | 8:02pm
Modal Trigger Only thing transparent about Hillary is her dishonesty
Hillary Clinton Photo: Zumapress
Buried by last week’s Brexit furor was fresh news of Hillary Clinton’s efforts to cover up her abuses of power at the State Department. Two distinct Associated Press scoops show her concealing evidence.

One is just a single e-mail that she chose not to hand over in her supposedly complete dump of her work correspondence. It’s far from the first one recovered from other sources, but it’s telling because she opted to delete just the one e-mail in a long exchange with top aide Huma Abedin.

And because it’s a clear acknowledgment that Clinton’s reliance on her homebrew server posed risks.

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It was November 2010, and Abedin had urged the secretary to get onto the state.gov e-mail system or look at “releasing your email address to the department” because State’s spam filter was blocking messages from clintonemail.com.

No, came Clinton’s reply: “Let’s get separate address or device but I don’t want any risk of the personal being accessible” — almost certainly meaning, accessible to Freedom of Information Act requests.

And it directly contradicts her repeated claims that she relied on the private account purely to avoid having to use more than one device.

The other AP story uncovered the fact that Clinton had scrubbed at least 75 meetings with longtime political donors, Clinton Foundation funders, etc., from her official State calendar.

That is, she didn’t want the public or the press to know how much time she was spending on personal business — or, rather, how much of her work at State was blended right in with pursuing the interests of Clinton Inc.

Here’s the laughable spin from Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill: The candidate “has always made an effort to be transparent since entering public life,” including “asking that 55,000 pages of work e-mails from her time of secretary of state be turned over to the public.”

Yes, the 55,000 pages she handed over after being caught, more than two years after she left office. Team Hillary has yet to explain the work e-mail records we now know she instead opted to destroy.

The only thing transparent about Hillary Clinton is her transparent dishonesty.


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http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-benghazi-democrats-20160627-snap-story.html

House Democrats mistakenly release transcript confirming big payout to Clinton friend Sidney Blumenthal
Sidney Blumenthal

Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime confidant of Hillary Clinton's, told congressional investigators he earned "about $200,000 a year" from a pro-Clinton nonprofit. (Susan Walsh / Associated Press)

Evan Halper
 
The Democrats on the House Benghazi committee released their final conclusions from the inquiry into attacks on Americans in that Libyan city in 2012, and in the report they say, once again, that the investigation is a politically motivated sham aimed at damaging the reputation of Hillary Clinton.

But the report, which the Democrats published as a preemptive strike before the Republican majority releases findings likely to charge ineptitude and deception by the former secretary of State, also revealed, apparently unintentionally, details about the eye-popping amount of money a close Clinton friend and advisor made in a contract with a pro-Clinton nonprofit.

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Democrats released but redacted a transcript of Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal answering the committee’s questions to make the point that Republicans do not want the public to know what went on during the his interrogation, during which GOP members arguably used their subpoena power to conduct political opposition research unrelated to Benghazi. 

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But the redaction marks are easily erased by anyone able to use a computer’s cut-and-paste function. Once the marks are lifted, the transcript portion reveals some unflattering things for any partisans on the committee, Republican or Democrat. It shows that Republicans did, indeed, leverage their subpoena of Blumenthal for political gain, digging into his financial contracts with David Brock and forcing him to reveal the details of a lucrative financial arrangement that congressional sources would ultimately leak to Fox News.

And for Democrats, the exchange exposes once again the absurd amounts of money people in the orbit of the Clintons sometimes seem to rake in just for, well, being in the orbit of the Clintons. “I’d say it’s about $200,000 a year,” Blumenthal said when asked by a committee member how much the part-time work offering up advice and ideas was worth. 

“Redacted due to Chairman Gowdy’s refusal to allow release of transcript,” says a footnote to the pages of thick black redaction marks. “If released, the transcript would show that Republicans asked Mr. Blumenthal questions about his relationship with Media Matters, David Brock and Correct the Record.” Brock is a longtime Clinton loyalist, and Correct the Record and Media Matters are among the nonprofits he uses to attack Clinton opponents.

And how did Blumenthal get such a contract? “I have had a very long friendship with the chairman of Media Matters, whose name is David Brock, from before he founded this organization, and I have sustained that friendship. And he asked me to help provide ideas and advice to him and his organizations,” Blumenthal said.

Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren combine for energetic attack on Donald Trump
Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren combine for energetic attack on Donald Trump
Actually, the two got to know each other during the impeachment of Bill Clinton, during Brock’s former incarnation as a right-wing “hit man” journalist. He was starting to undergo his political conversion and in the process was feeding then-White House aide Blumenthal intelligence about what the right was plotting against Bill Clinton. Both men wrote about it in their books.

Below is the full transcript excerpt that Democrats intended not to publish. It is unclear who the questioner is in the first section.

Q: Did you ever receive any payment from an organization called Media Matters?

A: Oh, yes. I did — I did receive payment in that period from Media Matters.

Q: Okay. And what was your relationship with Media Matters at that time period?

A: I was a consultant to Media Matters. I’m sorry I—

Q: That’s okay.

A: I overlooked that.

Q: When did you become a consultant for Media Matters?

A: I would say the very end of 2012.

Q: Okay. And how did that come about, that you became a consultant for Media Matters?

A: I have had a very long friendship with the chairman of Media Matters, whose name is David Brock, from before he founded this organization, and I have sustained that friendship. And he asked me to help provide ideas and advice to him and his organizations.

Q: So you began your relationship, your paid relationship, with Media Matters at the end of 2012.

A: Right.

Q: Does that continue to this day?

A: It does.

Q: Okay. And what is your salary or your contract with Media Matters?  How much money are you earning from them?

A: I’d say it’s about $200,000 a year.

Q: And has that been roughly consistent from when you began receiving payment from Media Matters?

*[redacted due to Chairman Gowdy’s refusal to allow release of transcript].

A: I would say it’s — I’d have to check. I think it’s increased a little bit. It’s increased some.

Q: Okay. Are you familiar with the organization American Bridge?

A: Yes.

Q: Have you received any compensation from American Bridge over the last five years?

A: Yes.

Q: Okay. And how much compensation have you received from American Bridge?

A: Well, when I talk about that amount of money, I mean all of those organizations.

Q: So all of David Brock’s entities —

A: Right.

Q: — combined are 200,000?

A: About.

Q: Okay.

A: Something like that.

Q: Okay. So there’s American Bridge.

A: Yes.

Q: There’s Media Matters.


A: Right.

Q: Are there any other organizations on which you have done work for Mr. Brock?

A: Correct the Record

Q: Okay.

A: — is another organization.

Q: Okay.

A: And then there’s the American Independent Institute, which is a journalistic foundation.

Q: So, when you receive your paycheck, who signs the paycheck? Where does that come from?

A: It’s deposited directly. I imagine it comes from David Brock.

Q: Okay. Not David Brock personally but one of his —

A: Whoever — whoever is responsible for that payment.

Blumenthal and Republican Select Committee Member Mike Pompeo had the following exchange about Correct the Record:

Q: Fair enough. I’m going to jump around a little bit. You said I think earlier this morning that you still are working for Correct the Record?

A: I am.

Q: And tell me what the mission of Correct the Record is. 

A: Correct the Record is pretty much what it says, to correct — it’s a nonprofit organization to correct the record about public misstatements about prominent Democrats.

Q: Including this committee. If this committee said something, Correct the Record might comment on things that it said incorrectly and indeed it has?

A: That may well be so.

Q: Have you written any of that?

A: No.

All things Clinton
All things Clinton
Q: Yeah. So you haven’t made any comments as part of your role in Correct the Record related to this committee’s work?  You haven’t written any —

A: I have not written those.

evan.halper@latimes.com

Follow me: @evanhalper

 

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http://www.wsj.com/articles/clintons-benghazi-cover-story-1467155750

Democrats have succeeded in persuading the Washington press corps that what happened when four Americans died at Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012 isn’t a story. But the House report released Monday about that night and its aftermath contains details that ought to concern Americans who care about political accountability.

Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans died in that attack that is dissected in 800-plus pages released by Republicans on a House Select Committee chaired by South Carolina’s Trey Gowdy. The report’s most disturbing facts concern the way the Obama Administration and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spun an alternative narrative that is contradicted by their private statements and the intelligence from the scene.

We learn from the report that the day after Mr. Stevens became the first American ambassador killed in the line of duty since 1979, President Obama decided to skip his daily intelligence briefing.

We also learn that on the day of the attack, in a 5 p.m. meeting that included Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Mr. Obama said the U.S. should use all available resources. After that meeting, Mr. Panetta returned to the Pentagon to discuss what military resources were available. The Defense Secretary then issued an order to deploy military assets to Libya.

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But nothing was sent to Benghazi, and nothing was even in route when the last two Americans were killed almost eight hours after the attacks began. The holdup seems to have been caused in part by something else we learn from this report: a 7:30 p.m. teleconference of Defense and State officials, including Mrs. Clinton.


Ostensibly they were sharing intelligence and coordinating responses. But they debated whether they needed Libya’s permission to deploy American troops to defend endangered Americans, whether Marines should wear uniforms or civilian clothes, and so on.

Even more telling: Though there was no evidence linking the Benghazi attacks to a YouTube video mocking Islam, of the 10 “action items” from the notes of that meeting, five referred to the video.

Mrs. Clinton referred to the video more than once in her public statements. At 10:08 p.m. on the night of the attack, she issued a public statement on Benghazi: “Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet. The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others.” She repeated the point the next day at the State Department.

That’s not what she was saying in private. On the night of the attack, at 6:49 p.m. Washington time, Mrs. Clinton called Libya’s president to say the attack on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi was planned and that an Islamist terror group had claimed responsibility. A few hours later, she emailed her daughter that “an Al Qaeda-like group” was responsible.

The next afternoon Mrs. Clinton was even more categorical. In a phone call with the Egyptian Prime Minister, she said the Benghazi attack “had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack—not a protest.” She added that the Benghazi attackers were believed affiliated with al Qaeda.

On Monday this week on the campaign trail, Mrs. Clinton admitted that lots of Americans don’t trust her. “I personally know I have work to do on this front,” she told her audience. This report shows she has earned that mistrust.

As have her fellow Democrats on the Select Committee. From the start they treated the House investigation the way Mrs. Clinton’s State Department treated Benghazi—as a political issue. They refused to participate in the investigation and spent most of their time denouncing it as partisan. Their minority report on Benghazi contains no fewer than 23 mentions of Donald Trump.
The tragedy of Benghazi is that four brave Americans in a dangerous part of the world lost their lives to a determined and deadly enemy. The scandal of Benghazi is that instead of leveling with the American people, Mrs. Clinton and others who knew better opted for a more convenient—and corrosive—spin.

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