Tag: benghazi committee
Don't Compare 'Her Emails' With Trump's Brazen Misconduct

Don't Compare 'Her Emails' With Trump's Brazen Misconduct

Ever since the FBI searched Donald Trump’s premises at Mar-a-Lago on August 8 to retrieve the boxes of files he kept there unlawfully, he has tried to distract attention by reviving his bawling about "her emails."

For years, Trump has insisted that Hillary Clinton somehow escaped the punishment she merited — amid shrieks of "Lock her up!" from the likes of Rudy Giuliani and Mike Flynn— and now complains that he is somehow the victim of a "double standard" because the FBI is investigating his apparent theft of national security materials. "Absolutely nothing has happened to hold her accountable," he whined earlier this month.

In fact, the former secretary of state endured many months of an intrusive investigation that cost her heavily in legal fees and personal demonization —although she was finally and fully exonerated of any criminal wrongdoing or intent by the Justice Department.

Rather than benefiting from favorable treatment by the FBI, Clinton was the target of a concerted smear campaign by Trump allies within the bureau instigated by Giuliani. Their internal operation pushed then FBI director James Comey to brazenly violate strict Justice Department political guidelines by discussing her case publicly twice, the last time only weeks before the November 2016 election — while at the same time concealing the counterintelligence probe of the Trump campaign's collusion with the Kremlin. The sanctimonious Comey, who claimed to be above politics, cowered under threat from right-wingers lodged within the Bureau.

So, while the differences between the Clinton and Trump cases are vast indeed, they leave little space for the feigned indignation of the former president and his flunkeys.

What we know about Hillary Clinton's emails is that of the many thousands examined by the FBI, only a tiny proportion — a number in the low single digits — were deemed to have been "classified." Of those, none disclosed sensitive information that could have jeopardized national security, such as nuclear weapons secrets, but instead involved drone strikes that had already been prominently reported in national news outlets. Most of the emails deemed secret had either been classified after the fact or were improperly marked in the first place.

As Comey explained at the time, the FBI found no evidence that Clinton, her aides, or her attorneys had intentionally withheld any information from the State Department, the National Archives or the Justice Department, or obstructed the investigation in any way.

We know far less about the documents that Trump allegedly removed from the White House, but what has been reported so far draws a sharp contrast with the Clinton emails episode. According to the search warrant and receipt released by Attorney General Merrick Garland, Trump evidently absconded with hundreds of hard copies of highly classified documents — all properly marked — that implicated serious national security and defense matters.

The Justice Department plainly suspects him of violating the Espionage Act, of hiding or destroying those sensitive documents, and of obstructing the government's efforts to locate and retrieve them.

In other words, Trump acted with purpose and in direct violation of the law, including the Presidential Records Act. He continued to defy the law even after the Justice Department issued a subpoena for documents he had withheld — which was why the FBI went to Mar-a-Lago to recover them.

Despite the excessive and obsessive media coverage that contributed to Hillary Clinton’s loss, the more we learned more about the substance of Clinton's emails, the more their importance diminished, ultimately to the vanishing point. The opposite is true of Trump's purloined documents, whose significance only seems to be increasing. And we are still at the very beginning of this scandal.

In panic, Trump and his henchmen now insist that he had "declassified" all those papers, and many others too, supposedly for the sake of transparency. But top officials of his administration have openly ridiculed that assertion, which is absurd on its face, as a brazen lie. Much like his election lies, it is a hollow claim, devoid of any supporting facts or evidence. Donald Trump lie? What a surprise!

Protecting the nation requires a careful declassification process, even when the president wishes to alter the status of specific documents. For Trump to void secrecy with a wave of his hand would create a state of chaos, gravely damaging national security. And since he believes in exercising presidential power so recklessly, he must never be allowed anywhere near the nation's secrets again.

Trump and his minions only bring up Hillary Clinton as a ruse. Keep in mind that "her emails" only became an issue because House Republicans were trying to damage her politically, bring down her poll numbers, as the perpetually stupid Kevin McCarthy blurted out, by concocting a pseudo-scandal from the Benghazi attack. She put that to rest when she testified before the House Benghazi committee for 11 hours, answering every question posed by her inquisitors.

Three days after the FBI search at Mar-a-Lago, on August 11, Trump invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 440 times in response to questions from the New York Attorney General investigating his crooked business practices. In 2016, Trump said, “If you're innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?" We should expect that if he is ever compelled to testify about the potential crimes involved in swiping and concealing White House documents, we will hear him repeat the Fifth Amendment many more times.

Remember Benghazi? The Hypocrites On The Hill Should

Remember Benghazi? The Hypocrites On The Hill Should

Donald Trump will never build the Great Wall he envisioned on this country’s southern border, but his lawyers and minions are erecting the largest stonewall against Congressional oversight since Nixon’s presidency. In a scolding letter to Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), White House attorneys have said that the administration will simply reject some 81 subpoenas from the House Judiciary Committee that he chairs.

The reason offered for this blanket refusal to cooperate sounds much like a Trump tweet. “Congressional investigations are intended to obtain information to aid in evaluating potential legislation,” huffed the president’s lawyers, “not to harass political opponents or to pursue an unauthorized ‘do-over’ of exhaustive law enforcement investigations conducted by the Department of Justice”

Requests for information from the House Oversight Committee, the House Intelligence Committee, the House Ways and Means Committee, and the Senate Intelligence Committee have all met with roughly the same arrogant attitude — as if the executive branch has no obligation to provide any information at all to Congress. Such dismissive responses represent a profound violation of the Constitutional order.

Or as certain members of Congress explained not so long ago:

“Congress’s authority to oversee and investigate the Executive Branch is a necessary component of legislative powers and to maintain the constitutional balance of powers between the branches. As the Supreme Court held in 1927: ‘[T]he power of inquiry—with process to enforce it—is an essential and appropriate auxiliary to the legislative function.” Similarly, the Supreme Court held: “The power of the Congress to conduct investigations is inherent in the legislative process. That power is broad. It encompasses inquiries concerning the administration of existing laws as well as proposed or possibly needed statutes.’ When needed information cannot easily be obtained—or if government agencies resist—Congress has legitimate cause to compel responses.”

That pithy reference to our constitutional framework, complete with the relevant US Supreme Court decision, is from the Final Report of the House Select Committee on Benghazi.  It prefaces a long and indignant recitation of the supposed failures of the Obama administration to cooperate adequately with the Benghazi committee’s lengthy and mostly pointless investigation, which was only the tenth (10th) probe of the 2012 tragedy that claimed the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other State Department employees in Libya.

The tenth Benghazi “investigation” was known as a political sham long before Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), then the minority whip and now minority leader, boasted about its impact on Hillary Clinton’s approval ratings — its true and blatantly non-legislative purpose. That was why the Benghazi committee spent hours interviewing Sidney Blumenthal, a Clinton adviser with scarcely any connection to Libya and none whatsoever to Benghazi, about political topics including the Clinton Foundation, Media Matters for America, and his communications with the presumed Democratic presidential nominee. (To this day, the transcript of Blumenthal’s interview with the committee remains sealed. Presumably that’s because its contents would prove so embarrassing to the Republicans who questioned him, including then-Rep. Mike Pompeo.)

When the Benghazi committee issued its final report — just in time for the 2016 presidential election — its press releases boasted about all the new information it had discovered through interviews of 107 witnesses, many from the White House, CIA, State and Defense Departments. The most notable was Clinton, of course, who sat for 11 hours of nonsensical public badgering by committee members. The Obama administration not only delivered 75,000 pages of documents, in addition to 50,000 provided to the previous investigations, but removed redactions as requested by the committee.

Yet none of this was enough for Trey Gowdy, the South Carolina Republican who chaired the committee and bitched endlessly about the Democratic president’s attempt to “obstruct” his investigation. Incidentally, his final report culminated in no significant legislation concerning diplomatic security or any other conceivable issue — because that was never the Benghazi committee’s aim.

Now the same Republicans who whined so loudly about “lack of transparency” when Obama was president are silent, complicit, or aggressive shills for Trump. They are aiding and abetting his obstruction of Congressional investigations of the worst national scandal since Watergate, after two years of covering up for Trump and Russia when they held the majority.

They swore to uphold the Constitution, but for them it is always party first. Their oath means nothing.

IMAGE: Hillary Clinton listens to a question as she testifies before the House Select Committee on Benghazi, on Capitol Hill in Washington October 22, 2015. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

The Benghazi Committee’s Final Report Proves Nothing But Its Own Real Purpose

The Benghazi Committee’s Final Report Proves Nothing But Its Own Real Purpose

The GOP-lead Benghazi Committee released their final report on Tuesday morning, claiming that with 81 new witnesses and 75,000 new pages of documents, it “Fundamentally Changes the Public’s Understanding of the 2012 Terrorist Attacks that Killed Four Americans.”

Well… not really. The report offers no game-changing information — there are no “bombshells.” Instead, “new details” attempt to paint the Obama administration as a failing bureaucratic machine that allowed the attack to happen despite knowing about possible threats. By being vague on the details, the committee is letting Republican voters fill in the blanks.

Some of the “new details” include:

  • What officials discussed at a two-hour White House meeting after the attack. (White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that a House Intelligence committee investigation has already “debunked” allegations that the military was too slow to act, and that the report is so obviously a partisan effort that it should be disclosed as an “in-kind contribution” to the RNC.)
  • The fact that the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff wasn’t at the meeting, even though he usually would be, “because he went home to host a dinner party for foreign dignitaries.” (According to the Democratic report on Benghazi, there was nothing the Pentagon could have done differently that night to prevent the attack.)
  • A Fleet Antiterrorism Security operatives in Spain changing in and out of their uniforms four times because officials weren’t sure about the right protocol for introducing U.S. forces. (State Department spokesman Mark Toner said “Concerns about what they wore had no bearing on the timing of their arrival.”)

What the new details do not include is any evidence at all that Hillary Clinton, or the State Department, could have done anything differently to prevent the deaths of four Americans. Instead, it suggests that Clinton and other officials did not properly address possible threats in intelligence reports, and finds that Ambassador Chris Stevens, one of the four victims, was responsible for securing his post.

In this latest episode of the Benghazi Committee show, Republicans also failed to justify the committee’s own existence as anything other than a source of anti-Democrat propaganda. GOP congresspeople have urged voters to “read the report and make their own conclusions,” knowing full well that likely no one will read the inscrutable 800-page report. By leaving this opening, they leave an empty space for GOP conspiracists to fill.

In a news conference, Gowdy tried to appear somber and unbiased, denying that the partisan investigation had political motives, and refusing to blame Clinton.

The other members of the committee were left to do that. “This was something Hillary Clinton pushed for and got done,” said Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio of the U.S. presence in Libya. He, along with Rep. Mike Pompeo of Kansas, did not think 800 pages were enough, so they released yet another analysis of the attack, called “additional views” where they go after Clinton and Obama more directly, blaming the attack on “a tragic failure of leadership.”

The committee has been using the Benghazi tragedy for two years as a vehicle to attack Clinton and the Obama administration. All seven Republican committee members released statements and took turns speaking at the press conference, expressing outrage at the four lives lost in the attack, before relating it to Clinton’s morality and judgement.

These same representatives have pulled dirty tricks like leaking sworn depositions to conservative media, sending federal marshals to serve  subpoenas to witnesses who weren’t involved with the events on September 11, and perhaps most notoriously, questioning Clinton for 11 straight hours last October without any material findings to show for it.

You would think the Committee would hang up the cleats after that hearing. If only. The Benghazi committee’s investigation is estimated to have cost $7 million over two years.