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Benghazi Hearing: While Republicans Barked And Snarled, Hillary Smiled

Benghazi Hearing: While Republicans Barked And Snarled, Hillary Smiled

To watch Hillary Clinton’s Republican antagonists during Thursday’s public hearing of the House Select Committee on Benghazi was to wonder how they could possibly behave the way they did. As representatives of the American people, they not only failed miserably to fulfill the responsibilities entrusted to them, but exposed their own blithering ignorance of basic aspects of government.

Determined as they were to encourage doubt about Clinton’s presidential candidacy, they instead elevated her and raised hard questions about their own knowledge, character, temperament, and intellectual capacity to serve in Congress. After months of “investigating” Clinton, the Republican committee members have developed only a dim understanding of simple phenomena — like the many and varied sources of information, beyond emails, that are available to the Secretary of State. Only someone very dense, very poorly informed, or both, would believe, for instance, that she had received “most of her intelligence about Libya,” or any other subject, in unclassified email traffic.

Often the sheer mindlessness of their inquiries was stunning: Rep. Martha Roby (R-AL) asked Clinton whether she had been alone “all night” at home on Sept. 11, 2012, while the tragic events in Benghazi occurred. Rep. Mike Pompeo inquired whether the late Ambassador Chris Stevens had ever visited Clinton’s home or possessed her “fax number.” Rep. Peter Roskam (R-IL) demanded that Clinton admit that as Secretary of State she had overseen American policy toward Libya. Several of the Republicans interrupted her rudely, upbraided her for looking at notes, even while they read from their own notes, and demanded that she give “Yes or No” answers to their queries, as if they were prosecutors grilling a perp.

The lines of inquiry that the Republicans pursued were muddled, directionless, and confusing, seemingly even to them. As the Democrats repeatedly pointed out, after all the tumult over Clinton’s emails, the proceedings of this committee so far — following several legislative and administrative investigations — revealed nothing new about the terrorist attack on the US compound in Benghazi, its prelude, or its aftermath.

So what might American taxpayers have gleaned from those 11 hours of hearings, the culmination of an expenditure of 17 months and $4.8 million? They learned that Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), the committee chair, is obsessed with someone named Sidney Blumenthal, a friend of Clinton who sent her emails about Libya and other topics. He’s not just weirdly preoccupied, as anyone could see, but truly obsessed to the point of choking rage.

Those who have followed Gowdy’s conduct during the months leading up to this moment will find this Blumenthal business all too familiar. Having discovered that Blumenthal sent some emails to Clinton about Libya, largely incorporating information he had gathered from retired intelligence personnel, the chairman and his colleagues sought to fabricate a conspiracy theory of the Benghazi attack that somehow involved him.

Actually, “conspiracy theory” is too coherent a description of their aimless maundering on the topic of Sidney (who also happens to be my friend).

Gowdy appeared to believe – or perhaps pretended to believe – that if only the Secretary of State had ignored Blumenthal’s emails, the Benghazi attack might somehow have been prevented. According to this theory, she was paying too much attention to him, and not enough to Stevens.

In fact, as Clinton patiently attempted to explain over and over, she naturally delegated decisions about the safety of the Benghazi compound and personnel — and all perilous diplomatic posts — to the State Department’s security staff. Moreover, her communications with Blumenthal were, and are, entirely irrelevant to the matters that Gowdy purports to be investigating. Should Gowdy ever really wish to know why it is difficult to protect our embassies, consulates, and foreign service officers abroad, he might investigate himself and all the other Republicans who – as Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) acknowledged on Thursday – voted repeatedly to slash hundreds of millions of dollars from the State Department’s security budget.

As I noted in Politico months ago, back when Gowdy first embarked on the Blumenthal trail, this isn’t the first time that the former Washington Post and New Yorker journalist has driven Republican politicians to manic distraction. Like Clinton herself, he is a demonized figure in certain circles – but every time they go after him, they risk humiliation or worse.

Among the many low points of the Clinton hearing was the moment when Gowdy first refused a committee vote on releasing Blumenthal’s deposition before the committee, and then whipped a party-line vote to keep it under seal. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the ranking member who led his fellow Democrats in eloquently protesting the committee’s many abuses, asked Gowdy what he is hiding.

But of course Cummings already knows the answer: In that closed deposition last June, Gowdy and company asked Blumenthal dozens of questions about wholly irrelevant but highly political matters, such as his employment by the Clinton Foundation, Media Matters, and Correct the Record – even though Gowdy has publicly claimed that he had no interest in those subjects. To release Blumenthal’s testimony would risk exposing the committee chairman’s bad faith and clumsy deceptions.

By the time Rep. Trey Gowdy finally gaveled the hearing to a close, there was little doubt that Hillary Clinton’s composed, dignified demeanor – and the contrast between her and the Republicans — had notched another political victory for her. She had movingly recounted the events of that awful night in Benghazi, explained her actions in detail, firmly defended the honor of Accountability Review Board chairs Tom Pickering and Admiral Mike Mullen, and pleaded for a return to statesmanship. Her strong performance rallied skeptical liberals to her side, while furious conservatives whined in despair.

And when it was over she rose from the witness chair, smiling and greeting friends, while Gowdy stalked out, stone-faced and perspiring, as if he had seen his own demise.

4 Days Before Clinton Is To Testify, Members Of Congress Argue About Benghazi

4 Days Before Clinton Is To Testify, Members Of Congress Argue About Benghazi

By W.J. Hennigan, Tribune Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — With Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton set to testify before a House committee on Thursday about the 2012 Benghazi attacks, members of both parties appeared on television to discuss how the former secretary of State handled the security situation in Libya.

The Republican-led investigation into the attacks on two U.S. compounds that killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, has been criticized as a partisan investigation.

Seven committees that looked into the attacks and the role Clinton and the Obama administration played in properly addressing security matters. The Clinton presidential campaign has accused the most recent committee of bias, particularly after House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., boasted that the committee’s work had driven down Clinton’s popularity with voters.

Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., chairman of the special House committee to investigate the attacks, bluntly dismissed McCarthy’s statement Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“Shut up talking about things that you don’t know anything about,” he said. “Unless you’re on the committee you have no idea what we’ve done, why we’ve done it, and what new facts we have found.”

Gowdy said the investigation has taken on new importance after recently receiving the ambassador’s emails, which previous inquiries never “bothered to access.”

“If you want a window into Libya and what was happening in the weeks and months before these four were killed, why would you not look at the ambassador’s emails?” he said. “He was a prolific emailer.”

Stevens asked for more security at the embassy because of increased violence but instead received an email from Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal, “who knows nothing about Libya,” Gowdy said.

The committee does not have all of Clinton’s emails, which were kept on a private server, Gowdy said, but it is time to “go ahead” and call her to testify.

Clinton said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that after seven investigations she doesn’t “have very much to add.”

“It’s pretty clear that whatever they might have thought they were doing they ended up becoming a partisan arm of the Republican National Committee with an overwhelming focus on trying to — as they admitted, drive down my poll numbers,” she said. “I will do my best to answer their questions, but I don’t really know what their objective is right now.”

(c)2015 Tribune Co. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at a campaign town hall meeting in Keene, New Hampshire October 16, 2015. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Scandalizing Hillary: If The First Time Is Tragedy, Then The Second Time Is…

Scandalizing Hillary: If The First Time Is Tragedy, Then The Second Time Is…

With a self-proclaimed socialist running a credible campaign for president, perhaps the time has come to revive Karl Marx’s wittiest aphorism – although his pungent quip is relevant to Hillary Clinton, not Bernie Sanders.

At the outset of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, the young revolutionary said Hegel had once observed that “all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

That piercing insight can be applied to the “Clinton scandals,” now playing again, courtesy of the Congressional Republicans and especially the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Chaired by Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), that committee is hardly the first on Capitol Hill to investigate, at great length and expense, a series of vague accusations against Bill and/or Hillary Clinton and/or various staffers and/or associates. (Indeed, it is the seventh Congressional committee to investigate this particular set of vague accusations concerning the former Secretary of State, with none of the earlier probes finding any evidence of wrongdoing by her in the consulate attack on September 11, 2012.)

Back in 1994, just before the Republicans gained control of Congress in the midterm elections, Newt Gingrich gloated that his agenda as Speaker of the House would include multiple investigations of the Clinton administration, the President, the First Lady, and all their friends and associates. He wasn’t kidding. Whitewater? Definitely. Travelgate? Certainly. Filegate? Absolutely. Even those obviously fabricated tales implicating the president in cocaine smuggling at a tiny Arkansas airstrip called Mena? Of course!

While the national press corps treated all those farcical “investigations” as matters of the utmost gravity, even a cursory glance at the underlying facts would have quickly showed that there was nothing to investigate (as Gene Lyons and I explain in considerable detail in our free ebook, The Hunting of Hillary).

Whitewater was a defunct land deal that cost the Clintons about $45,000 and ended long before his election as president. Travelgate was an inter-office dispute of no consequence to anyone, except the traveling press corps that had enjoyed favors from a few White House employees. Filegate was a complete fake, based on a misreading of a list of former staffers. And no, there was never any evidence that Clinton knew about drug trafficking at Mena. But a presumably sane Republican Congressman from Iowa named Jim Leach pretended to believe it for a while, anyway.

Still these official hoaxes dragged on for months and years, courtesy of the Republican majority and an independent counsel appointed by Republican judges (a position happily eliminated from the statute books when its enabling legislation finally expired). Their aim was blatantly political, even though nobody in the GOP leadership was stupid enough to brag about driving down Clinton’s poll numbers. And they all ended with nothing to show for the millions of taxpayer dollars expended. In fact, the following midterm elections saw the most prominent figures on the Senate Whitewater Committee – Alfonse D’Amato of New York and Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina – abruptly ousted from their seats.

If Whitewater wasn’t quite tragedy, despite the damage inflicted on many innocent people in Arkansas, #Benghazi/email is assuredly farce. Not only has Rep. Kevin McCarthy exposed the scam with his juvenile bragging on Fox News Channel, but now a second Republican member, Rep. Richard Hanna (R-NY) has confirmed that the Benghazi committee was “designed” to “go after…an individual, Hillary Clinton.”

According to the New York Times, the committee’s members and staff occupy their time with a “wine club” and a “gun-buying club,” while issuing subpoenas to Clinton’s friends and associates – and failing to discover anything of consequence about that incident in Benghazi. Gowdy likes to claim that he uncovered Clinton’s use of a private email server – as used by many public officials, including her predecessor Colin Powell – but even that fact, obviously known to many in the Obama administration, had been revealed by a Romanian hacker long before the committee was appointed.

At the first Democratic debate, Sanders turned to Clinton and declared that the American people “are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails.” Laughing, she agreed. Nevertheless the damned emails will return on October 22, when Clinton appears before the Benghazi committee for a full day in open session to answer the committee’s questions, and say a few words about the committee and its masterminds.

As that date approaches, let’s hope this partisan burlesque, at the very least, provides a few more laughs before its inevitably ignominious conclusion. We’ve already spent more than $4 million in tax revenues on its production, and we’ll never get that money back.

Photo: Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shakes hands with rival candidate and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (L) and thanks him for saying that he and the American people are sick of hearing about her State Department email controversy and want to hear about issues that effect their lives as they participate in the first official Democratic candidates debate of the 2016 presidential campaign in Las Vegas, Nevada October 13, 2015. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

‘Criminal’ Mischief: Did A Government Official Smear Hillary Clinton?

‘Criminal’ Mischief: Did A Government Official Smear Hillary Clinton?

In the aftermath of that famously discredited New York Times story about a “criminal referral” regarding Hillary Clinton’s emails, a few important questions stand out, among many that remain unanswered.

Exactly who told Times reporters Michael S. Schmidt and Matt Apuzzo that the referral to the Justice Department – concerning whether information in her emails that wasn’t classified should have been – was a matter for criminal investigation? And when will the Justice Department track down, reveal, and discipline those who made these false statements to the Times and later to other news outlets?

These unpleasant questions arise from the Times editors’ explanation of an error that is enormously troubling (and the most consequential of several substantive mistakes littered throughout Schmidt and Apuzzo’s article, as catalogued superbly by Kurt Eichenwald in Newsweek). Never was there any criminal referral, only a “security referral” prompted by the appearance of retroactively classified material in a sample of Clinton emails released by the State Department.

In short, Clinton did nothing wrong, and the ensuing journalistic firestorm was, in reality, no more than a boring bureaucratic dispute over what should or should not be kept secret.

Yet determining who did this is important because – if we accept the editors’ version that the reporters’ sources misled them – one or more federal officials evidently tried to smear a presidential contender with a falsified leak, under cover of anonymity. That may or may not be a federal crime, but it should be a firing offense at the very least. And the public has a right to know if officials in the nation’s top law enforcement agency tried illicitly to influence a national election.

In the lengthy post-mortem published by Times public editor Margaret Sullivan on July 27, which delineated the damaging “mess,” she quoted executive editor Dean Baquet, who told her: “You had the government confirming that it was a criminal referral.” Deputy editor Matthew Purdy offered further detail on the anonymous figures who led Schmidt and Apuzzo astray. “The reporters had what Mr. Purdy described as ‘multiple, reliable, highly placed sources,” wrote Sullivan, “including some ‘in law enforcement.’ I think we can safely read that as the Justice Department. “

That does seem a very safe assumption, partly because Apuzzo, a Pulitzer Prize-winning AP reporter, joined the Times almost two years ago to cover Justice, while Schmidt has covered the FBI, an agency overseen by Justice officials. Both would have access to multiple, highly placed sources in law enforcement, although whether those sources are “reliable” is now open to serious doubt.

Of course, there was at least one other obvious source behind this story, as Sullivan mentioned in passing: “The story developed quickly on Thursday afternoon and evening, after tips from various sources, including on Capitol Hill.” With absolute safety, that generic reference should be read as the House Select Committee on Benghazi, chaired by Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) and controlled by the Republican majority – an outfit that has provided multiple, unreliable, and slanted leaks to Schmidt and his Times colleagues, which the paper has eagerly disseminated.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the select committee’s ranking Democrat, who immediately corrected the inaccurate “criminal referral” story, righteously blasted his Republican colleagues. “This is the latest example in a series of inaccurate leaks to generate false front-page headlines − only to be corrected later − and they have absolutely nothing to do with the attacks in Benghazi or protecting our diplomatic corps overseas,” he told The Hill newspaper. Clearly, Cummings intended to indicate that this latest leak came from the select committee’s members or staff.

But the unethical conduct that has apparently become habitual around Gowdy is a matter for the House to handle – not that its Republican majority ever will. Dealing with the misconduct of the government official or officials who leaked the phrase “criminal referral,” however, is an issue that only the Justice Department itself can address. Perhaps the person or persons responsible will do the right thing and step forward. If not, the department’s own inspector general should open an investigation to uncover the truth.

Lingering suspicion that anyone in government would so blatantly violate the public trust is enough to undermine confidence in the department’s law enforcement mission. Smearing a former Secretary of State now running for president isn’t “justice.” And this isn’t a situation Attorney General Loretta Lynch — or President Obama, for that matter — should tolerate.

Photo: Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton talks about her environmental plan during a visit to the LEED Platinum certified DART Central Station in Des Moines, Iowa July 27, 2015.     REUTERS/Scott Morgan