“An Expensive And Partisan Excursion Into Nowhere”: Benghazi! Why Trey Gowdy Is Still Hiding Blumenthal Transcript
The strange saga of the House Select Committee on Benghazi continues as its chair, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) fends off renewed questions about the committee’s purpose, as well as demands to release the sworn deposition of Sidney Blumenthal, taken behind closed doors on June 16.
In a July 7 CNN interview, Hillary Clinton – the actual target of Gowdy’s investigation – brushed off accusations about her use of a private email server and mocked his partisan probe. “This is being blown up with no basis in law or in fact,” she said. “That’s fine. I get it. This is being, in effect, used by the Republicans in the Congress, OK. But I want people to understand what the truth is. And the truth is everything I did was permitted and I went above and beyond what anybody could have expected in making sure that if the State Department [servers] didn’t capture something, I made a real effort to get it to them.”
Gowdy answered by reiterating previous claims that only his committee’s intrepid work had revealed Clinton’s email practices. “The fact of the matter is it took the Benghazi Committee to uncover Secretary Clinton’s use of personal email and a server to conduct official State Department business,” the chairman insisted after her interview aired. He went on to make a series of further accusations about the emails, insisting that the messages about Libya sent to her by Sidney Blumenthal were “solicited” by her and not, as she described them, “unsolicited.”
These disputes might be cleared up if Gowdy would release Blumenthal’s testimony, since he answered all the committee’s questions on these and other matters under oath.
In actuality, Blumenthal probably mentioned the indisputable fact that Clinton’s use of a private email server was revealed not by the Benghazi committee but by a Romanian hacker known as “Guccifer” — now serving time in prison for stealing messages from Blumenthal as well as former Secretary of State Colin Powell and Dorothy Bush, the sister of former president George W. Bush. Many of those emails, obtained by Guccifer in a suspected Russian intelligence operation, were published on the Internet months before the Benghazi committee came into existence.
And Blumenthal surely noted, again under oath, that his emails to Clinton were “unsolicited,” despite Gowdy’s strained attempt to prove otherwise — as Gowdy undoubtedly knows. That is one of many reasons why he continues to suppress the former Clinton aide’s testimony. The excuse proffered by committee Republicans is that releasing closed testimony might discourage candor by future witnesses – an argument undercut by letters from Blumenthal attorney James Cole, urging the committee to release it.
No, it is now clear that Gowdy prefers to leak the Blumenthal testimony to smear both Clinton and the witness he claims to be protecting. For weeks, snippets of Blumenthal’s testimony and of his emails to and from Clinton have turned up in the media, to advance negative, highly distorted perceptions of both the former Secretary of State and her longtime friend.
These cowardly, bullying tactics are designed not only to embarrass Clinton and Blumenthal but to justify the committee’s increasingly expensive and partisan excursion into nowhere.
On July 7, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen too took a hard shot at Gowdy, under the headline “Placating The Right-Wing Clinton Haters.” He capably sums up the results of the committee’s inquisition into Blumenthal and Clinton:
The committee, the eighth to look into the Benghazi matter and determine if Clinton, as Secretary of State, was somehow complicit in the deaths of four colleagues — you know, those Clintons are capable of anything —asked Blumenthal 160 questions regarding his relationship with Clinton and fewer than 20 regarding Benghazi. (The Democratic minority kept count.)
The committee also asked Blumenthal more than 50 questions about his relationship with the Clinton Foundation and only four about security in Benghazi [the ostensible purpose of its existence]. Blumenthal was additionally asked more than 270 questions about his business dealings in Libya, which, considering that he has none, is commendable thoroughness run amok.
The committee in its wisdom came to appreciate that regarding Libya, Blumenthal not only had no business interests there, but also that he had never even been in the country. The emails concerning Libya that he had passed on to Clinton had come originally from Tyler Drumheller, the CIA’s one-time top spy and someone who just might have had something interesting to say. It seemed reasonable to Blumenthal to relay them to Clinton and it seemed reasonable for her to relay them to her staff for vetting. In fact, it seems downright admirable, because the last thing you want is a government official who operates in a bubble. Given what the committee learned, its Republican majority then nimbly pivoted from insinuating a Blumenthal conflict of interest over Libya to accusing him of having nothing of interest to say about it. They got him there.
The Republicans, led by Gowdy, have learned little of significance, despite spending millions of taxpayer dollars. But they have keenly pursued political matters of interest to them, such as Blumenthal’s work for Correct The Record, a political committee that publicly defends Clinton and other Democrats, and Media Matters for America, the watchdog against right-wing misinformation wherever it appears. Today Gowdy also received a sharply worded letter from David Brock, the founder of both groups, and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the former Maryland lieutenant governor who chairs Correct The Record’s board.
Noting that Gowdy and other Republican committee members asked at least 45 questions about Blumenthal’s “association with our organizations,” the letter from Brock and Townsend urged him to disgorge the testimony in full:
Mr. Chairman, we are entitled to know what questions you and other committee members asked about our organizations in Mr. Blumenthal’s deposition. Judging by the portions that have been leaked to favored people in the press and various right-wing blogs by Republican committee staff aides in direct violation of your committee’s own rules, presumably with your approval, aspersions have been cast upon our work. Your unethical leaking was a further abuse of Congressional power. The only way we can clear our good name is by knowing exactly what innuendoes and insinuations Republican members made about us behind the committee’s closed doors.
Indeed, Gowdy no longer seems to expect anyone to believe his denials that the leaks emanate from him and his staff. In his Washington Post media blog, Erik Wemple wrote that the Select Committee chair seemed to “wink” at a recent leak to Politico that sparked a brief controversy last week. And nobody else would have either the motive or the opportunity to orchestrate the leak campaign.
Meanwhile, the New York Times and other outlets that have published the leaks continue to slant their reporting against Blumenthal and Clinton. The easiest way to measure the Times bias is to note that Blumenthal’s attorney, former Deputy Attorney General James Cole, has written not one or two but three pungent letters to Gowdy, protesting the committee’s cheap-shot leakage and urging the release of his client’s testimony. For reasons best known to Michael S. Schmidt, the Times reporter covering the Benghazi committee, the paper has failed to mention those letters from Cole, let alone to quote them.
Times editors might well ask themselves why their Washington bureau is in cahoots with a congressional committee that epitomizes partisan abuse. Even Maureen Dowd, of all people, understood what was going on when she aptly renamed it “the House Select Committee To Keep Republicans in Power and Harass Hillary Clinton.”
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editors Blog, Featured Post, The National Memo, July 8, 2015
“Little To Show For The Significant Rabbit Hole Expenditure”: Benghazi Investigation Spends Fortune To Harass Hillary Clinton
The Benghazi Select Committee moves slowly but spends quickly, exceeding the budget of the entire House Intelligence Committee.
On June 16th, the Benghazi Select Committee, meeting behind closed doors, questioned Hillary Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal for nine hours about emails he sent to the then-Secretary of State containing privately gathered intelligence reports from inside Libya.
The release of new emails from Mr. Blumenthal marked a milestone for the committee, characterized committee chairman, Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, as “noteworthy,” because no Congressional committee that “has previously looked into Benghazi or Libya has uncovered these memos.”
Yet there was no explanation as to how these emails contained any new insights or information about the September 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound and CIA base in Benghazi, Libya that resulted in the murders of Ambassador Chris Stevens, Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith, and CIA contractors Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty.
Mr. Blumenthal himself noted “my testimony has shed no light on the events of Benghazi—nor could it—because I have no firsthand knowledge.”
This has been a consistent theme of the House’s investigation—a frenzy of media fireworks, with little substantive progress made in pursuit of the committee’s actual mandate. (The majority staff of the Benghazi Select Committee did not respond to requests for comment).
Led by a an 18-member Republican staff, whose full time employees are paid an average of $128,750 per year, the Benghazi Select Committee has proceeded at a plodding pace. Thus far, it has held only three hearings and by the end of this week will have interviewed just 29 witnesses. In comparison the Congressional investigation into the Iran Contra scandal lasted 10.5 months, during which time investigators conducted 500 interviews along with 40 days of public hearings.
The lack of progress is especially striking considering seven Congressional committees and a State Department Accountability Review Board already conducted inquires into the attack. Most recently the findings of the Republican led House Intelligence Committee found no evidence for many of the accusations hurled at President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and other government officials.
Over 13 months the Benghazi Select Committee has spent more than $3,500,000, exceeding the budget of the entire House Intelligence Committee. This figure does not include significant expenditures made by the State Department and Defense Department to find and declassify material requested by the committee or the expense of witness travel for those who work for the government.
While exact dollar amounts spent by federal agencies are unavailable, details released about other declassification processes shed light on these costs. In March 2014 the Defense Department informed Democratic Rep. Adam Smith, they had spent “millions of dollars” and “thousands of man-hours to responding to numerous and often repetitive Congressional requests regarding Benghazi.” Currently the State Department has 12 full-time staff members paid between $63,700 and $150,000 reviewing Hillary Clinton’s emails “a process that could cost more than $1 million” according to the National Journal. The total cost for these document queries could run well into the eight figures. For example, the IRS spent $14 million responding to Congressional investigations into accusations it politicized the tax-exemption application process.
The Benghazi Select Committee has little to show for the significant expenditure—aside from a trail of unfulfilled promises by its Chairman. “We will have hearings in January, February and March,” Rep. Gowdy (R-SC) announced in December.
That never happened.
The committee held a single hearing in January, focused on berating State Department legislative liaison Joel Rubin about the production of documents. CIA representative Neil Higgins escaped with a mild talking to.
Two days after his December announcement, Rep. Gowdy told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren the committee would hold a hearing in January to explore why the State Department was in Benghazi. That hearing never occurred.
In February, Rep. Gowdy sent a letter to the committee’s ranking Democratic member Elijah Cummings (D-Md) informing him that “beginning as early as April I intend to start interviewing” a list of twenty prominent members of the Obama administration including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, former White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, Clinton State Department Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills among others.
According to a Democrat committee staff member, “The committee has yet to interview a single person on Gowdy’s list.”
In April, Gowdy again appeared on Van Susteren’s show claiming, “we’re doing four witness interviews a week, whereas we were doing two.”
A Democratic committee, who requested anonymity, aide told the Observer, “The Select Committee has never done four interviews a week.”
Rep. Gowdy now states the committee will continue its work into 2016 raising its cost to taxpayers to more than $6,000,000, casting his inaction as the result of the Obama administration’s slow pace at producing requested documents, a questionable premise. Rep. Gowdy began receiving documents in August. The committee did not make its first request to the State Department until mid-November, six months after beginning its work. His document request to the Department of Defense was only delivered in early April of this year.
Rep. Gowdy has proceeded in a similar vein while attempting to schedule Hillary Clinton’s appearance before the committee. In early September Stop Hillary PAC, which was “created for one reason only—to ensure Hillary Clinton never becomes President of the United States,” delivered a petition with 264,000 signatures demanding Gowdy call the Secretary of State to testify.
The next day, he asked Rep. Cummings to reach out to Ms. Clinton on his “behalf to determine whether she would testify.” On a November 12 phone call with majority and minority committee staff, Clinton’s team confirmed she would be willing to testify before the committee in December. Rep. Gowdy recently moved the goal posts, asking she appear for a private transcribed interview, as opposed to a public hearing.
Recently, the committee has shifted some of its focus from investigating the actual attack in Benghazi, to reviewing policy decisions made by Hillary Clinton regarding Libya more than nineteen months prior to the attack. Rep. Gowdy, confirmed this to Politico, which reported that “broader problems with the Obama administration’s Libya policy—could prove to be an ugly albatross weighing on the Clinton campaign.”
Rep. Cummings believes these efforts are part of “a fishing expedition for anything they can use against Secretary Clinton in her presidential campaign.” He continued, “After a full year, it now seems obvious that this investigation is being dragged out in order to attack Secretary Clinton and her campaign for president—squandering millions of taxpayer dollars in the process.”
In May of 2014 it was reported that Republicans worried that if they created a Benghazi Select Committee it would fail to produce tangible results. “Investigate and find nothing new, and the committee looks like a bunch of tin-hatted obsessives,” wrote Eli Lake. One House member told Lake, “This could be a rabbit hole.”
It has turned out to be an extremely deep one.
By: Ari Rabin-Havt, Featured Post, The National Memo, June 18, 2015; This piece originally appeared in The New York Observer
“Conspiracy-Minded Conservatives, Be Warned”: Sorry, GOP. There’s No Smoking Gun In Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi Emails
If Republicans were looking for a silver bullet to use against Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, the State Department’s Friday document dump about Benghazi wasn’t it.
There’s no illicit weapons Libyan program to be found in the emails, as some have speculated. No ‘stand-down’ order. Just a hectic flow of information to and from Hillary Clinton—about danger, about death, and ultimately, about condolences.
The State Department released Friday 296 emails involving Hillary Clinton during her tenure as Secretary of State, from 2009 to 2013. The documents include some 300 emails related to Benghazi, which were turned over to the Congressional committee investigating the 2012 attacks. The attacks left four Americans dead, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya.
The hundreds of emails released by the agency show a Secretary of State who was deeply engaged on Libyan issues—but usually just in a crisis. While Clinton was a key proponent of intervening in Libya to protect civilians under threat from then-Libyan leader Moammar Qadhafi, her emails show that she took a largely hands off approach towards the country.
Of course, this document trove is an incomplete view, at best. It excludes any phone calls, briefings or memos. It doesn’t include the emails that were deleted by Clinton—and we know there were many. (Republicans noted “inexplicable gaps” in Secretary Clinton’s emails over several time periods, such as from Oct. 2011 to Jan. 2012, and from April 2012 to July 2012. ) And it was released by a State Department that was formerly helmed by Clinton and is still part of a Democratic administration.
But according to her Benghazi-related email traffic, Clinton appears to only have been involved at times of crisis and even then deferred to those on the ground, including Stevens and friends outside government.
Clinton’s emails show that the late Amb. Christopher Stevens had multiple brushes with danger in Benghazi in 2011—more than a year before the September 2012 attacks that would ultimately take his life.
Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton received an update about Stevens’ 2011 security situation: that there had been intelligence indicating a credible threat to his safety, and that officials were moving swiftly out of the hotel he was staying at in Benghazi.
“There is credible threat info against the hotel that our team is using—and the rest of the Intl community is using, for that matter… DS [Diplomatic Security] going to evacuate our people to alt locations. Info suggested attack in next 24-48 hours,” wrote top Clinton aide Jacob Sullivan in an email to Clinton on June 10, 2011, with the subject line, ‘Hotel in Benghazi.’
At the time Stevens was a special envoy to Libya, and the U.S. had joined a U.N. campaign to set up a no-fly zone to assist rebels in the overthrow of Muammar Qadhafi.
In a separate incident, in April 2011, a State Department official wrote:
“The situation in Ajdabiyah has worsened to the point Stevens is considering departure from Benghazi. The envoy’s delegation is currently doing a phased checkout (paying the hotel bills, moving some comms to the boat, etc). He will monitor the situation to see if it deteriorates further, but no decision has been made on departure.”
The communications received by the Secretary of State illustrate the fast pace of security decisions made on the ground—but don’t show Clinton with a direct role in these decisions. For example, there’s no indication that Clinton intervened in the decision-making process when told about Stevens’ 2011 security scares.
Clinton was heavily criticized when it emerged in March that she had used a private email server to conduct business while she was Secretary of State. Her private email accounts prevented the normal process of archiving official government records. Clinton’s staff had turned over some 55,000 pages of email correspondence to the State Department in December 2014.
Democrats on the Select Benghazi Committee had urged the release of Benghazi-related emails for months. Clinton herself had urged the State Department to swiftly publish the emails, telling reporters earlier this week that she wanted them in the public domain as soon as possible.
“I am pleased that the State Department released the complete set of Secretary Clinton’s emails about Benghazi—as Democrats requested months ago,” said Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the committee.
The American people can now read all of these emails and see for themselves that they contain no evidence to back up claims that Secretary Clinton ordered a stand-down, approved an illicit weapons program, or any other wild allegation Republicans have made for years.
In the time between the June 2011 security scare and the September 2012 terrorist attacks, the mood in Libya ebbed and flowed—Stevens left Libya in November 2011 before returning as U.S. ambassador in May 2012.
In July, Libya held national elections which went off well, leading to people heralding the country worldwide. Meanwhile, Islamist flags had emerged on buildings throughout Benghazi.
The correspondence in summer 2012 shows a somewhat positive situation in Libya: the last email from Stevens that Clinton receives paints a rosy picture: in July 2012 Sen. John McCain is in Tripoli, Libya, being lauded for his support of the rebels.
“The atmosphere in Tripoli is very festive,” Stevens wrote in one email on July 7, 2012. “The gov’t declared today a holiday and people are driving around honking and waving flags and making peace sign gestures… McCain was applauded and thanked for his support wherever we went.”
The world’s focus doesn’t dwell on Libya, and Clinton doesn’t receive additional emails about Benghazi again until the 2012 attacks on U.S. facilities.
By September 2012, the situation in Libya had deteriorated. In a diary entry on Sept. 6, Stevens wrote about a “security vacuum” and “dicey conditions,” even suggesting that he was on an “Islamist ‘hit list’ in Benghazi.”
On the fateful day of Sept. 11, 2012, at approximately 4 p.m. in Washington, D.C., the first attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound occurred. Clinton had previously testified (PDF) that she was at the State Department that day, which could explain why she did not send or receive a large volume of emails about Benghazi.
She becomes more active on emails that evening, and at 11:37 p.m., she receives word through her Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills that the Libyan government had confirmed Amb. Steven’s death.
“Cheryl told me the Libyans confirmed his death. Should we announce tonight or wait until morning?” Clinton wrote in an email to top aides.
Throughout the morning after the initial attacks she has a lot of activity: in particular she received a large number of messages expressing condolences to her and the State Department over the death of the ambassador.
“The Ambassador was a perfect role model of the kind of person we need representing us around the world, and the others had so much to give—and already had given so much,” said former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates.
“What a wonderful, strong and moving statement by your boss. please tell her how much Sen. McCain appreciated it. Me too,” wrote a top national security aide for Sen. John McCain.
That weekend, Clinton continued to exchange emails on the Benghazi issue. On Saturday Sept. 15, the day before Susan Rice appeared on cable shows to make the since-rescinded claim that the Benghazi attacks were the result of protests-turned-violent, Clinton was involved arranging calls from her home and the collection of an action memo via classified courier.
The emails give insight into how Clinton operated at the time: using classified couriers to move memos and getting on the phone with other world leaders, rather than using email.
None of the released emails show Clinton being involved with Rice’s appearance on the Sunday shows, or the discussion of what Rice should say. She does, however, receive a transcript of what Rice would eventually say.
Findings of the Republican-led Select committee on Benghazi may not be released until sometime in 2016, in the thick of campaign season.
If the Select Committee continues to operate through the end of the 2015, its estimated cost will rise to $6 million dollars. The House Select Committee on Benghazi was established in May 2014. If it continues through to the end of 2015, it will have been investigating for 19 months—longer than other major, comparable investigations.
(To compare, the joint inquiry into the intelligence community’s actions with regard to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks took less than a year. The Senate Watergate committee operated for about 17 months before presenting its findings. And the Warren Commission on the assassination of President Kennedy operated for under a year.)
The release of Friday’s Benghazi-related emails has itself been months in the waiting: the State Department had been going through an excruciating process of assessing the emails for any information that would show sensitive or personally identifiable information, and then removing it. The State Department will now turn its attention to performing the same task on thousands of Clinton emails that are not related to Benghazi.
In fact, Hillary Clinton’s email correspondence has the potential to generate headlines at least through the end of the year, acting as a disruptive force that distracts from her presidential campaign.
For Republican committee chairman Trey Gowdy, the release of these emails are just the first step in a long slog to “collect and evaluate all of the relevant and material information necessary.” Gowdy said that the emails released Friday had all been exclusively reviewed and released only after review by her own lawyers.
Earlier this week, a federal judge had dismissed a State Department plan to release her email archives, comprised of some 55,000 pages of emails, by January 2016. Instead, the judge asked the State Department to come up with a plan to gradually release the emails in stages.
In the nearer term, Hillary Clinton is expected to appear before the Select Committee on Benghazi, Gowdy said last week that he will not schedule the former Secretary of State’s testimony until the State Department turns over more documents.
“The Select Committee should schedule Secretary Clinton’s public testimony now and stop wasting taxpayer money dragging out this political charade to harm Secretary Clinton’s bid for president,” Cummings, a Democrat, said Friday.
The New York Times obtained and published about a third of the Clinton Benghazi emails earlier this week, revealing that longtime Clinton friend Sidney Blumenthal had frequently written to her about Libya, serving as a source of information about the country before and after the 2012 attacks.
While Blumenthal had originally blamed demonstrators in the American diplomatic facility in Benghazi, a subsequent memo fingered a Libyan terrorist group for the attacks, arguing that they had used the demonstrations as cover for the violence. This week, the Select Committee on Benghazi subpoenaed Blumenthal to appear before the panel.
By: Tim Mak, The Daily Beast, May 22, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 