WASHINGTON — Longtime Hillary Rodham Clinton aide Cheryl Mills was grilled for hours Thursday by a House committee — a day after a former Clinton staffer said he would invoke his Fifth Amendment rights to avoid giving testimony.
The appearance by Mills, who testified behind closed doors before the House committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi attack, came after it was revealed that former Clinton tech expert Byran Pagliano would refuse to answer committee questions.
That created another political embarrassment for Clinton, who “has made every effort to answer questions and be as helpful as possible, and has encouraged her aides . . . to do the same, including Bryan Pagliano,” said campaign spokesman Nick Merrill.
Pagliano isn’t just any staffer. He was responsible for Clinton’s private server during her 2008 presidential campaign, and followed her to the State Department as a “special adviser.”
As orange is the new black, Mrs. Clinton belongs in the big house not the White House in 2016
Delusional, morally bankrupt, self-obsessed Hillary Clinton—a metaphorical modern day power-obsessed Lady Macbeth (with the same self-destructive [political] behavior) is the poster child of the dictionary definition of treason: a violation of allegiance to one’s sovereign or to one’s state and the betrayal of a trust or confidence; breach of faith; treachery. (Indeed, staffers should have known something was amiss when the Clinton’s movers snatched everything not nailed down when the Clintons left the White House—the people’s house—the first time.) Yes, people of Hillary’s ilk live by a single axiom: numero uno first, last, and always.
Clearly, Mrs. Clinton exists in the rarefied air of ruling class elitists: millionaires and billionaires, and former and future U.S. Presidents. Therefore, the rule of law (and not the fickle dictates of distant kings and emperors for which the American Revolution was fought) is not for her. It is something only to penalize the rest of us—the “little people” laboring in the hamster wheels of part-time jobs (sans health insurance due to Obamacare regulations)—to pay the 18 trillion dollar tab (and counting) of their largesse. We should be grateful for she who would stoop to rule us.
Under Congressional questioning, recall her petulant knee-jerk response to four murdered Americans (including one U.S. Ambassador) in Benghazi when she raged “what difference, at this point, does it make?” Therefore, her callous, blasé attitude (and her recent smarmy joke about using the Snapchat app and automatically deleting emails) is just par for the course. Mrs. Clinton sent and received top secret material (of the 20% currently sampled, 305 are classified) across a non-governmental, unsecured, private server (in clear violation of law) that has likely exposed the nation’s vulnerabilities to our enemies. That obliviousness—and the intentional lies of cover-up—are treasonous.
Of this, Watergate reporter Bob Woodward said: “Follow the trail here. There are all these emails. Well, they were sent to someone or someone sent them to her. So, if things have been erased here, there’s a way to go back to these emails or who received them from Hillary Clinton. So, you’ve got a massive amount of data in a way, reminds me of the Nixon tapes: Thousands of hours of secretly recorded conversations that Nixon thought were exclusively his.” Lesser politicians not abetted by a minimizing hard-left MSM would be doomed.
In any case, ignorance of the law is no defense. A far less dire example; former CIA director and retired general David H. Petraeus who shared classified material with his biographer mistress (who incidentally had a security clearance) got prosecuted for his lack of good judgment. As orange is the new black, Mrs. Clinton belongs in the big house not the White House in 2016.
Donald Trump has a new ad out today attacking Hillary, telling her IT DOES MATTER:
I have to admit I chuckled when I saw the ad the first time because the messaging is so simple and to the point. It’s not dolled up with all of this pomp and circumstance. It’s focus is the message and nothing else.
I did like how they threw in the Whitewater controversy between the emails and Benghazi as a reminder back to the 90s
Platte River Networks, the Denver-based cybersecurity firm Hillary Clinton hired in 2013 to maintain her old email server, says it is “highly likely” a full backup of the device was made and that the thousands of emails Clinton deleted may still exist, ABC News is reporting.
On Wednesday, Platte River gave the FBI the server Clinton used as secretary of state. The Democratic presidential candidate had stated numerous times prior to that that she would not relinquish control of the server to a third party.
But the FBI became interested in the hardware after the revelation that the Intelligent Community inspector general had determined that two emails that traversed the server contained “top secret” information. While Clinton is not believed to have sent the emails in question, the finding undermines her claims at the onset of the email scandal in March that no classified information ever landed on her server.
Platte River has said that it is cooperating with the FBI and that it is not the target of any investigation.
The company did not respond to requests for additional comment Sunday.
The details about how Clinton’s server was handled and how the data from it was transferred have remained unclear.
In a March 27 letter to the House Select Committee on Benghazi, Clinton’s attorney, David Kendall, wrote that he “confirmed with the Secretary’s IT support that no e-mails from hdr22@clintonemail.com…reside on the server or any back-up systems associated with the server.”
Earlier this week, Barbara Wells, an attorney for Platte River, told reporters, including The Daily Caller, that the server was rendered blank after data was transferred from it in June 2013. Wells told Bloomberg News that the information from Clinton’s old server was migrated to a new server that still exists.
In an angry moment at the Iowa Democratic Wing Ding on Friday, Hillary Clinton said she will not “get down in the mud” with Republicans who she claims are trying to exploit her use of a private email server and the Benghazi attacks for political gain.
“[Republicans will] try to tell you this is about Benghazi, but it is not,” Clinton told an audience at the event, her voice fraught with anger and her finger wagging in the air.
“Benghazi was a tragedy. Four dedicated public servants lost their lives,” she added. “And we have to be focused on how to prevent future tragedies.”
She said that seven congressional investigations have “already debunked all of the conspiracy theories” about the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.
It’s not about Benghazi,” Clinton bellowed to applause.
“And you know what, it’s not about emails or servers, either,” she continued. “It’s about politics.”
Clinton’s remarks are her most direct and hostile on the issue of her private email and private server use. The aggression comes at the same time that the FBI has opened an investigation into the server she used as secretary of state. The FBI seized the server this week from Platte River Networks, a Denver-based cybersecurity company Clinton hired in 2013 to manage the system.
But Clinton, as she’s done all throughout the scandal, which commenced in March due to the investigative work of the Republican-controlled House Select Committee on Benghazi, tried to portray herself as taking a proactive part in the inquiry. She said that she has insisted that the State Department publish the 55,000 pages of emails she turned over in December “as soon as possible.” She also said that she has offered to answer questions before Cognress “for months.”
I'll be honest, I had no idea this movie was even being made until I saw the trailer -
Holy cow. This may be one Michael Bay movie that I actually put down money to go see (how in the WORLD a movie like this got past the liberal Hollywood gatekeepers, I will never know).
Dana Perino was on "The Kelly File" to talk about the potential impact this movie could have on Hillary Clinton's campaign and she makes some pretty good points about it -
Here's the thing about Michael Bay - critics don't like his movies. Shoot, I don't like his movies. But people go see his movies, regardless of what critics or the Hollywood elites say. Whether it's Pearl Harbor or Transformers or Ninja Turtles (which he only produced but, details), his movies are very successful at the box office. I'm sure plenty of low-info types are going to be looking through their movie options in January (which, there's rarely ANYTHING good playing at the theaters in January. Other than a bunch of pretentious Oscar-bait trash), and they'll be all "Hey - a new Michael Bay movie's out! Let's go see it!" And they will go see this movie. And they will see "This is a True Story." And they will hear the story of what happened in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. Many of them will be hearing about this for the first time.
Like Dana said, we don't know anything about the movie other than the trailer. Hillary could come out of this looking like a hero or a villain. Or she might not even be mentioned in the movie. But it's an opportunity to get the truth out.
A two-month gap in Hillary Clinton’s released private emails coincide with the escalating violence in Libya, as well as the hiring of close aide Huma Abedin, reports say.
Although the former Secretary of State released around 2,000 emails from her private account, there are no emails between Clinton and her staff between May and June 2012. During that time, violence escalated in Libya, including a June attack on the Benghazi consulate prior to the fatal September 11 attack.
Abedin, Clinton’s top aide, was also hired during that time period — at both the State Department and the Clinton Foundation.
Speaking to the Daily Beast, a State Department official said that only emails related to the security of the Benghazi consulate or U.S. diplomats in Libya were released to the House committee that is still investigating the attacks on Benghazi. According to Fox News, if that’s true, than neither the Democratic frontrunner nor her staff communicated by email during that period — during which there were three attacks on international outposts in Benghazi, including one on the consulate.
On May 22, an International Red Cross office was struck by rocket-propelled grenades.
“The attack on the International Red Cross was another attack that also involved us and threats to the compound there in Benghazi,” Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Wood, a senior State Department security chief in Libya, testified before the House Oversight Committee in October 2012.
Another attack, on June 6, prompted the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli to warn of the “fluid security situation in Libya,” after an improvised explosive devise detonated outside of the consulate. It was then that Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was killed a few months later in the September attack, told his superiors that “Islamic extremism appears to be on the rise in eastern Libya,” according to Fox News.
Five days later, two bodyguards were injured after a convoy carrying Britain’s ambassador to Libya was hit with rocket-propelled grenades.
During that time, Abedin was allowed to work both as a staff member for Clinton in the State Department and serve in a private role in Clinton and her husband’s foundation. In 2013, the Associated Press filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the records of how she was able to obtain her special employment status.
The Daily Beast reported that last week a federal judge gave State Department a final deadline of one week to fulfill the news organization’s request. Just before midnight on Tuesday, narrowly making the deadline, lawyer’s for the department submitted a declaration that identified almost 70 pages of “potentially responsive” documents.
According to the Daily Beast, this is the first time the State Department has acknowledged its two-year dispute with the Associated Press.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will testify in October before the House committee investigating the killing of four Americans in a 2012 terror attack in Benghazi, Libya, the Clinton campaign said Saturday.
Clinton was secretary of state when the attacks occurred.
Campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said Clinton will testify publicly before the House’s special Select Committee on Benghazi, after months of negotiations about the terms of her appearance.
A tentative date of Oct. 22 has been set. Clinton has already testified before Congress on the issue.
Committee Chairman and GOP South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy initially requested a private interview.
The announcement that Clinton will testify comes one day after the release of a letter from intelligence investigators to the Justice Department stating secret government information may have been compromised in Clinton's private server that she used when secretary of state.
Clinton used the server and private email for official business including some exchanges about the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks on a U.S. outpost in Benghazi.
The investigation into the deaths of the U.S. ambassador and the three others has grown into a political fight over Clinton's emails and private server. It's likely to shadow Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.
“Friday began with the printing of a story that was false,” Merrill said in a statement. “Entities from the highest levels of two branches of government have now made that clear. … We want to ensure that appropriate procedures are followed as these emails are reviewed while not unduly delaying the release of her emails.”
The inspector general of the U.S. intelligence community on Friday alerted the Justice Department to the potential compromise of classified information arising from Clinton's server.
The IG also sent a memo to members of Congress indicating that "potentially hundreds of classified emails" were among the 30,000 that Clinton had provided to the State Department -- a concern the office said it raised with FBI counterintelligence officials.
The memo also made recommendations for changes in how the emails are being reviewed and processed for public release.
Though the referral to the Justice Department does not seek a criminal probe and does not specifically target Clinton, the latest steps by government investigators will further fuel the partisan furor surrounding the 55,000 pages of emails the State Department already has under review.
Merrill also said the agency is slated to make public more of them next week.
“We hope that release is as inclusive as possible,” he said.
Select committee spokesman Jamal Ware said Saturday that Clinton's campaign should contact the candidate's lawyer, David Kendall, because as of last night he was still negotiating conditions for her appearance. Among the key issues apparently is whether Clinton will answer questions about her emails.
“The committee will not, now or ever, accept artificial limitations on its congressionally-directed jurisdiction or efforts to meet the responsibilities assigned to the committee by the House," Ware said.
A spokesman for Democrats on the Benghazi committee told Fox News on Saturday that Gowdy's staff proposed to Clinton's attorney hearing dates in October and that on Friday the attorney accepted the Oct. 22 date.
"However, all we can confirm at this point is that the date was offered and accepted, not that the Republicans will stick to it," the spokesman said.
Fox News’ Doug McElway, Ed Henry and Chad Pergram and The Associated Press contributed to this story.
No sooner had Hillary Clinton announced the start of her U.S. presidential campaign than several skeletons popped out of her closet.
The Clinton Foundation skeleton, at worst, gave foreign contributors a “pay to play” influence at the U.S. State Department, or, at best, the appearance of such. If the former, the Clintons have taken Harry Truman’s motto, “the buck stops here,” to mean millions of them.
Another skeleton is Hillary’s unauthorized use of a private email server along with her erasure of those communications while announcing her candidacy.
A third skeleton, Benghazi, is being examined by Chairman
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC)
85%
of the House Select Committee which is investigating the matter.
These three skeletons demand, and are receiving, close scrutiny. However, a fourth and much more damning skeleton—Hillary’s Muslim Brotherhood connection—still escapes scrutiny. Interestingly, in connection with the Benghazi investigation, three Hillary aides have been subpoenaed by Gowdy to produce emails. The one who has yet to do so completely is the one with the closest ties to the Brotherhood—Huma Abedin.
The subpoena stems from Gowdy’s efforts to track what communications were made by Hillary and her staff concerning Ambassador Chris Stevens movements prior to the Benghazi attack. Of interest also will be why efforts were undertaken after the attack to minimize involvement by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Some background about the Brotherhood is needed to understand its driving force and why, under Hillary’s leadership as Secretary of State, a decision would have been made to embrace an organization determined to eliminate America and her allies.
Because our Middle East allies understand this background, they have outlawed the group.
The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 as a Sunni Islamist religious, political and social movement. Founder Hassan al-Banna’s fundamental goal was Islam’s global domination. That effort quickly turned violent. As its influence grew, its tentacles spread to 80 other nations, laying the groundwork for an envisioned global caliphate.
An early influential Brotherhood member, Sayyid Qutb, wrote of the need to cleanse the world of Western influence by imposing sharia. Years later, his work became Osama bin Laden’s and Ayman al-Zawahri’s “bible.” But, feeling the Brotherhood was not moving fast enough to achieve global Islam, they created an offshoot group—al-Qaeda—to quicken the pace.
At various times, as the Brotherhood gained influence causing domestic instability, nations cracked down on it. To survive, it renounced violence—birthing numerous splinter groups to do its violent bidding.
In 1981, one such group assassinated a Middle East peace apostle—Egyptian President Anwar Sadat—for his peace treaty with Israel. Hamas was another terrorist splinter group.
Viewing America as an obstacle to Islam’s global dominance, the Brotherhood—to this day—seeks to destroy America, informing followers to be “patient” as it so plots to do so.
In the 1990s, Brotherhood leaders mapped out a secret war plan to accomplish this—one discovered completely by accident in 2004. Despite this discovery and our knowledge about what is in the plan (such as using Muslim Brotherhood front companies within the U.S. and making claims of Islamophobia whenever Islam is criticized), the Brotherhood openly continues implementing that plan today. Meanwhile, under Obama’s tutelage, the federal agencies responsible for protecting us from such a threat fail to do so.
Just like Osama bin Laden’s 1997 declaration of war against America received little media attention, so too did the Brotherhood’s 2010 war declaration against America by its Supreme Guide, Muhammad Badi.
Badi called for jihad against “the Muslim’s real enemies, not only Israel but also the United States. Waging jihad against both of these infidels is a commandment of Allah that cannot be disregarded.”
The Brotherhood’s long running anti-American platform properly inhibited U.S. recognition of the group. But, incredibly, under the Obama/Clinton team, that changed overnight.
Failing to support our long-time ally, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Obama welcomed the Brotherhood with open arms in June 2011—without even demanding it withdraw its war declaration or otherwise renounce its anti-American platform.
The skeleton in Hillary’s closet now in need of close scrutiny is how the Muslim Brotherhood instantly converted—in the Administration’s eyes but not those of the Brotherhood itself—from foe to friend.
Of note in all this is that the family of Hillary’s now longest serving assistant, Huma Abedin, has enjoyed an intensely close relationship with the Brotherhood for decades. Her father, Zyed Abedin, served as editor of an anti-Semitic journal funded by an Islamist; her mother, Saleha Mahmood Abedin, replaced him as editor in 1993 when he died. As editor, Saleha has promoted the Muslim Brotherhood (she is a member of its female division), violent jihad and the “right” of women to be repressed under sharia.
Republican lawmakers investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, released a subpoena Wednesday issued to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, refuting her claims that she was never subpoenaed.
Clinton used a private email address and a home-based server during her time at the State Department (2009-2013), and investigators on the House Select Committee on Benghazi are trying to piece together what Clinton knew at the time of the attacks.
During an interview with CNN this week, Clinton said everything she did was "permitted," including deleting thousands of emails without turning them over to the government.
"I didn't have to turn over anything. I chose to turn over 55,000 pages because I wanted to go above and beyond what was expected of me," Clinton said. "Because I knew the vast majority of everything that was official already was in the State Department system. And now I think it's kind of fun, people get a real-time, behind-the-scenes look at what I was emailing about, and what I was communicating about."
"The committee has issued several subpoenas, but I have not sought to make them public," committee Chairman Trey Gowdy said in an emailed statement.
"I would not make this one public now, but after Secretary Clinton falsely claimed the committee did not subpoena her, I have no choice in order to correct the inaccuracy. The committee immediately subpoenaed Clinton personally after learning the full extent of her unusual email arrangement with herself, and would have done so earlier if the State Department or Clinton had been forthcoming that State did not maintain custody of her records and only Secretary Clinton herself had her records when Congress first requested them.
Democrats serving on the House Select Committee on Benghazi are chiding the panel’s chairman for not holding a vote on whether to make public the deposition of Hillary Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal.
In a statement, the panel’s five Democrats said they are “disappointed” chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) “decided not to hold a vote today on releasing the transcript of Sidney Blumenthal’s deposition, particularly since we have no hearings, interviews, briefings, or other activities on today’s schedule.”
“We believe it is an abuse of power for Republicans to selectively release Mr. Blumenthal’s emails while at the same time withholding the deposition transcript from the American people,” they added.
The statement comes a little over a week after Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the panel’s ranking member, said the select committee would vote today on releasing Blumenthal’s roughly nine-hour, closed-door interview.
But a GOP spokesman for the panel quickly shot down that idea, saying Gowdy had not scheduled anything relative to holding such a vote.
Gowdy and other Republicans have resisted making the deposition public, noting that the select committee hasn’t released the text of any of its previous interviews.
Democrats had expected to lose the vote, being outnumbered on the 12-member committee 7 to 5. But panel member Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.) has said the deposition should be public, putting Democrats one vote away from getting it released.
Democrats believe the transcript will show GOP questions during the marathon, closed-door session were mostly political and not focused on the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including an ambassador.
"The fact is that the Select Committee has not held a public hearing in more than five months, and the taxpayers of this nation should be able to see for themselves how far beyond Benghazi the Select Committee has strayed in its glacial, politically-motivated, $3.7 million fishing expedition targeting Secretary Clinton," they said. "We urge Chairman Gowdy to follow the House rules and schedule the vote promptly.”
Thanks to Tuesday’s State Department document dump, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s email server is back in the news. The roughly 3,000 emails that State plopped on the media were among those that Clinton supposedly surrendered before she wiped that server as clean as a chalkboard at the start of class.
But what if that server still brims with Clinton’s emails and other documents?
I strongly suspect that Clinton has erased nothing. Her server is pristine. Hillary and company only say that it has been deleted.
“I have confirmed with the secretary’s IT support that no emails . . . for the time period January 21, 2009 through February 1, 2013 reside on the server or on any back-up systems associated with the server,” Clinton’s attorney, David Kendall, wrote the House Select Committee on Benghazi. “Thus, there are no hdr22@clintonemail.com e-mails from Secretary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State on the server for any review, even if such review were appropriate or legally authorized.”
By asserting that contents of the server have been obliterated, Clinton enjoys the political advantage of pretending to delete it: Republicans largely have stopped asking for the device.
Hillary’s server is empty, GOPers think. So, why bother with it?
Instead, Republicans probing Clinton’s role in the Benghazi massacre trust bureaucrats at State to share emails from among those that Clinton hand-picked in the first place. At best, Benghazi Committee chairman Rep. Trey Gowdy, R–S.C., and others are seeing a subset of a subset of Clinton’s emails.
Meanwhile, my hunch is that Clinton has touched nothing. This leaves her totally immune to federal charges of destruction of evidence and obstruction of justice because she craftily has done no such thing.
“It’s entirely possible that Hillary is lying when she claims to have wiped her server,” former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell tells me. “Her bald claims to have done so seem to have deflected attention from the server and bought her a pass — at a minimum stalling and diverting the substantive investigation.”
The author of "Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice" adds, “If Hillary actually did not erase her own server, and is lying about having done so, she hasn’t actually destroyed evidence. And if her lies were not under oath, she’s not subject to a perjury prosecution. It’s the Clinton version of ‘bait and switch.’”
New documents released by a federal court show President Obama called then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the night of the 2012 Benghazi attack -- but the contents are being withheld by the State Department.
It had previously been disclosed that Clinton and Obama spoke the night of the terror attacks. But the documents offer additional information about the timing of the call -- after the initial attack on the U.S. consulate, but before the second wave where mortars hit the nearby CIA annex and killed former Navy Seals Ty Woods and Glen Doherty.
The contents of the call, however, are being withheld, not because the information is classified but because the administration claims they represent internal deliberations about the 2012 terror assault.
The claim comes as Clinton also faces accusations that she withheld Benghazi-related emails from her private server in the trove of emails handed over to the State Department.
The contents of the call were only shared with Obama's and Clinton's closest aides. Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes sent an email on the call to State Department officials Jake Sullivan and Philippe Reines, and National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan.
The email was released as part of an ongoing lawsuit by conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.
The email on the Obama-Clinton phone call bears the subject line, "Call." The text of the email says, "Readout of President's Call to Secretary Clinton," but the rest of the details are fully redacted. The State Department cited the so-called "B5" exception for internal deliberations.
A fired-up "American Sniper" widow Taya Kyle slammed Hillary Clinton's shortcomings as a presidential candidate today, specifically in her responses to the Benghazi attack.
On a Herald Radio interview, Kyle said she was appalled that Clinton had “the audacity to sit there and say, ‘Look people die in America every day, what’s the big deal.'
“It’s almost like the real world doesn’t apply to her anymore, it doesn’t affect her, she doesn’t care,” Kyle said.
She added it is “horrifying” that the government failed to send in help during the Benghazi attack, but for Kyle, the worst offense is Clinton’s handling of the situation.
“Maybe (Clinton) has been in the system so long that she’s lost sight of it,” Kyle said.
