Hillary Used Several Intel Agencies, Hundreds of Classified Emails

Hillary Clinton with her lawyer, David Kendall have worked out the details to testify before the House Committee on Benghazi led by Congressman Trey Gowdy.

 Data in Clinton’s ‘secret’ emails came from 5 intelligence agencies 

Clinton Campaign Punting on Missing Benghazi Abedin Emails?

Check that Lincoln bedroom….no one knows anything, perhaps Sidney Blumenthal is still available or Sandy Berger hid them in some vault posthumously.

There is some inside the DC beltway conspiracy when it comes to official government business emails. They all seem to go missing.

The Missing Hillary Emails No One Can Explain

Daily Beast: There is a two-month gap in Hillary Clinton’s emails that coincides with violence in Libya and the employment status of a top Clinton aide, Huma Abedin.
Among the approximately 2,000 emails that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has released from her private account, there is a conspicuous two-month gap. There are no emails between Clinton and her State Department staff during May and June 2012, a period of escalating violence in Libya leading up to the September 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi that left four Americans dead.

A State Department spokesman told The Daily Beast that for the year 2012, only those emails related to the security of the consulate or to the U.S. diplomatic presence in Libya were made public and turned over to a House committee investigating the fatal Benghazi assault. But if that’s true, then neither Clinton nor her staff communicated via email about the escalating dangers in Libya. There were three attacks during that two-month period, including one that targeted the consulate.

That two-month period also coincides with a senior Clinton aide obtaining a special exemption that allowed her to work both as a staff member to the secretary and in a private capacity for Clinton and her husband’s foundation. The Associated Press has sued to obtain emails from Clinton’s account about the aide, Huma Abedin.

The status of Clinton’s emails has become an explosive political issue ever since The New York Times revealed that the then-Secretary of State was using a private email server to handle her official correspondence. Cybersecurity experts believe the homebrew system opened Clinton and her colleagues to targeting from online spies. The State Department and Intelligence Community Inspector Generals have asked the Justice Department to look into possible disclosure of classified information.

Regarding the security situation in Libya, there was plenty for Clinton and her team to discuss via email. On May 22, 2012, the International Red Cross’s Benghazi office was hit 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,” testified Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Wood, a senior State Department security chief in Libya (PDF) before the House Oversight Committee in October 2012.

Then, on June 6, an improvised explosive device detonated outside of the U.S. consulate, ripping a 12-foot-wide hole in the compound’s wall and prompting officials to release a public warning on “the fluid security situation in Libya.”

Yet the State Department has not produced any emails to or from Clinton about the improvised bomb.

Republicans on the House committee investigating the Benghazi attack have called the absence of any email communication noting the explosive attack at the U.S. consulate “inexplicable.”

“There are gaps of months and months and months,” Republican Representative Trey Gowdy, chairman of the Select Committee on Benghazi, said in a March 8 interview.

“The State Department transferred 300 messages exclusively reviewed and released by her [Clinton’s] own lawyers,” Gowdy added in a May 22 statement noting gaps in the email records. “To assume a self-selected public record is complete, when no one with a duty or responsibility to the public had the ability to take part in the selection, requires a leap in logic no impartial reviewer should be required to make and strains credibility.”

Since then, the Benghazi committee has recovered one email, largely about business interests in Libya, from June 2012 after subpoenaing Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal. The email from Blumenthal does not mention threats to the U.S. consulate, and there is no response from Clinton. The State Department subsequently gave the committee its copy.

U.S. interests weren’t the only ones being targeted in Benghazi. Five days after the improvised bomb damaged the consulate, an RPG hit a convoy carrying the British ambassador in Benghazi, wounding two bodyguards.

The United Kingdom and the Red Cross closed their facilities in Benghazi by the end of June 2012.

From there, the violence directed at the U.S. escalated. In a cable dated July 9, 2012, U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens asked that the State Department provide a minimum of 13 security personnel for the U.S. embassy in Tripoli and the consulate in Benghazi, noting a heightened security threat. The State Department did not fulfill Stevens’s request, a Senate Intelligence Committee report (PDF) later revealed.

A Clinton aide didn’t respond specifically to a request about the two-month email absence. But in a statement to reporters, Clinton spokesperson Nick Merrill noted, “More emails are slated to be released by the State Department next week, and we hope that release is as inclusive as possible.”

The two-month period wasn’t notable only for violence in Libya, and it has been the subject of questions about Clinton’s email and State Department records for a different reason.

On June 3, Abedin, a longtime Clinton aide and personal friend of the Clinton family, was given the status of a “special government employee,” which allowed her to stay on the State Department payroll while simultaneously working for the Clinton Foundation, Teneo, a consulting firm founded by Clinton confidant Doug Band, and as a private adviser to Clinton regarding her post-State Department transition.

Conflict-of-interest laws ordinarily would prohibit that arrangement, but the special designation exempted Abedin from some ethics rules.

In 2013, the AP filed a Freedom of Information Act request for State Department records on how Abedin obtained the special employee status. The news organization asked for emails about the matter.

Last week, a federal judge gave the State Department one week to respond to the AP’s two-year-old request. At midnight Tuesday, just before the judge’s deadline, the department’s lawyers submitted a declaration identifying about 68 pages of “potentially responsive” documents.

That marked the first time that the department acknowledged, in its two-year dispute with the AP, the existence of any agency documents related to Abedin’s arrangement.

Michael Smallberg, an investigator at the Project on Government Oversight, told The Daily Beast that while special government employees are not uncommon, the lack of information about Abedin may be keeping alive questions about potential conflict of interest in her work for the secretary and the foundation’s fundraising.

“Unless you come across any evidence to the contrary, there’s no reason to believe she was abusing the special government position,” Smallberg said. But, “the State Department has allowed those concerns to fester by withholding basic information,” Smallberg added. “Even if she did nothing wrong, secrecy breeds mistrust.”

State Department lawyers have argued that once all of Clinton’s emails are released on the agency’s website, following a vetting process that will take months, the AP’s request for information about Abedin will have been satisfied.

However, since some of the emails on Abedin that the AP wants likely fall within the June 2012 time frame, that might not be the case.

About 7 percent of Clinton’s emails have been released. All the emails are scheduled to be released on a rolling, monthly basis until the last set is released in January 2016, to comply with an order by a different federal judge. The next release is tentatively scheduled for this Friday.

 

13 Hours of Benghazi, Hat Tip to the Heroes RIP to the Heroes

Hello Tanto, thanks buddy and to you Col. Wood, we honor you. Hugs to Oz, Mark, and Tig.

 

WSJ: Michael Bay is notorious for mounting massive-scaled blockbusters crammed wall to wall with explosions, twisted metal, swaggering heroes and supermodels.

The director’s next movie, however, is shaping up to be a lot more serious because the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, is anything but the stuff of pure entertainment.

“13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi” is based on Mitchell Zuckoff’s nonfiction book “13 Hours,” which tells the story of the efforts of six members of a security crew who seek to protect the U.S. compound during the chaos that claimed the lives of four Americans.

The trailer for the film is still packed with plenty of Bay trademarks, such as action and pyrotechnic virtuosity, not to mention men of action and duty, but the tone is dead serious in a way that even Bay’s previous war film based around true events, “Pearl Harbor,” wasn’t. It’s like “Argo” meets “Zero Dark Thirty,” but filmed with Bay’s kinetic, flashy style.

Chuck Hogan, co-creator of FX’s “The Strain” and a novelist, wrote the screenplay for “13 Hours.” The film stars James Badge Dale, John Krasinski and Pablo Schreiber, and it is due to hit theaters Jan. 15.

WSJ App users can watch the trailer here.

Hillary: A Woman’s Right to Choose Reproduction of Emails?

Perhaps Hillary has some confusion in her social engineering thinking. She touts that women have a right to choose on personal reproduction but does that really apply to her emails?

Hillary Clinton turned over emails to the State Department after her term as Secretary of State from her private server. Apparently not being too tech savvy, someone else in her inner circle reviewed and processed tens of thousands of emails, printed them and delivered them to the State Department. The question is who did that and did they have security clearance for such action or access?

The intelligence community inspector generals reviewed the emails and declared that at least so far, 4 emails contained classified information. Read on and learn the basis of those emails.

What’s in those classified Clinton emails?

22 emails already made public were classified after they were sent

They’re different from 4 that were the subject of a New York Times report

It’s possible to figure out at least the general topics

 

 

Hillary’s Team Denies Classified Emails

As the probe continues on Hillary Clinton’s email history and her private server, one must question how a Secretary of State in four years never electronically interacted in classified communications.

If this is accurate when it comes to her private email server, then where did classified communications occur?

Hillary was a lawyer and so is Jeh Johnson, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and he too used a private email for official business and did the former Secretary of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, who also created an alias.

Clearly there is a real pattern in the Obama administration where abuse and waivers are the culture of corruption and obstruction of procedures and law. Imagine how many others use non official communications systems.

Criminal Inquiry Is Sought in Clinton Email Account

NYT’s

WASHINGTON — Two inspectors general have asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into whether sensitive government information was mishandled in connection with the personal email account Hillary Rodham Clinton used as secretary of state, senior government officials said Thursday.

The request follows an assessment in a June 29 memo by the inspectors general for the State Department and the intelligence agencies that Mrs. Clinton’s private account contained “hundreds of potentially classified emails.” The memo was written to Patrick F. Kennedy, the under secretary of state for management.

It is not clear if any of the information in the emails was marked as classified by the State Department when Mrs. Clinton sent or received them.

But since her use of a private email account for official State Department business was revealed in March, she has repeatedly said that she had no classified information on the account.

The Justice Department has not decided if it will open an investigation, senior officials said. A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign declined to comment.

At issue are thousands of pages of State Department emails from Mrs. Clinton’s private account. Mrs. Clinton has said she used the account because it was more convenient, but it also shielded her correspondence from congressional and Freedom of Information Act requests.

She faced sharp criticism after her use of the account became public, and subsequently said she would ask the State Department to release her emails.

The department is now reviewing some 55,000 pages of emails. A first batch of 3,000 pages was made public on June 30.

In the course of the email review, State Department officials determined that some information in the messages should be retroactively classified. In the 3,000 pages that were released, for example, portions of two dozen emails were redacted because they were upgraded to “classified status.” But none of those were marked as classified at the time Mrs. Clinton handled them.

In a second memo to Mr. Kennedy, sent on July 17, the inspectors general said that at least one email made public by the State Department contained classified information. The inspectors general did not identify the email or reveal its substance.

The memos were provided to The New York Times by a senior government official.

The inspectors general also criticized the State Department for its handling of sensitive information, particularly its reliance on retired senior Foreign Service officers to decide if information should be classified, and for not consulting with the intelligence agencies about its determinations.

In March, Mrs. Clinton insisted that she was careful in her handling of information on her private account. “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email,” she said. “There is no classified material. So I’m certainly well aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material.”

In May, the F.B.I. asked the State Department to classify a section of Mrs. Clinton’s emails that related to suspects who may have been arrested in connection with the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya. The information was not classified at the time Mrs. Clinton received it.

The revelations about how Mrs. Clinton handled her email have been an embarrassment for the State Department, which has been repeatedly criticized over its handling of documents related to Mrs. Clinton and her advisers.

On Monday, a federal judge sharply questioned State Department lawyers at a hearing in Washington about why they had not responded to Freedom of Information Act requests from The Associated Press, some of which were four years old.

“I want to find out what’s been going on over there — I should say, what’s not been going on over there,” said Judge Richard J. Leon of United States District Court, according to a transcript obtained by Politico. The judge said that “for reasons known only to itself,” the State Department “has been, to say the least, recalcitrant in responding.”

Two days later, lawmakers on the Republican-led House committee investigating the Benghazi attacks said they planned to summon Secretary of State John Kerry’s chief of staff to Capitol Hill to answer questions about why the department has not produced documents that the panel subpoenaed. That hearing is set for next Wednesday.

“The State Department has used every excuse to avoid complying with fundamental requests for documents,” said the chairman of the House committee, Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina.

Mr. Gowdy said that while the committee has used an array of measures to try to get the State Department to hand over documents, the results have been the same. “Our committee is not in possession of all documents needed to do the work assigned to us,” he said.

The State Department has sought to delay the hearing, citing continuing efforts to brief members of Congress on the details of the nuclear accord with Iran. It is not clear why the State Department has struggled with the classification issues and document production. Republicans have said the department is trying to use those processes to protect Mrs. Clinton.

State Department officials say they simply do not have the resources or infrastructure to properly comply with all the requests. Since March, requests for documents have significantly increased.

Some State Department officials said they believe that many senior officials did not initially take the House committee seriously, which slowed document production and created an appearance of stonewalling.

State Department officials also said that Mr. Kerry is concerned about the toll the criticism has had on the department and has urged his deputies to comply with the requests quickly.