@FoxNews speechless, truly. Don't know how the families of the fallen in Benghazi deal with this....— Little Don Draper (@ukunderk) June 28, 2016
State Dept flack says they "took seriously the request for security that the embassy made" #Benghazi— Mike aka Proof (@ProofBlog) June 28, 2016
Which one of the 600 requests was that?
Hillary Clinton will hide behind the State Department’s Accountability Review Board report.
The ARB never interviewed Secretary Clinton. It never sought to obtain her emails and never learned that she had set up a private server. The ARB chose not to interview State Department officials who were likely to offer testimony that contradicted the Obama administration’s preferred narrative, including Mark Thompson, the senior counterterrorism official at the State Department on duty the night of the attacks, who repeatedly offered to testify but was never contacted by the ARB investigators.
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Among the issues that have dominated the attention of investigators is the matter of security before the attack. In previous congressional testimony, Clinton has volunteered that she was ultimately responsible for what happens at the State Department under her watch.
But Libya was different. US facilities there were increasingly under threat and those responsible for securing them—and those who worked in them—were sounding alarms about inadequate security. A long trail of documents make clear that Clinton was intimately involved virtually every aspect of Libya policymaking and was receiving detailed reports from both formal State Department channels and from outside advisers (Sidney Blumenthal and others).
[SNIP]
And, second, she will be asked why she had time to read, share and respond to a regular stream of emails from Blumenthal, who was barred by the Obama administration from working at the State Department, but did not have time to read urgent reports from State Department officials responsible for addressing the deteriorating security situation in Libya.
In that email, which Blumenthal sent Clinton in preparation for a meeting she was to have about the Libyan opposition; Blumenthal described at length the qualifications of an American security firm seeking contracts in Libya.
According to Blumenthal, the firm, Osprey Global Solutions, had unique experience in chaotic wartime security environments. The training and assistance they could provide the Libyan opposition could break the stalemate between the rebels and the Qaddafi government. The opposition, Blumenthal wrote, had finally recognized that Qaddafi would not fall on his own and that they needed American assistance to force him out. Blumenthal argued that Osprey was the firm to provide that assistance and noted that he and two associates had secured an agreement between Osprey and the Libyan opposition.
“For months the Select Committee on Benghazi has called on Secretary Clinton to turn over her server to a neutral, detached third party for independent forensic examination. She refused every entreat. Secretary Clinton said she created this unusual email arrangement with herself for ‘convenience.’ It may have been convenient for her, but it has been troubling at multiple levels for the rest of the country.”“Congress, the media, the public, private litigants and FOIA requestors were denied access to public documents, and recently the Inspectors General for two separate Executive Branch entities expressed concern about the possible exposure of classified material as a direct result of her decision to eschew the email rules applicable to everyone else and create her own.”
“The IC [IntelligenceCommunity] Inspector General revealed Secretary Clinton’s emails and server contained not just ‘top secret’ classified information, but ‘compartmented’ classified intelligence not releasable to foreigners, which must be noted in the timing of this announcement. This is a serious national security issue, and the seriousness of it should transcend normal, partisan politics.”
“The revelation that Secretary Clinton exclusively used private email for official public business, and the multitude of issues that emanated from her decision, including this most recent one, demonstrates what can happen when Congress and those equally committed to exposing the truth, doggedly pursue facts and follow them.”
The highly unusual practice of a Cabinet-level official physically running her own email would have given Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, impressive control over limiting access to her message archives. It also would distinguish Clinton's secretive email practices as far more sophisticated than some politicians, including Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin, who were caught conducting official business using free email services operated by Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc.
