A View from the Beach: Clinton.com: More Emails, More Secrets

Oh, so much goodness in the new tranche of Hillary's email. . .

New Email Shows Tripoli Embassy Warned D.C. to ‘Not Conflate’ Video with Benghazi Attacks

Two days after the 9/11/2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, the United States embassy in Tripoli, Libya, was warning the State Department via email not to conflate the Innocence of Muslims YouTube video with the attacks.

The email, released by the House Select Committee on Benghazi on Saturday, was sent by a Tripoli embassy official to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s staffers in Washington, D.C., at 6:43 a.m. on September 14, 2012.

That is the day Clinton declared at the transfer of remains ceremony, “We’ve seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men. We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.”

It was two days before Susan Rice appeared on five Sunday talk shows to blame the violence in Benghazi on the video.

Here, via the Select Committee on Benghazi, is the full email with appropriate redactions:

Colleagues, I mentioned to [redacted] this morning, and want to share with all of you, our view at Embassy Tripoli that we must be cautious in our local messaging with regard to the inflammatory film trailer, adapting it to Libyan conditions.
Our monitoring of the Libyan media and conversations with Libyans suggest that the films not as explosive of an issue here as it appears to be in other countries in the region. The overwhelming majority of the FB comments and tweets we’ve received from Libyans since the Ambassador’s death have expressed deep sympathy, sorrow, and regret. They have expressed anger at the attackers, and emphasized that this attack does not represent Libyans or Islam. Relatively few have even mentioned the inflammatory video.
So if we post messaging about the video specifically, we may draw unwanted attention to it. And it is becoming increasingly clear that the series of events in Benghazi was much more terrorist attack than a protest which escalated into violence. It is our opinion that in our messaging, we want to distinguish, not conflate, the events in other countries with this well-planned attack by militant extremists. I have discussed this with [redacted] and he shares PAS’s view.
Select committee spokesman Matt Wolking said the email was referenced in the hearing last week and was released publicly for the first time on Saturday.

People died, then Hillary lied.

5 Can’t-Miss Hillary Emails from New Batch

1. She really wanted to respond to Ben Affleck
2. She was really happy to get Sid’s advice
3. She jokes about ‘neocon monitoring’ when email screws up
4. Libyan assassination stories make her think of home decorating
5. Her Netanyahu smack-talking gets redacted

See the actual emails at the link.

The Ad Writes Itself:

Hillary Clinton asked staff how to make smiley face emoticons and worried about email exchange with Ben Affleck in latest installment of messages (including 268 classified ones) from secret server

Affleck's Eastern Congo Initiative emailed Clinton a preview of a report in 2012 and sent it to the private address on her secret email server

Clinton took the email seriously and asked aides to draft a reply, even though it was likely a mass-mailing to a list of influential people

By contrast, the late U.S. ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, never had Clinton's personal email address to ask for added security help before he died in a terror attack

Today marks the fifth of eight monthly email releases ordered by a federal judge; last one will come in January, three days before the Iowa Caucuses

A State Dept. aide says the monthly routine 'is getting a little bit old. ... It's a fire drill that we'll be glad to be done with'

New tranche includes 268 emails that intelligence agencies deemed 'classified'

Because currying favor with Hollywood was more important to Hillary than the lives of diplomats.

Sid Blumenthal Emailed Hillary About ‘Setting Up Secret Channels Between Insurgents And Governments’

Emails released by the State Department on Friday show that Hillary Clinton’s longtime friend Sidney Blumenthal reached out to her on behalf of a former United Kingdom diplomat who was interested in “setting up secret channels between insurgents and governments.”

Clinton was receptive to the idea which came via Blumenthal from Jonathan Powell, former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s chief of staff.

“Hillary, Jonathan Powell has launched a new NGO that has already initiated some very interesting work below the radar,” Blumenthal wrote in the March 18, 2012 email.

“Sid We are trying to replicate what we did in Northern Ireland by setting up secret channels between insurgents and governments and then, where appropriate, developing these into negotiations,” Powell wrote to Blumenthal.

Maybe under President Hillary, we can dispense with that scandal ridden mob at the State Dept. and just go with her hand picked cronies.

Proof: Hillary Sent Classified Info

Hillary Clinton has repeatedly claimed that, “The State Department has confirmed that I did not send nor receive material marked classified."

But Clinton did indeed send classified information in emails. In an email released today by the State Department, part of her comments are redacted, because they are classified.

Here's the email:

Clinton emails show increased Benghazi security for Libyan PM

The latest batch of Hillary Clinton's private emails includes one that shows Clinton made an effort to help evacuate the acting Libyan prime minister from Benghazi amid a crumbling security situation.

It was released by the State Department just a week after congressional Republicans grilled Clinton for failing to respond to requests for more security from her own ambassador, who was killed in the 2012 terror attack in Benghazi.

The email shows Clinton received a request for supplies to help the acting prime minister leave Benghazi and transition into Tripoli, the nation's capital. Clinton seemingly greenlighted his request, and asked her aide Huma Abedin if the U.S. government could ship the requested supplies to a Libyan port.

The message from August 2011 is likely to give fresh fodder to her critics, who point out that requests for tighter security for U.S. officials never made it to her desk.

Even if the requests never reached her desk, she is responsible for overseeing the staff that makes the determination of what reaches her. Kind of like being chief executive, or something.

Hmmm: White House will block release of Hillary e-mails to … Barack Obama

. . . Unlike the other claim of executive privilege made in the Operation Fast and Furious probe by Congress involving Eric Holder, privilege in this circumstance does have long precedent. This directly involves communication between a President and his advisers (which includes Cabinet Secretaries), the case for which executive privilege explicitly exists. In order to overcome that claim, Congress or a court would have to have cause to suspect that specific violations of the law exist. One cannot conduct fishing expeditions without something specific in mind, unless a President chose to release the communications and waive the privilege. The classic case of piercing the privilege was with Richard Nixon’s tapes in the Watergate scandal, when there was already plenty of reason to suspect that the tapes had information relating to potentially criminal behavior. Nothing like that exists here, at least not yet.

Of course, invoking that privilege carries some political risks regardless of whether the circumstance falls completely within the classic model or not. In this case, Congress is looking into the deaths of four Americans in a terrorist attack on a consulate for which it provided inadequate security. If any of these e-mails relate to the attack or to the security of the Benghazi compound, then withholding them becomes at least politically problematic. The odds of that are probably pretty low, but the fact that they’re locking the e-mails down makes it impossible to rule out, too.

The mystery doesn’t do many favors for either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. It just serves to remind everyone that the White House knew full well that Hillary was using a private e-mail system and never bothered to mention it while Congress and several courts were being told that State had no e-mail records responsive to numerous and legitimate requests related to both oversight and transparency. Keeping those e-mails secret in the middle of an investigation into Benghazi only ties Obama more closely to both the Benghazi probe and Hillary’s e-mail scandal.

The bigger issue for Hillary, though, is the fact that the State Department has again had to classify hundreds of e-mails improperly stored and transmitted as classified, including one she herself sent. The privilege claim is a political issue; the classification issues are potential felonies.

She Botched It: What we’ve learned about Hillary Clinton’s performance at the State Department

Clinton is running for president as a sagacious and trustworthy steward of the national interest. Yet the Benghazi hearing revealed that some of her decisions were irresponsible, and her handling of her email records has been outright dishonest.

Going into the hearing, the media anticipated a debate between Republican members of the committee and Clinton, to be scored as a forensic contest. So did Clinton, and she played to the media’s expectations. So did the Democrats on the panel (with the exception of Tammy Duckworth, who emphasized policy reforms).

Most conservative commentators focused on Clinton’s exchanges with congressman Jim Jordan, about the Obama administration’s shifting accounts of the cause of the attack on the American facilities in Benghazi on the night of September 11, 2012. Jordan produced an email Clinton sent to her daughter Chelsea around 11 p.m. the night of the attack that identified the attackers as “an Al Qaeda-like group.” This was shortly after Clinton had suggested in a first-person statement released by the State Department that a YouTube video had been the cause.

The point was important. It provided further evidence that the administration’s public spin of the Benghazi attack was knowing and deliberate—as it would be, two months before an election, with the president campaigning on the claim that al Qaeda was “on the run.” Even so, exclusive focus on the email to Chelsea actually understates the scope of the Republicans’ case and overlooks data they proffered to support their argument.

The GOP’s contention is that Clinton cared about Libya mostly for political reasons. She was eager to take credit for the perceived victory when longtime dictator Muammar Qaddafi was toppled by rebels, with NATO air support, in August 2011. She had little interest, however, in managing the tasks assigned to the State Department in connection with the post-Qaddafi transition, though she did keep open a back channel on that country with her old political associate Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime confidant at the time employed by the Clinton Foundation. Not all of the Republicans’ assertions rang true, but the questioners did marshal an impressive array of data points to suggest that Clinton should have been more interested in the policy, and less in the U.S. domestic political value, of the intervention in Libya.

Clinton Pressed On Scandals By NH Voter

Do you think she gave his name to Sid "The Shiv" and asked him to "Blumenthal" the heckler?

Clinton Foundation hires Wall Street executive

One day after Hillary Clinton vowed to go after banking executives who lead their firms into financial trouble, her family's foundation hired an executive who escaped a struggling bank to work in the Obama administration.

The Clinton Foundation announced Wednesday it had hired Kevin Thurm as its executive vice president. Thurm served as a Citigroup executive for more than a decade, working his way up to become the bank's chief compliance officer before departing for the Department of Health and Human Services last year.
. . .
Big banks have been among her top campaign donors throughout her career, supporting her and her husband financially by paying them generous fees to speak at events.

Clinton's friendliness with the financial industry has given her less flexibility to move left amid Sanders' populist surge.

Spitzer: I buried plan to give illegal immigrants licenses to help Hillary

WASHINGTON – In a stunning admission, former Gov. Eliot Spitzer says he buried a plan to give drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants just to help Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign back in 2007.

The licenses became a key issue in Clinton’s nomination fight with Barack Obama, who said he was for the licenses at a debate in Philly, while Clinton danced around taking a position.

“She waffled and waffled and waffled,” recalled Spitzer, who backs Democratic rival Martin O’Malley for president.

Hillary Posts This TERRIBLE THING About GOP Debate… Instant Karma Pays A BRUTAL Visit