Hillary says, "They all look alike!"

When you are Hillary Clinton, you do not believe you will ever be held accountable.

A federal judge is amazed that State Department officials lied to him!

17 months after Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley sent a letter to the State Department asking about Hillary Clinton's security clearance, he finally got a response from the State Department. Her security clearance has been revoked at her request! So reports Trace Gallagher at Fox News.

In related news, Gregg Re reports at Fox,

In a combative exchange at a hearing Friday in Washington, D.C., a federal judge unabashedly accused career State Department officials of lying and signing "clearly false" affidavits to derail a series of lawsuits seeking information about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email server and her handling of the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth said he was "shocked" and "dumbfounded" when he learned that FBI had granted immunity to former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills during its investigation into the use of Clinton's server, according to a court transcript of his remarks.

"I had myself found that Cheryl Mills had committed perjury and lied under oath in a published opinion I had issued in a Judicial Watch case where I found her unworthy of belief, and I was quite shocked to find out she had been given immunity in — by the Justice Department in the Hillary Clinton email case," Lamberth said during Friday's hearing.

...Four Americans were killed in the attack on the Benghazi embassy, and the Clinton State Department was faulted for ignoring security concerns in the run-up to the attack, contributing to the poor defense posture at the post.

Read more here.

The Espionage Act is back to being enforced as it is written. Bad news for Mrs. Clinton and her underlings?

At National Review, Andrew McCarthy writes about

Restoring the rule of law to the protection of classified information.

On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced the arrest of a former CIA officer on a felony charge of unlawfully retaining classified information. Jerry Chun Shing Lee (a/k/a “Zhen Cheng Li”) is charged in a complaint with one count of unlawfully retaining classified information, a felony carrying a potential ten-year prison sentence.

...Like Petraeus’s journals, Lee’s notebooks contain handwritten notes of highly classified missions, meetings, and sources. Lee’s offense does not appear to involve retaining classified information in digital form on non-government servers or transmitting it by email.

...the Justice Department finds that traitorous intent is not an element of the offense. The prosecution must merely show that Lee acted willfully: i.e., aware that his conduct was illegal, he intentionally retained classified information in a place not authorized for its storage (and during a time when he was no longer authorized to possess it).

...As I have recently explained, the misimpression that Clinton’s case is primarily about “extreme carelessness” rather than willful misconduct is the result of Obama administration sleight-of-hand. Mrs. Clinton should have been investigated (and charged) under section 793(e) since she, like Lee, willfully and unlawfully retained classified information in unauthorized places (and transmitted it to unauthorized people). The gross-negligence felony (793(f)) should have been the prosecutors’ fallback position — i.e., even if a jury somehow rejected the overwhelming evidence that she willfully mishandled the intelligence, she could still be convicted if the jury concluded she was grossly negligent.

...the Espionage Act is back to being enforced as it is written. If the email investigation were reopened under those terms, it would be bad news for Mrs. Clinton and her underlings.

Read more here.

An expert in Nothingburgers

My admiration for Laura Ingraham increases daily. Here she is with #NeverTrumper Jonah Goldberg, who hypocritically makes fun of Hillary Clinton, and I think Charles Krauthammer might have also refrained from voting for Trump, although I am not sure about that. Laura doesn't confront either of them for their hypocrisy.

Oh, and can you believe Hillary blaming the DNC, when they rigged the nomination for her against Bernie? That's Chutzpah!

That's the gal she knows

Linda Tripp, a woman who knows Hillary Clinton oh so well, writes,

As Donald Trump faced the enormity of his win, he gave a heartfelt, humble and gracious victory speech, one which in its inclusiveness was clearly meant to begin our national healing. Hillary’s voters across the country finally went to bed, monumentally let down by all of it. Their mistake was in believing she actually cared about all of them.

...Countless Presidents and Prime Ministers, world leaders all, have been and are women. Some going back decades. For the sake of argument, we won’t even consider the female surgeons, pilots, astronauts, CEOs, elected officials and diplomats to name just a few both here and around the world who years later are still picking shards of glass out of their hairdos. Women have long since arrived at the pinnacle of power, they are just named something other than Hillary Rodham Clinton. Apparently they don’t count.

...So as the President-elect conducts a well-disciplined transition and prepares to lead the nation in a matter of weeks, the country will simply have to endure Hillary’s behind-the-scenes temper tantrum. With strains of “Hail to the Chief” echoing silently in her mind, all else pales for Hillary. Unity be damned. She’s going for it. Not for the good of the country. Never for the good of the country. It is for personal achievement, for personal gain, for personal riches. And that’s the gal I know.

Read more here.

Linda Tripp tells what she saw and heard in the Clinton Whit

Aaron Klein reports in Breitbart about his interview with Linda Tripp, a former White House staffer whose workspace was located directly adjacent to Hillary Clinton’s second floor West Wing office. Tripp confirmed long-reported accounts of the former First Lady throwing hard objects at Bill Clinton.

Tripp revealed some of what she personally witnessed firsthand of Clinton’s temperament and the way she says White House staff feared the First Lady to the point of “cowering” in her presence.

“In the Clinton White House there was endless screaming,” she recalled. “Constant vulgar profanity on the part of both the President and the First Lady. And it’s hard for me to refer to her as the First Lady, frankly.

“You’ve heard all about the hurling of hard objects. All of that was true. But what you haven’t heard is the cowering of the White House staff in her presence. There was a contempt for the military. And this is a woman who believes she is entitled to be commander-in-chief. And that was very, very difficult for me. Having had a 20-year history with the military. And a deep, abiding respect for all the members of the Armed Services. She had a hatred of Republicans. And I have think we have seen that with her basket of deplorables (comments). Sometimes the truth just peaks out.”

Washington-shrunken-soul

Austin Bay writes this to James Comey,

I carried a Top Secret clearance for three decades so I got all the briefings and I signed all the papers and I know damn well that Hillary’s grossly negligent handling of classified information—which your investigation documented—is criminal. And somewhere in your Washington-shrunken-soul, you do, too.

What we’ll call the revelation of the BleachBit Timeline gives you a shot at redemption. The BleachBit Timeline documents obstruction of justice that you cannot ignore.

...Jim, I see you as a man in a responsibility-heavy government security position who has acted irresponsibly. Obstruction of justice is an indictable crime—that’s the crime Richard Nixon and his aides committed in the Watergate Scandal. You remember Watergate, don’t you? The scandal that made The Washington Post famous? Turns out the Deep Throat source on whom WaPo reporters relied was the FBI’s Number Two Boss. Back in 1974 our country couldn’t stomach a criminal in the White House. So, Comey, why the hell in 2016 should you help get a criminal elected?

Mr. Director, it’s time for you to admit you erred in early July. You’ve got the evidence. Call a press conference. Recommend Hillary Clinton be indicted and, this time, let Attorney General Loretta Lynch make the decision. She’s the prosecutor—not you.

Recommend indictment for three reasons, Mr. Director. First and foremost recommend she face legal consequences because her actions were criminal. Recommend indictment in order to re-establish the integrity of your agency, whose reputation has been tarnished by your cowardly July decision. You know it. You face internal dissent as well as external criticism, and somewhere in your previously mentioned Washington-shrunken-soul you know the dissent and criticism is righteous, hence your prickly little memo.

Finally, sir, do it for the dead, the Americans who died at Benghazi.

If you lack the character and guts to recommend indictment, then resign, sir. Resign.

Read much more here.

Pitiful

Matt Walsh writes at The Blaze,

Hillary Clinton is many things, most of them bad, but she is nothing if not pitiful. There have been rumors flying around for months surrounding her declining health, and every coughing fit, every image of the candidate needing help to walk up the stairs, every time she falls down, every lengthy break she takes from the trail, every piece of evidence must lead an observant person to the conclusion that Hillary Clinton is not exactly a picture of health and vitality. And all of these concerns seemed to be officially validated late last week when an authority on Hillary Clinton’s health came forward to confirm them. That authority being Hillary Clinton herself.

It was revealed on Friday that, while being interviewed by the FBI, Clinton cited brain damage and a blood clotting problem as reasons why she couldn’t remember vital details from her time at the State Department. Her health was so bad, she claimed, that she was forced to stay home and illegally conduct government business on her secret private servers. This is a weak — and yes, pitiful — excuse, but we can say with relative certainty that she did have these medical issues. And, even if she’s embellishing and using them as cover to weasel out of felony charges, it does seem true that her various health crises impeded her ability to operate competently as Secretary of State. This is according to her own testimony, remember.

...She could have gone to her doctor’s appointments, taken care of her health problems without scrutiny from the peanut gallery, and lived in ease and luxury with all of her skeletons buried and her dirty laundry packed away and out of sight. But she chose this path instead. One of shame, disgrace, and intense physical strain.

Why?

...Don’t get me wrong. I feel more sorry for my children, who will have to grow up in a country controlled by the likes of Hillary Clinton, than I do for Hillary Clinton herself. But that does not change the fact that she is a sad character. Dangerous, yes. Scary, yes. Corrupt, yes. But pitiful. Just pitiful.

Read more here.

Not in good health

Hillary came out today. It was kind of hard to hear her, though, because of her coughing.

Special

At Town Hall Kurt Schlichter writes,

Just the other day – you know, late afternoon on the Friday before Labor Day – the FBI released more documents and reports related to her email shenanigans. What they revealed was, of course, that a situation that was already terrible was actually about ten times more terrible than we ever imagined. Not only did the Woman Most Qualified Ever To Be President not know how classification works, and not only did the bar-failing, chronically sick crone forget pretty much everything she ever did or said or heard, but she also managed to lose about a dozen Blackberry phones that she used to transmit classified materials.

Now, for those of you who have not worked with classified material and the equipment that transmits it, let me share with you how it might go for someone who, say, was a military guy and not a famous liberal woman:

Hi Colonel. How’s it going? By the way, I think I misplaced about 13 of those communication devices we use for classified materials. Wacky me, right? I forget where. Maybe I left them out at the range, or maybe at the base Burger King. I was getting one of those Whopperritos – yum!

Say Colonel, you don’t look so good. You’re all ashen and sweaty. Did you accidentally click on those Lena Dunham lingerie photos? Are you hungry? Do you want a bite of my Whopperito?

Cue the lockdown of the base, the 24/7 search for the missing gear, and the MPs to come and haul away Lieutenant Schmuckarelli. Oh, but don’t worry about Hillary’s lost gear. Some of those missing phones were hit with hammers, which apparently Huma and Company believes magically erases electronic data, so I guess it’s all good.

Are you freaking kidding me? If it wasn’t a famous liberal woman the elite is dying to install as president, this person would be Cool Hand Lukeing it in Leavenworth until the year 2100.

But famous liberal women don’t have to play by the rules. They can be bizarrely racist and the trained seals of the media will happily clap their fins. They can commit clear, unequivocal crimes and the FBI will eagerly do on its reputation what a bear does in the woods to excuse her. Because, after all, unlike us peasants, famous liberal women are special.

Read more here.

Get Out of Jail Free card

Debate prep? All Donald Trump needs to do is read some of my favorite blogs. For example, here is Ace of Spades recommending James Comey be impeached:

Does James Comey believe it's plausible that the CEO of the State Department did not know that "NOFORN" meant "NO FOReigN exposure"? Or that "(C)" means classified?

And she's claiming she can't remember the details of her security briefings, which covered all this, because of a convenient patch of brain damage which arrives to grant her an alibi but then departs in time to permit her to be Commander in Chief?

That is not plausible. That is a clear lie.

...Second: The safekeeping of foreign intelligence is so critical to this nation's security that the law itself specifically removes the "I didn't know the most basic things about the law" defense. That's the whole point of the charge only requiring a showing of negligence in handling secret information -- not intent.

The law forbids such a defense -- by not requiring the government to prove intent -- because it is so easy to claim "Oh I didn't know," and concommitantly so hard for the government to prove the contrary.

...Congress therefore specifically made the charge provable without proof of intent -- it only requires mere negligence.

But James Comey, to finagel a Get Out of Jail Free card for Mrs. Clinton, read such a demand into the law anyway, on his own alleged authority.

James Comey and his minions must be forced to testify, under oath, whether they believe this "I didn't know breaking the law is illegal" is a valid defense for the average corporate CEO, or if this is just a special favor to the apparently Brain Damaged Smartest Woman in the World.

(C)orrection: A commenter who seems to know the ins and outs of clasification tells me "C" is a type of classification, but it does not stand for classified -- it stands for (C)onfidential, the lowest level of classification.

So while (C) means classified, it does not stand for classified, as I claimed. It stands for (C)onfidential.

I apologize for the frequently-made error.

But it's not my fault.

See, I had brain damage when I was writing these posts.

But I'm all better now, and ready to take a job as Director of the CIA's Clandestine Service.

Read more here.

Saul’s daughter has it all figured out.

I was delighted to find an article by Jen Kuznicki in Conservative Review. As you may know, Hillary Clinton wrote her college thesis about Saul Alinsky, a man I met in the late 1960s. The thesis has long been off limits, but now is available here. I plan to read it.

Kuznicki writes,

Hillary noted that, “Alinsky's lessons in organizing and mobilizing community action independent of extra-community strings appear to have been lost in the face of the lure of OEO money.” Pointing out that the power of the government took away the work of the “local organizer.” It is here that we see her light bulb illuminate. With this reasoning, the better approach would be to be the government who had the power to force social change. - See more at: https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/08/alinskys-daughter-here-is-the-truth-about-hillary-the-media-will-not-tell-you#sthash.Snyam4I5.dpuf

At the time I met Alinsky, I was working as Director of the Northeast Neighborhood Counseling Center in Kansas City, Kansas. The funding came from OEO, Lyndon Johnson's Office of economic Opportunity!

Kuznicki concludes,

For 75 years, inner city blacks have been poor, labor unions have worked to put their members out of a job, and everyday there is some new group claiming it doesn’t have equality. All of these groups have been targeted by these so-called organizational geniuses. No matter what happens, either by the power/conflict ideals of Alinsky and Obama or by power grabs/money laundering of the Clintons, the lives of the people get worse. It is not whether Saul or Hillary are right about how to “achieve democratic equality,” or whose tactics are more effective, but of the failure of the philosophy behind it.

David Brock, in his 1996 biography, "The Seduction of Hillary Rodham," called Hillary "Alinsky's daughter." That is an apt label. Where Alinsky tactics are used now on both sides to confuse and agitate, Hillary is poised to become the supreme leader with all the power and tools of our monstrous government at her fingertips.

Saul’s daughter has it all figured out.

Read more here.

Breathtaking misconduct

Andrew McCarthy reports at The Corner,

it has now come to light that Hillary Clinton attempted to destroy about 30 emails related to the 2012 Benghazi massacre. They were recovered by the FBI, notwithstanding the use by Mrs. “Like With a Cloth or Something” of an advanced software program – “BleachBit” – in a willful effort to erase the contents of her servers so thoroughly that no one would be able to recover her emails (many of which were government records, which it is a felony to horde and destroy).

Obviously, these emails were kept from the congressional committees that investigated the Benghazi massacre. Mrs. Clinton was also clearly trying to shield them from discovery by defense lawyers in the prosecution of the lone terrorist the Obama administration has thus far charged (in connection with an attack that involved scores of jihadists whom Obama promised to “bring to justice”).

The depth of Mrs. Clinton’s misconduct regarding the unlawful email system and the obstruction of investigations into a terrorist attack in which four Americans were killed is breathtaking – as is the media’s indifference to it. As I’ve repeatedly argued, Clinton ought to be impeached. How much more contempt for Congress does she need to exhibit before some dim memory of self-respect moves lawmakers to take some action?

Nearly as reprehensible, however, is the Obama administration at large. Evidently, it has just today gotten around to telling a United States court that these 30 emails have never been disclosed, even though they have been sought for years, the Justice Department has known the FBI had them for months, and the State Department, too, has to have known they were in the possession of the administration as it litigated Freedom of Information Act claims yet said nothing.

Mind you: Mrs. Clinton told us there were no government-business related emails on her servers and certainly no classified information. It turned out there were tens of thousands of government-related emails, with thousands containing classified information. Clinton lawlessly withheld these emails for years, and the executive branch has known about them for months. Indeed, the FBI director told Congress and the public that the FBI went through a painstaking process with intelligence agencies to determine which of the recovered emails had classified information in them. And yet, despite all that, the State Department has the audacity to tell a federal judge that it needs another 30 days to review less than three dozen emails? Seriously?

Does anybody care how outrageous this is?

Read more here.

Bond

Roger L. Simon writes at PJ Media, The Huma Abedin/Hillary Clinton relationship had its beginnings

when young Huma came to work at the White House in 1996, not inconsequentially not long after Monica Lewinsky arrived. This was obviously a time of great vulnerability for Hillary. No wonder she and Huma developed a bond.

But who was Huma? In a recent article, Paul Sperry—who has become something of an Abedinologist—describes the maternal background of the young woman who was born in the USA but spent most of her childhood in Saudi Arabia:

As The Post first reported, Huma’s mom edits the Journal of Muslim Minority ­Affairs, which has suggested that America had 9/11 coming to it, because of “sanctions” and “injustices” the US allegedly imposed on the Muslim world.
The journal also opposed women’s rights as un-Islamic, arguing that “ ‘empowerment’ of women does more harm than benefit.

But that’s not all.

In 1999, Saleha translated and edited a book titled “Women in Islam: A Discourse in Rights and Obligations,” published by the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs. Written by her Saudi colleague Fatima Naseef, the book explains that the stoning and lashing of adulterers, the killing of apostates, sexual submissiveness and even female genital mutilation are all permissible practices ­under Sharia law.

...Coincidentally or not (you decide), this is the same group—the Muslim Brotherhood—whose control of Egypt, under Morsi, was backed by the Obama/Clinton administration under the grounds the MB was ultimately reformist. That turned out be as untrue as it gets. Morsi was plotting for total control in a manner yet more fascist than his Islamist cohort Erdogan, if such a thing were possible. The Obama/Clinton administration, as we know, had already abjured the old secular U.S. ally Mubarak as it would, later, Morsi's also-secular successor al-Sisi.

Is it an accident that the despot that Hillary chose to attack and ultimately urge Obama to destroy was the furthest thing from an Islamist—Muammar Gaddafi? That cleared the way for the Islamists (ISIS, etc.) to move in on Libya. To Obama and Clinton, only Islamist dictators are permissible.

...I'm not suggesting some covert Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy is behind all this, although the MB has profited. I'm suggesting something stranger—a bizarre cocktail of greed and ambition justified by the most tired of leftwing ideology with the decline of the West as the result, the sort of unintended consequence.

Against this background, we watch the dissolution of the pathetic Weiner-Abedin marriage. Where is Tolstoy when we need him?

Read more here.

Dr. Drew crosses the wrong woman.

Michelle Jesse reports that Dr. Drew Pinsky's show on CNN is ending next month. He did an interview last week in which he expressed grave concerns about Hillary Clinton's health. That interview is no longer available on the internet. You crossed the wrong woman, Dr. Drew.

Why not impeachment?

Andrew McCarthy writes in National Review,

Since the newly revealed e-mails put the lie to Clinton’s always risible claim that these communications were unrelated to State Department business, they tend to be double-whammies. First, their substance is stunningly corrupt, often showing how she and her staff ran the State Department as an annex of the Clinton Foundation, the enterprise Bill and Hillary used to monetize political influence to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Second, even the most innocuous of the e-mails that concern State Department business illustrate that Clinton brazenly lied to Congress and the public for over a year: maintaining that the destroyed e-mails involved yoga, Chelsea’s wedding, and other personal matters, not the operations of government.

Republicans keep telling us they are “constitutional conservatives.” Well, how about it? The remedy provided by the Framers to deal with corrupt executive-branch officials (including former officials who might seek to wield power again) is impeachment, not criminal prosecution. That is because, for the well-being of the nation, the critical thing is that power be stripped from those who abuse it, to prevent them from doing further damage. Whether, beyond that, they are prosecuted for any criminal offenses arising out of the wrongdoing is beside the point.

The Framers would have thought laughable the suggestion that corrupt members of the president’s cabinet — officials who had taken their corrupt actions with the president’s knowledge and support — would be prosecuted by the president’s own law-enforcement agents. Indeed, at the time the Constitution was adopted, there were no such agents. Law-enforcement was handled by the states, and the attorney general was basically the president’s lawyer. There was no Department of Justice until 1870, nor anything like the FBI until 1908. That did not stop the Framers from including impeachment in the Constitution, nor cause Madison any hesitation in regarding impeachment as Congress’s “indispensable” tool.

In impeachment, the official is held to a higher standard of conduct because public office is an extraordinary privilege, not a fundamental right. Public office is a trust with awesome attendant powers; a person may be manifestly unfit for it without having committed indictable crimes. Therefore, high crimes and misdemeanors — which, again, need not be indictable penal offenses — are easier to prove: Congress may fashion its own rules for the proceeding, there is no judicial oversight, and no requirement that all essential elements of criminal offenses be proved beyond a reasonable doubt under strict rules of evidence — Congress must merely determine that violations of the public trust have occurred and that they warrant removal of that trust. By contrast, because a criminal prosecution does involve the potential deprivation of fundamental rights, the standards of proof are more exacting and the protections of judicial due process are guaranteed.

...Again: The point is for Congress to strip the undeserving official of trust and power. Whether she also warrants criminal prosecution is separately determined by executive branch prosecutors.

Thus, impeachment is more analogous to a civil lawsuit than a criminal proceeding. A person can be prosecuted for a crime even after being civilly sued for the same misconduct. Like impeachment, the civil suit has a lower burden of proof and legal standards that are not as exacting because it is not the functional equivalent of a criminal case. Just as impeachment is only about removing a corrupt official’s power, the civil suit is merely about compensation for damages. Neither involves the potential loss of liberty that a criminal conviction does.

For once, I have some sympathy for Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Why should the Justice Department do for Congress what Congress is unwilling to do for itself? Congressional Republicans want Mrs. Clinton indicted in order to show that she is unfit for the presidency. But impeachment by the House would show the same thing, and the impeachment case is considerably stronger than the perjury case. Why should Lynch do the heavy political lifting? If Republicans think Mrs. Clinton is unfit, what’s stopping them from acting on their own, as the Constitution empowers them to do and as the Framers would have expected them to do?

Oh, one last thing. Let’s say the roles were reversed: The Democrats hold congressional majorities, and their presidential nominee is the dodgy real-estate mogul, while the Republicans are running a demonstrably corrupt former secretary of state. Would the Democrats have the slightest hesitation about impeaching the GOP candidate? I’m betting not only that the House would already have voted articles of impeachment; Senate Democrats would already have found the Republican votes they needed for conviction. Anyone doubt me on that?

Read more here.

I was less careless than she was!

Rudy Takala reports at The Washington Examiner,

Hillary Clinton is trying to use Colin Powell as a scapegoat to vindicate herself over her private email server and her mishandling of classified information, Powell said over the weekend.

"Her people have been trying to pin it on me," the former secretary of state said in an interview published Sunday night in People magazine. "The truth is, she was using [the private email server] for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did."

Powell added that he "has no recollection of the dinner conversation" where Clinton alleged he advised her to use her own system for emailing, though he said he did send her "an email memo describing his use of his personal AOL email account for unclassified messages and how it vastly improved communications within the State Department."

The FBI typically seeks to corroborate the claims made by interview subjects over the course of an investigation. It is unclear why the agency did not check with Powell before Director James Comey released his recommendation on the case July 5 when he said the agency was not going to recommend any punishment.

The House Judiciary Committee is set to hold a hearing next month to investigate whether claims Clinton made to Congress last year constitute perjury. Witnesses in the hearing have not been confirmed, though aides have said Comey is a top prospect.

Reminder to politicians: you are entitled to your own opinions, not to your own facts!

Do we expect to get the truth from Hillary Clinton?

Andrew McCarthy writes in National Review,

As U.S. armed forces attack ISIS in Libya, WikiLeaks is poised to remind us that ISIS is in Libya — indeed, that ISIS is ISIS — thanks to disastrous policies championed by Hillary Clinton as President Obama’s secretary of state. Also raised, yet again, is the specter of Mrs. Clinton’s lying to Congress and the American people — this time regarding a matter some of us have been trying for years to get answers about: What mission was so important the United States kept personnel in the jihadist hellhole of Benghazi in 2012?

Specifically, did that mission involve arming the Syrian “rebels” — including al-Qaeda and forces that became ISIS — just as, at Mrs. Clinton’s urging, our government had armed Libyan “rebels” (again, jihadists) to catastrophic effect?

It has been less than two weeks since WikiLeaks rocked the Clinton campaign on the eve of the Democratic convention by leaking hacked e-mails illuminating DNC efforts to rig the nomination chase in Clinton’s favor. Now the organization’s founder, Julian Assange, has announced that WikiLeaks is soon to publish highly sensitive government e-mails that demonstrate Hillary Clinton’s key participation in efforts to arm jihadists in Syria. Just as in Libya, where Mrs. Clinton championed the strategy of arming Islamist “rebels,” the Syrian “rebels” who ultimately received weapons included the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, and ISIS.

...what is known is outrageous and has not been given nearly enough attention — largely because Beltway Republicans were complicit in the Obama-Clinton policy of allying with Islamists, and thus have shown no interest in probing the inevitably disastrous fallout.

As I have been pointing out for years, for example, we have never gotten to the bottom of why the State Department, under Mrs. Clinton’s direction, had an installation in Benghazi, one of the world’s most dangerous places for Americans.

The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, had touted Qaddafi as a key counterterrorism ally against rabidly anti-American jihadists in eastern Libya. Nevertheless, Secretary Clinton led the policy shift in which our government changed sides in Libya — shifting support to the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies, just as Mrs. Clinton had urged shifting U.S. support to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. In Libya, this included arming “rebels,” who naturally included a heavy concentration of jihadists.

As I’ve recounted, to topple Qaddafi on behalf of the Islamists, the Obama administration — which did not seek congressional authorization for its offensive war (and preposterously maintained that bombing another country’s government was not really “war” anyway) — had to flout a United Nations resolution. The U.N. had agreed only to military operations for the purpose of protecting civilians, not offensive operations against the regime. Besides arming jihadists, the administration took no meaningful steps to make sure that Qaddafi’s military arsenals did not fall into terrorist hands. The regime was toppled and Qaddafi was brutally murdered — prompting Secretary Clinton’s bizarrely giddy quip, “We came, we saw, he died.” As some of us not-so-giddy types had warned would happen, Libya then became a safe haven for terrorists who turned on the American and Western forces that had cleared the path for them.

In small compass, this is the story of J. Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador killed in the Benghazi massacre. As Business Insider’s Michael B. Kelley recounts, before becoming ambassador, Stevens was the Obama administration’s official liaison to Qaddafi’s Islamist opposition in Libya, including its al-Qaeda-linked groups. The latter included the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). Stevens worked directly with a top LIFG leader, Abdelhakim Belhadj.

...In the months leading up to the attack on the State Department facility, and on the even more shadowy CIA outpost a little over a mile away, jihadists in eastern Libya conducted a series of attacks against Western targets — including, on June 6, 2012, a bomb detonated just outside the State Department compound. The British government and the International Red Cross pulled their personnel out; yet the Obama administration left U.S. government personnel in, despite grossly inadequate security precautions. Why? I believe that one significant mission was the coordination of weapons transfers from Libya to Syrian jihadists.

Remember the state of play in mid 2012. Obama was locked in a tight reelection race. He was falsely claiming that he had “decimated” al-Qaeda (which was actually thriving); that he was ending American wars (which were actually intensifying as he drew troops down despite ground conditions); and that his pro-Islamist policies were helping forge democracy in places like Egypt (then under Muslim Brotherhood rule) and Libya (which had disintegrated into a failed state under domination by Islamist militias). Prior to the November election, if Obama had openly announced that his administration was arming Syrian Islamists, it would have been highly controversial. It would have spotlighted how that same policy had failed in Libya, a fact to which neither the media nor Republicans had called public attention. This, no doubt, is why reports that Obama was “launching a covert operation to send weapons to Syrian rebels for the first time” (as the Times of London’s Christina Lamb put it) did not appear until immediately after Obama had won a second term.

Were Obama, Clinton, and others in the administration steering arms to Syrian jihadists before that time?

Recall that in mid 2012, Obama was also feeling heat — from the Islamist regimes he was appeasing, from Beltway Republicans, and even from some in his own administration, apparently including Secretary Clinton — for not doing enough to help the “rebels” drive Assad from power in Syria. There was a good explanation for this reluctance: Our government knew that the Syrian “rebels,” like the Libyan “rebels,” teemed with jihadists. Not only has this fact long been notorious; Judicial Watch managed to wangle from the government an August 2012 Defense Department memo that flatly states, “The Salafist [sic], the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [i.e., al-Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.” The memo elaborates that its reference to AQI incorporates both Jaish al-Nusra (which is al-Qaeda’s main affiliate in Syria) and the Islamic State (the breakaway “caliphate” spawned by AQI).

...Putting aside the administration’s recklessness in failing to keep Qaddafi’s arsenals out of jihadist hands, what are the “other things” that the State Department and the CIA were up to?

...Were U.S. personnel stationed as sitting ducks in Benghazi in order to help supply weapons to Syria, where it was inevitable they would fall into the hands of America’s enemies? Perhaps we’ll soon find out.

Read more here.

She "didn't know" weapons were getting into enemy hands.

I am so impressed with Senator Rand Paul's questioning of "transparent" Hillary Clinton.



h/t Gateway Pundit, which has a story quoting Julian Assange about weapons going from Libya to ISIS, after the U.S. deposed ghaddafy.