Tag: benghazi

Quid pro quo: Tammy Ducksworth trades a HRC endorsement for a Benghazi No vote.

Allegedly.

In April, when [Tammy] Duckworth announced her bid for the senate against incumbent Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., she was asked a question about Clinton’s emails. In response, Duckworth talked about transparency, and added that “I’m on Benghazi committee, I’m on Armed Services, I think transparency is better and she needs to come before the Benghazi committee and testify as well.”

But after Clinton endorsed Duckworth, the congresswoman changed her tune.

Continue reading Quid pro quo: Tammy Ducksworth trades a HRC endorsement for a Benghazi No vote.

Trey Gowdy to Elijah Cummings: so, hey, Sidney Blumenthal profited from the Libyan civil war?

What was the saying, again? ‘No blood for oil?’

So Trey Gowdy sent a formal letter to Elijah Cummings over the latter’s intolerably and pettily partisan hackwork with regard to the Benghazi Committee (@RBPundit categorizes it as ‘BEASTMODE,’ which is highly accurate).  There are a lot of interesting things in this letter.  A lot of brutal commentary on Rep. Cummings’ willingness to say one thing in private and another in public, for example. But I found this part about Sidney Blumenthal to be highly entertaining reading:

Beyond the pure politics that were occurring at this time, perhaps more disturbing it that at the same time [Sidney] Blumenthal was pushing Secretary Clinton to war in Libya, he was privately pushing a business interest of his own in Libya that stood to profit from contracts with the new Libyan government – a government that would exist only after a successful U.S. intervention in Libya that deposed Qaddafi. This business venture was one he shared with Tyler Drumheller and Cody Shearer, the authors of the information sent to Secretary Clinton. It is therefore unsurprising that somebody who knew so little about Libya would suddenly become so interested in Libya and push an old friend in a powerful place to action – for personal profit. Continue reading Trey Gowdy to Elijah Cummings: so, hey, Sidney Blumenthal profited from the Libyan civil war?

The ’13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi’ trailer.

It looks… a bit more serious than the stuff that Michael Bay usually does.

Then again, it’s a serious subject. January 2016, huh? …That’s going to get some people exercised, particularly since even the trailer is making it clear that it’s a movie about Heroic American Mavericks Who Had To Fight Both The Enemy And The Cowards At The State Department.  Which is to say, it’s going to make insane amounts of money domestically. And make a lot of people that I don’t particularly like more-or-less quietly furious. Continue reading The ’13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi’ trailer.

Career State Department staffer accuses Hillary Clinton’s staff of sanitizing Benghazi records.

This comes perilously close to being ‘too bad to be true’ territory. Meet Ray Maxwell, former Deputy Assistant Secretary at the State Department – and one of the people fingered, then cleared, of wrongdoing in the Benghazi ambassador disaster.  (He since has retired, having served for over two decades. And also, yeah, the entire ‘pariah’ thing.) Mr. Maxwell is now testifying that Hillary Clinton loyalists organized a band of plumbers* to sanitize the relevant files between said disaster, and the inevitable investigation:

When he arrived, Maxwell says he observed boxes and stacks of documents. He says a State Department office director, whom Maxwell described as close to Clinton’s top advisers, was there. Though the office director technically worked for him, Maxwell says he wasn’t consulted about her weekend assignment.

“She told me, ‘Ray, we are to go through these stacks and pull out anything that might put anybody in the [Near Eastern Affairs] front office or the seventh floor in a bad light,’” says Maxwell. He says “seventh floor” was State Department shorthand for then-Secretary of State Clinton and her principal advisors.

“I asked her, ‘But isn’t that unethical?’ She responded, ‘Ray, those are our orders.’ ”

Continue reading Career State Department staffer accuses Hillary Clinton’s staff of sanitizing Benghazi records.

Nancy Pelosi is trying to stack the Benghazi committee, bless her heart.

The Democrats have caved in and announced their appointees to Trey Gowdy’s select committee on investigating the Benghazi incident.  Nancy Pelosi’s choices?

Name Background Ideology
Elijah Cummings Lawyer Liberal
Tammy Duckworth War Veteran Liberal
Linda Sanchez Labor Progressive
Adam Schiff Prosecutor Liberal
Adam Smith Prosecutor Moderate

Continue reading Nancy Pelosi is trying to stack the Benghazi committee, bless her heart.

Alan Grayson touches, for a moment, his former idiotic glory.

I personally think that it’s adorable that Alan Grayson thinks that he’d actually be a benefit for the Democratic party in this situation: “Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) said in an interview Friday that he is ready and willing to serve on the House Republican committee slated to investigate the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.”  Alas, I don’t think that Nancy Pelosi would be dumb enough to give him a spot.  If for no other reason than the Democrats, rhetoric to the side, know better than to appoint the House’s most pathetic rodeo clown* to a critical committee.  I mean, shoot, the man’s currently trying to ‘win’ his exceedingly messy divorce by claiming bigamy. You really want him to be the face of the Democratic party’s response to Benghazi?

…Because I do.  I’ll take a free win, sure.

Via Hot Air Headlines.

Moe Lane

*My apologies to rodeo clowns.

Trey Gowdy does a mike drop on media over Benghazi.

[UPDATE] This is actually from last year. Which tells me something important: John Boehner is taking this issue seriously, because he picked precisely the right person for the job.

Oh, Trey Gowdy’s gonna work out just fine, here. Short version: it’s three and a half minutes of the man listing every question that the media should have been asking – honestly, truly asking – yet did not. To paraphrase CS Lewis: you will not find a dull moment in this.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6kK7gAU0-A

…GOWDY OUT.

Via

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Former CIA acting Director Michael Morell *wants* Benghazi panel.

I believe that he feels it will clear his name.

It took me a while to figure out what was so off about former acting CIA Director Michael Morell’s forthright statement that he supports the House investigating committee on Benghazi:

Speaking to a forum founded and run by his former boss at the CIA, Leon Panetta, Morell said he hopes that the House effort can lay to rest lingering questions Americans’ have about the attack which killed the U.S. Ambassador to Libya and three other Americans.

“A lot of people have looked at this, but the polls show that the American people still have questions. I want to make sure that all of those questions are cleared up. There are still some questions about the role of the agency. And there are still questions about my own personal role and I want to clear that up,” Morell said during a panel discussion at the Panetta Institute in Monterey, Calif. “It might be surprising for you to hear me say this, but I am a supporter of the creation of this committee because I want all the facts to come together in one place and be presented as one—by one entity as one thing, so the American people can see all of this.”

…and then it hit me: Michael Morell sounds like a guy who thinks that he can walk into House hearings on Benghazi and walk back out again with his scalp intact. I don’t know whether that’s because of a clean-enough conscience, self-confidence in his abilities to finesse a House committee, a certain warm awareness of knowing where all the bodies are buried, or a combination thereof: at any rate, it is an attitude that is in stark contrast to everybody else in this administration (current and former) that was involved in the Benghazi mess. And since Morell is acting how you would expect an innocent (or innocent-enough*) civil servant to act… why aren’t the rest of them? Because if the rest of the Obama administration responded as did Morell and the Pentagon, this issue would have been over a year ago…

Via @amandacarpenter.

 

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Nobody is ever truly innocent in this business.  But the CIA’s involvement in this particular outrage is easily overshadowed by the actions of the State Department and the White House.