Free Republic

The Republicans are once again investigating how al Qaeda won a major victory by destroying the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and killing American Ambassador Chris Stevens. Hopefully, this time they will abandon conspiracy theories and consider the possibility that American stupidity allowed the massacre to occur.

(CNN)-The day after the Benghazi terror attack, a staffer for Arizona Sen. John McCain emailed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's office to convey praise for her remarks to State Department employees after the attack. Her statement to employees about the tragedy was "wonderful, strong and moving," said the McCain staffer, who asked Clinton's office to convey the senator's appreciation of the remarks. Ultimately, McCain turned into a fierce critic of Clinton over the attack. And Clinton's handling of Benghazi has been scrutinized and has cast a shadow over her tenure leading the State Department. But the friendly exchange between their...

Jeff Gerth and Sam Biddle explore an important sidebar both to the affair of the Hillary Clinton homebrew email server and to the Benghazi scandal: “Private emails reveal ex-Clinton aide’s secret spy network.” Long story short: enter Sid Blumenthal, one of the most unsavory characters of the Clinton era. Enter Sid Blumenthal along with Tyler Drumheller and Cody Shearer, that is. Mark Hemingway reviews the triumvirate in “Meet the men behind Hillary Clinton’s private ‘spy network’” Ed Morrissey finds NBC’s Chuck Todd commenting regarding Blumenthal that “nothing regarding Blumenthal surprises me,” but Blumenthal enters the story from left field. Gerth...

Revelations from emails purloined by a Romanian hacker show that Hillary Clinton was being secretly advised about Libya -- before and after the Benghazi terrorist attack -- by an off-the-shelf private spook group associated with controversial former Clinton confidante Sydney Blumenthal that claimed to be helping the Libyan opposition and considered placing ground operatives near the border. What's this all about? It's not completely clear, but apparently the goal of the rogue group, which included a former high level CIA covert operative and a former U.S. General, was, at the very least, to gather and provide sensitive reports to the...

Now that the public knows Hillary Clinton destroyed all the emails on her secret server — her lawyer told the House Benghazi Select Committee that there's nothing left to search — a question remains: Did Clinton destroy documents that were under subpoena from Congress? The answer is more complex than it might seem. There's no doubt Clinton withheld information that Congress demanded she turn over, and some Republicans believe the documents she destroyed were covered under a subpoena as well. But a look at the story behind the subpoena and other document requests from congressional Benghazi investigators is a tale...

**SNIP** September 20, 2012 — Nine days after the attack, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Calif., chairman of the House Subcommittee on National Security, Homeland Defense, and Foreign Operations, which is part of the larger Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sends a document request to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The request is for all information the Department has about the attack, and it specifically includes "any written, recorded, or graphic matter of any nature whatsoever, regardless of how recorded, and whether original or copy, including, but not limited to, the following: memoranda, reports, expense reports, books, manuals, instructions, financial reporters,...

The House Select Committee on Benghazi is planning to subpoena Clintonmail.com for all correspondence related to the 2012 Benghazi embassy attack. According to The Washington Post, the State Department can expect to receive subpoenas sometime Wednesday afternoon. It was the same House investigative committee that discovered, through its investigation of the Benghazi attack, Hillary Clinton had used a personal email account for diplomatic business while serving as Secretary of State. "Without access to the relevant electronic information and stored data on the server—which was reportedly registered to her home—there is no way the Committee, or anyone else, can fully explain...

TEL AVIV – An email reportedly sent to Hillary Clinton by former Clinton White House staffer Sidney Blumenthal quotes an intelligence source providing information that “wealthy Sunni Islamists in Saudi Arabia” funded the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. special mission in Benghazi. The leaked emails were published by Russia Today, which says it was forwarded the emails from Blumenthal’s AOL account by the hacker using the alias “Guccifer.” “Guccifer” reportedly hacked Blumenthal’s email in March 2013. Guccifer has since been identified as Marcel Lazar Lehel, a Romanian hacker serving a seven-year sentence for hacking into the accounts of...

Scandal: The former secretary of state's use of a personal account to exclusively conduct government business and to protect her political future in violation of the law ought to disqualify her from the presidency. 'Witch hunts" sometimes find a witch, and those who dismissed the establishment of the House Benghazi Select Committee, chaired by Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., as just another witch hunt are eating their words. The existence of a personal account that Hillary Clinton used to conduct government business as secretary of state was discovered by the committee and reported by the New York Times. Clinton's use of...

In 2012, congressional investigators asked the State Department for a wide range of documents related to the attack on the United States diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. The department eventually responded, furnishing House committees with thousands of boxes of records and emails. But it turns out that that was not everything. The State Department had not searched the email account of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton because she had maintained a private account, which shielded it from such searches, department officials acknowledged on Tuesday. It was only last month that the House committee appointed to investigate Benghazi was...

The House committee investigating the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi will issue new requests to Hillary Clinton for emails from multiple personal accounts she used during her tenure as secretary of state. It was not as if she had both an official and a private email account. She did not use personal email in addition to government email. She used personal email in lieu of government email,” Gowdy said. “And she had more than one private email account.”

The D.C. Establishment hopes if you drag out disclosure about a scandal long enough, it loses a bit of its “wow factor” along the way. That would seem to be the view of the Obama administration regarding many of its wanton acts of mismanagement.

Scandal: Documents from Judicial Watch show that Hillary Clinton's closest advisers knew from the onset, before she launched an inflammatory video lie, that Benghazi was a terrorist attack for which Ansar al-Sharia claimed responsibility. 'Mrs. Clinton, name an accomplishment," Carly Fiorina, former Hewlett-Packard CEO and prospective 2016 GOP presidential candidate, asked Thursday at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. Last year, when ABC's Diane Sawyer asked the former secretary of state that question, Mrs. Clinton changed the subject, not even bothering to mention dodging sniper fire in Bosnia. Nor is she likely to mention Benghazi, a place now synonymous with...

FULL TITLE: Hillary Clinton’s Top Aides Knew from First Minutes that Benghazi Was a Terrorist Attack, E-mails Disclose From the very first moments of the terrorist attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her top aides were advised that the compound was under a terrorist attack. In fact, less than two hours into the attack, they were told that the al-Qaeda affiliate in Libya, Ansar al-Sharia, had claimed responsibility. These revelations and others are disclosed by a trove of e-mails and other documents pried from the State Department by Judicial Watch...

NBC's Chief foreign correspondent reports on the deteriorating situation as ISIS gains ground in Libya.(Click source link for video report taking down Obama/Hillary's Libya fiasco.)

Libyan officials were deeply concerned in 2011, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was trying to remove Moammar Gadhafi from power, that weapons were being funneled to NATO-backed rebels with ties to al Qaeda, fearing that well-armed insurgents could create a safe haven for terrorists .. The reports included a 16-page list of weapons . ... the Qataris, they are doing this with every country, with every country,” Mr. Gadhafi said. “This is their plan, I mean in public. This is their own agenda. I mean, it’s not something hidden, ... A lot of jihadists that had been locked...

Hillary Clinton is willing to testify before the House Select Committee that is investigating the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, according to the panel’s top Democrat. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) on Tuesday said he has spoken to Clinton about the possibility of testifying at the request of Rep. Trey Gowdy (S.C.), the panel’s Republican chairman, and she “did not hesitate for one second.” “She said ... I’ll do it, period,” Cummings said after the committee's third hearing. Cummings said Clinton, who was secretary of State at the time of the Benghazi attacks, indicated to him last year that she...

Another Benghazi Cover-UpObama Administration Violates Obamacare Judicial Watch Exposes Government Cover-Up and Media Hypocrisy Another Benghazi Cover-Up Contrary to what the Obama administration had initially claimed in its public comments, top U.S. diplomatic officials knew the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, was under terrorist attack on September 11, 2012. This is big. In testimony before the U.S. House Oversight Committee on October 10, 2012, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Charles Lamb let the cat out of the bag. Apparently, the agents within the Diplomatic Security Commander Center in Washington, D.C., knew that U.S. embassy personnel were under a terrorist attack...

Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton knew the Obama White House’s Benghazi talking points BEFORE the White House even sent them around to administration officials. Hillary Clinton used the administration’s exact talking point blaming the attack on a YouTube video before Obama’s White House speechwriter Ben Rhodes drafted it to prepare Susan Rice for Sunday morning talk shows days later.

Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton knew the Obama White House’s Benghazi talking points BEFORE the White House even sent them around to administration officials. Hillary Clinton used the administration’s exact talking point blaming the attack on a YouTube video before Obama’s White House speechwriter Ben Rhodes drafted it to prepare Susan Rice for Sunday morning talk shows days later. As Rhodes prepares to leave the White House before he can be called to testify in front of Rep. Trey Gowdy’s select committee on the attack, a new timeline emerges that puts the video in Secretary Clinton’s hands.