Free Republic

Updated March 27 to include responses from the FBI and the State Department. Emails disclosed by a hacker show a close family friend was funneling intelligence about the crisis in Libya directly to the Secretary of State’s private account starting before the Benghazi attack. Starting weeks before Islamic militants attacked the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, longtime Clinton family confidante Sidney Blumenthal supplied intelligence to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gathered by a secret network that included a former CIA clandestine service officer, according to hacked emails from Blumenthal’s account. The emails, which were posted on the internet...

If the motives to wipe the hard drive on Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server weren’t already crystal clear, a new development last night put it in Ultra HD. Gawker’s Jeff Girth and Sam Biddle uncovered a secret, private intelligence network run by Sidney Blumenthal for Hillary’s benefit, apart from the State Department’s own Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Hackers got e-mails that went through Hillary’s private server between her and Blumenthal, e-mails that show her own private intel group was also warning her that Libya was collapsing in the weeks and months prior to the sacking of the consulate in...

Hillary Clinton did not hand over new documents to the House panel investigating Benghazi and wiped her server clean of past emails, the committee’s chairman said in a statement Friday. Clinton did not provide correspondence or emails to the Select Committee on Benghazi, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), said, even though the former secretary of state was under a subpoena, issued early this month, for all correspondence from Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state that focused on Libya and Benghazi.

The State Department had no permanent inspector general—the lead watchdog charged with uncovering misconduct and waste—during Hillary Clinton’s entire tenure as secretary, leaving in place an acting inspector who had close ties to State Department leadership. ...

Was a CIA disinformation expert part of a rogue intelligence operation?The Benghazi Select Committee, chaired by Rep. Trey Gowdy, has formally requested that Hillary Clinton turn over the private server she used to keep under her control all of her communications while secretary of state. That assumes that the server hasn’t been reduced to subatomic particles by now.

Editor’s Note: This excerpt, from a book by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, first appeared on the left-wing site Salon. We reprint in part here.  Hillary tapped Kris Balderston, the hit list author, to keep the Clinton political network humming at State. A longtime lieutenant to both Clintons, Balderston, who called everyone “buddy,” liked to talk in salesman’s terms about Hillary’s “power to convene” and her commitment to making sure her partners could “do well by doing good.” What he meant was that Hillary could use the Clinton Rolodex to focus private-sector money, government power, and the expertise at colleges and...

Back in the Arad penitentiary, I ask Lehel about his heyday. Was it worth it? “I had memos Hillary Clinton got as a State Secretary, with CIA briefings. These were being read by her, two other people from the US Government, and Guccifer. I used to read her memos for six-seven hours and then I’d get up and do the gardening in the yard,” he says.

It was less than two weeks ago that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton assured the nation that her “homebrew” email server was safely secure in her home in Chappaqua, New York. She insisted that the hardware was fortified behind a locked door and had a Secret Service detail mentoring it night and day, as though the greatest security threat that system faced was via a physical attack by a team of cartoonish cat burglars. Nevertheless, Clinton insisted that the safeguards around the email system she constructed out of “convenience” were “effective and secure.” She added that “there were no...

You could tell by his body language and the look in his eye that John Kerry, appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week, wanted to say to Marco Rubio: "Listen, punk, I was testifying before this committee before you were even born." And Kerry, the secretary of state and former veteran Massachusetts U.S. senator, would have been right. Kerry is 72. Rubio, the Republican U.S. senator from Florida, is 43.

On March 10, eight days after The New York Times began the scandal over her private email server, Hillary Clinton assembled the press at the United Nations in New York to offer a typically legalistic and crabby press conference lasting only 21 minutes. The first-blush reaction from the pundits? That wasn't good enough. She can't expect the story to go away just from that mess. But within 48 hours, that's exactly what began to happen, with the networks suddenly finding other shiny news objects to explore. So here's the question that needs to be asked: With the networks dumping investigators...

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, a former State Department official, sidestepped questions about Hillary Clinton's exclusive use of a private email address in testimony today on Capitol Hill:

National Journal Senior Political Columnist and Editorial Director Ron Fournier said that Democrats are “scared to death” over the scandals regarding donations to the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton’s emails on Monday’s “Special Report” on the Fox News Channel. “Don’t buy the spin, they [Democrats] are scared to death. And there’s a lot of them who are already starting to think ‘is she really the best candidate for us?’…Their bench, compared to the Republican bench is awfully, awfully thin. And there’s a lot of Democrats, by the way, who are saying ‘follow the money.’ A lot of Democrats are really worried...

I’ve come to realize over the years that in the world of politics, there will always be a steady supply of partisan hacks ready and willing to throw themselves on the proverbial sword for the party and the candidates they support. I’m not talking about ideologues who are reflexively defensive of their beliefs, or even campaign workers paid to put a positive face on whoever they work for. I’m talking about the “strategists” on cable news, newspaper op-ed writers, and Internet bloggers who shamelessly spin, distract, and outright lie—all at the expense of their personal credibility and character—to run cover...

According to Ed Klein, writing in the New York Post, President Valerie Jarrett was the source of the information published by the New York Ties on Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server for all her official correspondence as secretary of state. Befitting her status as a behind-the-scenes puppeteer, Jarrett alleged used cut-outs to feed the information to the media, keeping her fingerprints off the dirty Dem-on-Dem deed. Echoing a joke I made five days ago, Klein calls it a “vast left wing conspiracy.”

"For any government employee, it is that government employee's responsibility to determine what's personal and what's work-related," Hillary Clinton said in her March 10 press conference called to address mounting concerns over her use of a private email system for official use during her four years as Secretary of State. The phrase "any government employee" made it sound as if Clinton's actions were perfectly normal — no different than anybody else. In reality, Clinton's actions reflect her sense of privilege, a broader problem for her presidential ambitions than the email scandal itself. Even before the most recent scandal, Clinton faced...

In her Tuesday press conference defending her reliance on a private email system while serving as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton claimed that the "vast majority" of emails were sent to other State Department employees and therefore automatically archived. But State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki on Friday told reporters that it wasn't until last month that the State Department started automatically archiving emails — and it's only being done for senior staff. "Our goal is to apply this [automatic archiving] to all employee mailboxes by the end of 2016," Psaki said, according to Politico. On Tuesday, Clinton said, "It was...

Piling on more embarrassment for Hillary Clinton amid a row about her emails, U.S. officials revealed Thursday that during her time as secretary of state she had declined a government-issued cellphone. Spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Clinton was "not issued a State Department BlackBerry, and that wasn't a requirement — no one is required to be issued a State Department BlackBerry." The revelation is likely to raise more concerns about national security as well as speculation that the former first lady may have been hiding information that could embarrass her in her presidential campaign. Clinton is at the center of a...

Clinton Faces Broader Email Deception Issue Involving Entire State Department MAR 12, 2015 • BY MICHAEL ASTRUE Hillary Clinton’s email problems do not end with her illegal privatization of government communications or her Nixonian stonewalling of questions about how much of her public record she has destroyed in order to avoid public scrutiny. She must also defend her broader record at the State Department—a record of building information technology systems designed to keep the vast majority of public records from becoming public. In 2009 the State Department began an overhaul of its email system in order to bring its system...

On MSNBC this afternoon prior to Hillary Clinton's press availability about the controversy swirling around her private email server, NBC correspondent Kasie Hunt revealed Democrats "knew" about Clinton's use of a private email when she was Secretary of State. Video at link...

Where is the server and what is the status of it? Why in the world isn't the server being tracked down and preserved? I haven't seen any mentions of this in all of the news accounts, which I find amazing. Have I missed something??