¢linton ¢a$h: Nigeria

In the latest chapter of the movie Clinton Cash, author Brian Schweizer makes two allegations about the Clintons in Nigeria: One demonstrably false and dishonest, and the other simply misleading.

FIRST: Schweizer correctly identifies Nigeria as a massively corrupt country, and then says (per my own transcription):

You see, there's a federal law in the United States which says, if foreign governments that receive U.S. assistance aren't transparent in how they spend that money, that they will not be able to get U.S. foreign assistance any more.  It's about transparency.  But there's a way around that law.  You can get waiver from that law.  How? By getting the U.S. Secretary of State to grant you a waiver.

(Nigeria received) hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. foreign assistance, they've not made progress in being more transparent, and of course they've gotten exemptions from Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State.  What's so curious about this is what was happening commercially to the Clintons while this was going on.  Bill Clinton for the first time ever gets paid, highly lucrative speeches in Nigeria, which had never happened before.  In fact, he gets paid to do 2 speeches for $700,000 apiece by a businessman (Nduka Obaigbena) in Nigeria who just happens to be close with the president of that country.

Pretty damning stuff, if true.  And it is true that Bill received $700,000 per speech from Nduka Obaigbena (actually from his media operation, Thisday) for giving separate speeches in Nigeria in 2011 and 2012.  Of course, Schweizer neglects to point out that Bill had a long-standing relationship with Obaigbena going back at least as far as 2009 --- and that other political luminaries such as Al Gore, Jeb Bush, Karl Rove and Kofi Annan have been to Nigeria for similar purposes --- all at the same 2009 event, no less.  Schweizer also neglects to point out that Bill has returned to Nigeria numerous times since Hillary left her position as Secretary of State (it is unclear whether Bill's other appearances were paid).

But paid speeches alone mean nothing.  Schweizer needs to show a quid pro quo and (are you ready for this?) there's not one.  So instead Schweizer makes something up and hopes no one will notice.

Schweizer doesn't explicitly cite which "federal law" requires transparency from foreign governments which receive aid from the U.S., but he DOES flash the following image up on the screen at about this point in the video:

Note the highlighted date.  The law he appears to be referencing wasn't even introduced into Congress until Hillary had left office.  So when Schweizer said Nigeria has "gotten exemptions from Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State", he had to be lying.  When Hillary was SoS, there was nothing to exempt Nigeria from.

But couldn't there have been a different law in effect when Hillary WAS SoS?  Sure there could be, but then why didn't Schweizer flash that law on the screen?  This article suggests that no such law existed before 2012, and a 2012 version of the bill died in the Senate.

So Schweizer is lying to us, and not only that, he doesn't even make it that hard to discover that he's lying.  It's almost like he doesn't expect anyone to fact-check his hit piece (hmmmmm).  And I don't like being lied to, so now I'm pissed.

You know what else pisses me off?  At this same juncture in the movie, Schweizer shows a video of Hillary talking about transparency and anti-corruption efforts in Nigeria, sort of mocking her, I guess.  It turns out that video is from her final visit to Nigeria as Secretary of State in 2012, when she announces additional U.S. support for Nigerian security forces against the Islamist terror group Boko Haram.

Think about that.  This guy is trying to get Donald Trump elected, and one of Trump's main arguments is that Obama (and by extension, Clinton) haven't done enough to defeat Islamic terrorism, and Schweizer uses video of Clinton actually announcing a policy change to fight Islamic terrorism in his hit piece trying to take her down.  Really infuriating.

But wait!  There's still more!

SECOND: Schweizer notes that Nigerian billionaire Gilbert Chagoury pledged $1 billion to the Clinton Foundation, and that Chagoury has also done some bad things in his life, some of which he's been convicted for.

My first reaction is: so what?  There are precious few billionaires in the world, and hardly any of them are saints.  What's more, the nefarious behavior Schweizer specifically cites, buying up Nigerian oil assets on the part of Sani Abacha, Nigeria's president from 1993 until his death in 1998, happened more than a decade before Chagoury's pledge to the Clinton Foundation.  So, even if Chagoury was engaged in some dirty dealing in the mid-90s, why does that mean anything about the Clinton foundation today?

Furthermore, Chagoury's $1 billion pledge is to help build the new Nigerian city Eko Atlantic, with the goal of providing homes for 250,000 Nigerians and jobs for an additional 150,000.  I don't know much about the project, but I don't find allegations of corruption anywhere, and it sounds like EXACTLY the kind of thing Nigeria needs to improve the quality of life for its people.

In short, it sounds like a Nigerian billionaire gave $1 billion to the Clinton Foundation to do good for thousands of people in his country.  What about this should the Clintons be ashamed of?

I know what Schweizer should be ashamed of, however.  Himself and this whole, clumsily-executed hit piece he's put together.

Bill's Speaking Fees

As I continue to slog through the allegations in Peter Schweizer's Clinton Cash hit piece, I want to pause for a moment to say a few words about the money Bill Clinton receives for making speeches.

It's no secret Bill Clinton likes to talk to people.  Since leaving office in 2001, he's given hundreds of speeches to millions of people, sometimes for a fee, and sometimes for free.  When he does receive a fee, sometimes that money goes to the Clinton Foundation (in which case he personally receives nothing), and sometimes it goes into his pocket.  As I've discussed before, I personally do not believe a contribution to the Clinton Foundation, no matter the size, indicates that Bill or Hillary are on the take.  Since they don't profit personally in that case, there's no reason they should do favors for the donor.

So let's focus on those occasions when Bill does pocket a fee.

Bill Clinton has made A LOT of money in speaking fees since leaving office.  And perhaps you already consider that a mark against him, which would be fair enough.  However, in the interest of fairness, you should also consider that most past presidents, and indeed most well-known politicians, trade off their fame in this manner.  Ronald Reagan famously received $2 million for giving two speeches in Japan.  George W. Bush, Clinton's predecessor, has earned tens of millions of dollars with such speeches.  And of course there's Hillary herself, Rudy Giuliani, Sarah Palin and Colin Powell, and even Donald Trump.

So if you want to condemn Bill (or Hillary) for the mere fact that they got a lot of money for speeches, go ahead --- just make sure you similarly mark down the folks on the other side of the aisle, including Trump.

If not, then what really matters is whether there's a quid pro quo, whether payments to Bill influenced anything Hillary did as Secretary of State.  Schweizer is great at throwing around big numbers, and he's not wrong that the Clintons have made A LOT of money from Bill's speaking gigs.  But unless the Clintons did more for that money than just give a speech, there's nothing scandalous about it.

¢linton ¢a$h: Democratic Republic of Congo

Continuing our review of the anti-Clinton video Clinton Cash, we turn to allegations that Hillary compromised her position as Secretary of State in order to help an obscenely wealthy Swede retain mining contracts in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  Specifically (per my transcription):

By the time Lukas Lundin made his $100 million dollar pledge to the Clinton Foundation, his Congo operation was making 'staggering profits' according to his own financial statements.  

But for those profits to remain staggering, U.S. policy under Hillary Clinton had to remain unchanged.  That's a problem.  Hillary Clinton as a Senator back in 2006 supported something called the Congo Relief, Security and Democracy Promotion Act.

Schweizer goes on to explain that this law supports 'reform' in the DRC, and that although Hillary co-sponsored this law as a Senator in 2006, when she became Secretary of State in 2009 she "reversed course 180 degrees, and went from supporting reform in Congo to supporting the status quo."  The allegation here is that in return for a $100 million pledge to the Clinton Foundation, Hillary changed course on American foreign policy in the Congo in a way that helped Lundin.

I'm sorry, but if Schweizer can't be more specific in his allegations, I may have to abandon this whole project.  His argument boils down to the charge that in 2006, Hillary supported 'reform' in the Congo, and then in 2009, after Lundin pledged $100 million to the Clinton Foundation, she switched to 'supporting the status quo'.

WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?!?

Did she initially support fair and open elections, and later opposed them?  Did she support  higher taxes in the Congo, and then oppose them?  Lower taxes?  Higher tariffs?  Lower tariffs?  A stiffer anti-doping protocol for the Congolese olympic team?  What?

I will do my best, in good faith, to follow the few breadcrumbs Schweizer has left me, and then draw conclusions.

Let's start with the Congo Relief, Security and Democracy Promotion Act.  Despite its grandiose name, it actually specifies a grand total of ONE concrete new policy which applies to the U.S. Secretary of State:

The Secretary of State is authorized to withhold assistance made available under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (22 U.S.C. 2151 et seq.), other than humanitarian, peacekeeping, and counterterrorism assistance, for a foreign country if the Secretary determines that the government of the foreign country is taking actions to destabilize the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

That's it.  So the only way to interpret Schweizer's charge here is that while Hillary was SoS, she should have withheld funds (other than humanitarian, peacekeeping, and counterterrorism assistance) from some country that was trying to destabilize the Congo.  We can only guess what country Schweizer might have in mind, but it's a fair bet that he's still talking about Rwanda, which did indeed have a proxy faction in the Congolese army starting in March 2009.  This faction staged a rebellion in 2012, and sure enough, Clinton did not withhold any foreign from Rwanda.

Assuming this is Schweizer's real complaint (and if it isn't, he should make another damn documentary where he expresses himself more clearly), then he hasn't proven his case, for the following reasons:

1. Although Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State from 2009 - 2013, she didn't make U.S. foreign policy; she simply advised President Obama and then carried out the foreign policy he saw fit.  As this Atlantic article explains, the decision not to withhold aid from Rwanda was Obama's, not Clinton's, despite the wording of the 2006 law.
2. Furthermore, Schweizer acknowledges that before Lundin pledged a dime to the Clinton Foundation, he was making "staggering profits" from his operation in the Congo.  This undermines the notion that Lundin made his $100 million pledge as part of a quid pro quo.
3. Schweizer asserts --- totally without proof --- that Hillary's failure to suspend aid to Rwanda (or anywhere else) was necessary for Lundin to continue his Congo operation.  But that makes no sense.  As this history of the Lundin operation in Congo explains, Lundin received its mining concession from Laurent Kabila in 1997, and was allowed to continue its operations when Kabila's son Joseph succeeded him in 2001.  If Kabila lost power, then Lundin might lose its mining concession.  So it was in Lundin's best interest to maintain the status quo in Congo, which is exactly what the Congo Relief, Security and Democracy Promotion Act is all about.  If Hillary really DID "reverse course 180 degrees", that would have HURT Lundin, not helped him; and it certainly doesn't prove any kind of corruption on Hillary's part.

The Lundin Group have been accused of bad practices in the Congo and elsewhere, and so one might condemn the Clintons merely for accepting money from such a multi-national conglomerate.  But so far as any kind of quid pro quo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Schweizer's argument is complete nonsense.

¢linton ¢a$h: Sudan

This is part 3 of our continuing investigation into Peter Schweizer's anti-Clinton film Clinton Cash.  Today we examine a really tenuous accusation Schweizer made that Hillary abused her power to help a friend get a government contract in the Sudan.

Generally speaking, Schweizer alleges that there's a pattern of the Clintons --- mostly Hillary, as Bill has not held any formal government position in nearly 16 years:

1. Facilitate lucrative business contracts between foreign governments and those wishing to do business in those foreign countries,
2. In return for large contributions either directly to Bill or to the charitable organization the Clintons founded, the Clinton Fund.

But when it comes to the Sudan, Schweizer fails to provide proof that either (1) or (2) occurred, so I'm not entirely certain what his point is.

Anyway, Schweizer's allegation in the Sudan involves former U.S. diplomat Joe Wilson (yes, that Joe Wilson).  This is the whole of Schweizer's argument, as best as I can transcribe it:

In 2009, shortly after she became SoS, when Wilson was the vice-chairman of a company called Jarch Capital.  They took out a 50-year lease on 400,000 hectares in south Sudan.  South Sudan was in the middle of a civil war, and this lease was actually signed with warlords who were  involved in the civil war.  These individuals were involved in massive human-rights violations.

Schweizer goes on to suggest that Jarch Capital's lease was somehow unethical.  And maybe it was.  But in order to demonstrate that the Clintons are corrupt in some fashion, Schweizer needs to show that Wilson gave them something to help secure this lease, and he doesn't.  He doesn't even allege that Wilson gave money to the Clintons or their foundation, only that Wilson endorsed Hillary in her 2008 run for president, and that he was under consideration for a post in a Hillary Clinton State Department.

Sorry, but so what?  LOTS of Democrats endorsed Hillary in 2008, and Joe Wilson had already worked for the State Department under the George H. W. Bush administration, so what does this prove?

Schweizer also fails to show that Hillary did anything to help Jarch Capital obtain its lease, which is hardly surprising considering that she couldn't have done anything to help.  Check out this article from the Financial Times, dated January 9, 2009:

Philippe Heilberg, a former Wall Street banker and chairman of New York-based Jarch Capital, told the Financial Times he had gained leasehold rights to 400,000 hectares of land – an area the size of Dubai – by taking a majority stake in a company controlled by the son of Paulino Matip.

Barack Obama was first sworn in to office on January 20, 2009, and Hillary Clinton was confirmed as Secretary of State the next day.  Considering that Jarch Capital had acquired the lease nearly two weeks earlier, how exactly did she abuse her power to help Joe Wilson?  Did she somehow, as a sitting U.S. Senator, pull strings with contacts inside the Bush administration?

¢linton ¢a$h: Rwanda

We continue our examination of the anti-Clinton documentary Clinton Cash and its allegations.  Today we examine what writer Peter Schweizer has to say about the Clintons' involvement in the African nation of Rwanda.

For those who may not be as old as I am, the decade of the 1990s was a particularly brutal one for Rwanda.  In 1994, nearly 1 million Rwandas were murdered by their government in the name of ethnic cleansing.  To survive this kind of horror is thankfully unimaginable to most people; just as unimaginable is how a country returns to any kind of 'normal' day-to-day life afterward.

In the case of Rwanda, the credit for restoring normalcy goes to the current president, Paul Kagame, who led the opposition forces in the face of remarkable odds to defeat the government forces who were committing genocide, and to unite the country after a time.  To achieve this miraculous result out of such chaos no doubt requires a great deal of heroism, and no small amount of villainy --- and indeed, it's clear that while Kagame is clearly his country's savior, he is far from a saint.

Bill Clinton has publicly praised Kagame --- no doubt for his heroism, not his villainy --- calling him one of "the greatest leaders of our time," and the Clinton Foundation has awarded Kagame its Global Citizen Award.  It seems that Schweizer brings this up solely to paint the Clintons as those who would do business with tyrants, softening up the viewer for darker allegations to come.  Schweizer does say that the Clintons legitimize strongmen such as Kagame to create "commercial opportunities for donors and friends and allies who want to do business in Africa."

Well, maybe.  But the Clintons' support of Kagame is a poor example, considering that Schweizer fails to identify any Clinton "donor, friend or ally" to benefit from this support.  Additionally, the Clintons are far from alone in praising Kagame:

Kagame, credited with commanding the rebel force that put an end to Rwanda’s genocide 20 years ago, has made himself a global celebrity. Bill Clinton hails him as among “the greatest leaders of our time.” Tony Blair calls him a “visionary.” Bill Gates works closely with him. Kagame has spoken at Harvard and received honorary doctorates from a number of universities in the United States and Europe. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is also a fan, telling Kagame in May, “I hope many African nations will emulate what Rwanda is doing. I highly commend you.”

In addition to all of this praise, Rwanda has received international financial support, including from the United States --- from both Republican and Democratic administrations.  U.S. aid to Rwanda averaged $12 million/year in the five years after the genocide, increased to $34.7 million/year in the first Bush administration, and jumped to $150 million in 2012.  The intricacies and moral trade-offs involved in determining why the international community might support a strongman like Kagame are quite complex, but I expect it mostly boils down to this: Considering the genocide Rwanda endured 20 years ago, world leaders prefer the stability a leader like Kagame provides to the possible chaos which might result without him.

It's true that there are valid reasons to revile Kagame and his rule in Rwanda.  And one can reasonably question the Clintons motives in publicly supporting him both verbally and financially (Schweizer insinuates that the Clinton Foundation has given money to Rwanda; I have no idea whether this is true).  But given the widespread support for Kagame, including bipartisan support from the U.S. government, there is absolutely no reason to conclude that the Clintons' support comes from any nefarious self-interest.

¢linton ¢a$h: The Clinton Foundation only uses 10% of Donations for Charitable Work

Right-wingers love to bash the Clintons with some form of this accusation: Sure, they set up this global, multi-million dollar charitable organization, but hardly any of the money actually gets spent helping people.  This is the first charge Schweizer makes in his Clinton Cash movie, and he really hits the ground flailing, because this charge is 100% demonstrably false.

According to the hyper non-partisan Consumer Reports, the three best watchdog sites for charities are: Charity Navigator, Charity Watch, and the BBB Wise Giving Alliance.  Of these, Charity Navigator doesn't give a rating for the Clinton Foundation, and says that the lack of a rating "does not indicate a positive or negative assessment by Charity Navigator".  As for the other sites, Charity Watch gives the Clinton Foundation an A, indicating that 88% of funds collected are actually spent on program costs.  The BBB Wise Giving Alliance indicates that the Clinton Foundation spends 86% of funds collected on program costs.

I'm no math expert (no wait a minute, I am!) --- but it doesn't take a PhD to figure out that 88% or even 86% is much, much larger than 10%.

As long as we're talking about the Clinton Foundation, I want to mention one other thing.  Practically all of the accusations in the Clinton Cash movie allege that some bad actor gave a lot of money either to the Clinton Foundation, or to Bill Clinton in the guise of a 'speaking fee', in return for which the Clintons helped said bad actor to do nefarious things.  As I said earlier, all such accusations are extremely difficult either to prove or to disprove, but there's a very important difference between giving money to Bill Clinton versus giving it to the Clinton Foundation.

If someone gives money to Bill Clinton as a speaker's fee, Bill Clinton pockets it.  It belongs to him (and Hillary) and not the foundation, and as such serves as a powerful incentive for him to perhaps help bad actors do nefarious things.

If someone gives money to the Clinton Foundation, on the other hand, the Clintons themselves don't receive a penny of it.  The Clinton Foundation clearly states that Bill and Chelsea receive no compensation for their work on the foundation, and neither did Hillary when she was on the board.  And we know they're telling the truth because unlike some presidential candidates (ahem!), the Clintons have released their tax returns.  So when someone gives money to the Clinton Foundation, I'm sure the Clintons appreciate it, but it seems highly unlikely that they'll do anything unethical in return.

UPDATE (9/04/2016): As of September 1, Charity Navigator now has a rating for the Clinton Foundation!  Charity Navigator gives the Clinton Foundation 4 stars, or a score of 94.74 out of 100!

¢linton ¢a$h

So . . . a guy named Peter Schweizer came out with a long hit piece on the Clintons, called Clinton Cash.  It was first released as a book, and then later as a movie.  After the Clintons left the White House in 2001, they started up a charitable organization called The Clinton Foundation.  They also both (but mostly Bill) made a lot of money giving speeches to various organizations.  None of this is in dispute.

The premise of Clinton Cash is that in return for large donations to the Clinton Foundation, or for large speaking fees for Bill, the Clintons used their influence --- as a former President, and as Secretary of State --- to assist various unsavory characters in various ways, usually in form of business contracts of one sort or another with foreign governments.

On the one hand, such accusations are very difficult to prove.  Suppose Sam Slimeball gives Bill Clinton $500,000 for a speech, and two weeks later, Hillary does something as Secretary of State which benefits Sam.  While that certainly looks suspicious, Hillary might have made the exact same decision even without the $500,000.  Unless she radically changes her position for no apparent reason, or there's a video/recording/email somewhere where Hillary tells Sam "I will support policy X if you pay Bill $500,000 for a speech", we can't know for certain that a quid pro quo was in place.

On the other hand, the right wing loves to make accusations like this, because they are literally IMPOSSIBLE to disprove.  Unless we can show that Sam Slimeball never gave Bill any money, or that Sam didn't benefit from any decision Hillary made, or there's a lot of evidence that Hillary would have made the same decision anyway, right-wingers like Schweizer can make all the accusations they want, and no one can say for certain that they're wrong.

Which is, of course, the reason Schweizer wrote the book in the first place.  How can I be so sure?  Because Schweizer has a history of supporting Republicans and conservative publications, while making misleading or inaccurate attacks on Democrats.  This doesn't necessarily mean that all of his charges in Clinton Cash are wrong, but it does mean that they should be analyzed with a healthy dose of skepticism.  That's what I plan to do in the coming weeks.

West Virginia Lawmaker Calls for Darrell Issa to be Hanged!

No, not really.  What really happened is some whackjob who happens to be a state legislator in West Virginia said that Hillary Clinton "should be tried for treason, murder, and crimes against the US Constitution... then hung on the Mall in Washington, DC."

This should be obvious, but since Republicans (like this whackjob, and many of Donald Trump's supporters) don't seem to understand it, it is not acceptable to publicly advocate for killing your political opponents.  We have a little thing called "due process" in this country which determines whether and when a person's civil liberties are to be curtailed.

In the particular case of Hillary Clinton and her private email server, the FBI has concluded there is insufficient basis for criminal charges --- a conclusion which seems entirely correct.  It's certainly not up to this whackjob to determine a more severe penalty.

So why did I mention Darrell Issa in the title of this post?  Well Issa, like most Republican legislators, it seems, is on one of the many, many congressional committees investigating the attacks in Benghazi four years ago.  And just a month or so after the attacks, in his zeal to get at Hillary Clinton the truth, Issa posted 166 pages of "sensitive but unclassified" material on the internet.  This would be State Department information which shouldn't be released to the general public.

This is also the same level of sensitive information that over 99.7% of the information was that Hillary sent out over her private email server when she was Secretary of State.  A lot of people thought it was very bad that she did that.  You might have heard about it.

And it was very bad, and stupid.  It was a careless mistake that many people have rightly criticized Hillary for, and one ignorant yahoo actually demanded that she be hanged for it.  But there's a very important difference between what Hillary did and what Issa did.

Hillary used a personal email server to conduct her day-to-day business as Secretary of State, and in so doing, she risked the possibility that this "sensitive but unclassified" information might leak out.  Issa, on the other hand, posted his information to the internet, with the explicit goal of making it available to absolutely everyone in the world.

Seems like kind of a bigger deal to me.  And yet, even though this happened 4 years ago, there has been no investigation, no demands that Issa resign from Congress, no calls to criminally prosecute him, and certainly no West Virginia whackjob demanding that Issa be hanged.

Republicans are right; Hillary isn't treated just like everyone else.  She actually has to deal with one hell of a lot more scrutiny.

Benghazi!

Four years ago, an attack on a diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya resulted in the death of 4 Americans, including the U.S. Ambassador to Libya.  Ever since then, some congressional Republicans have been trying to prove that Hillary Clinton is in some way responsible, negligent, or covering up something, but they have failed.  Even other congressional Republicans agree there's no scandal here (see below).

A sad truth about the world we live in is that there are people in the Middle East who want to harm our country.  An even sadder truth is that no leader can provide absolute protection from this threat.  Jimmy Carter couldn't do it.  Ronald Reagan couldn't do it.  Bill Clinton couldn't do it.  George W. Bush really couldn't do it.  And despite his tough-guy rhetoric, Donald Trump can't do it.  Not 100% foolproof for the next four years.  Neither can Hillary Clinton.

The 1983 truck-bombing of a Marine compound in Beirut, Lebanon is perhaps instructive of the way our government used to react to such tragedies back when grownups were in charge.  Democrats controlled the House of Representatives at the time, with the Republican Reagan as President, and launched an investigation into the attack, similar to how Republicans are investigating Benghazi now.  The difference is that the Democrats conducted a single investigation, it concluded in two months, and no one tried to use the tragedy for political gain.  Everyone understood that the failure to prevent the attack did not indicate a lack of will, competence, or patriotism on the part of the Republican party generally or Reagan in particular.

What a difference 30 years makes.


September 11, 2012
There doesn't seem to be much disagreement about what happened in Benghazi, Libya on the night of September 11, 2012.  The main criticisms of Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration seem to center on whether more could have been done to prevent the attacks, why the attacks occurred, and whether appropriate actions were taken once the attacks were underway to secure the safety of Americans in Benghazi.

In summary, the U.S. had a diplomatic consulate (not a full embassy) established in Benghazi, Libya, with a CIA annex 1.2 miles away.  At 9:40 PM local time (3:40 PM in Washington, D.C.), 125 to 150 gunmen, armed with assault rifles, heavy machine guns, truck-mounted artillery, hand grenades and RPGs, attacked the consulate compound.  Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens and information officer Sean Smith were killed in the attack.

At 10:05 PM local time, staff from the CIA annex, including Tyrone S. Woods, attempted to secure the consulate and rescue any survivors.  Sean Smith's body was recovered, but the CIA team was unable to locate Stevens.  The team returned to the CIA annex with the survivors and Smith's body, coming under attack by AK-47s and grenades along the way.

Shortly after midnight local time, the CIA annex came under attack, with the CIA staff able to hold off the attackers until morning.  At 5:00 AM, a group of Libyans and Americans, including a man named Glen Doherty, arrived at the CIA annex from Tripoli to assist in the fighting and to evacuate survivors.  Upon arriving at the annex, Doherty sought out Tyrone S. Woods, finding him on the roof of the annex.  Shortly thereafter, mortar rounds killed both Woods and Doherty.


The Aftermath
As one might expect, there was quite a bit of confusion in the aftermath of the attacks.  For one thing, the attacks occurred on the 11th anniversary of the infamous September 11 attacks which brought down the World Trade Center towers in New York City and damaged the Pentagon.  There was therefore reason to suspect that Islamic militants might have planned the Benghazi attacks to celebrate their earlier successful attack.  Also, an anti-Islam video, Innocence of Muslims, had been released on the internet just one week earlier, causing protests at a number of U.S. diplomatic missions across the Middle East.  Five days after the attack, UN Ambassador Susan Rice indicated that the video was the cause, based on the government's "current best assessment".  On September 28, the Director of National Intelligence released a statement reversing this view, "to reflect new information indicating that it was a deliberate and organized terrorist attack carried out by extremists."

Republicans and other opponents of the Obama administration have tried to cast this mis-assessment as some kind of cover-up, for the purposes of gaining an advantage in the upcoming 2012 presidential election.  Republicans also spent a lot of time trying to make something out of the fact that Obama referred to the attacks as an "act of terror" or an "act of violence" rather than an "act of terrorism".  It's really not clear why this matters.  It seems to me that Republicans are just trying to cover for a Mitt Romney misfire in an October 16, 2012 debate, when Romney thought he nailed Obama with his accusation that "it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror."

Finally, some conservative/Republican-friendly news outlets tried to make something even more sinister out of the Benghazi attacks, insisting that Hillary or Obama or Someone gave the CIA orders to 'stand down' and not defend the consulate.  This is completely absurd and unfounded, but it hasn't prevented such conservative luminaries as Allen West from repeating it, citing as his source --- I'm not making this up --- some guy he sat next to on an airplane.

Fortunately, as was the case with the Marine barracks suicide bombing in 1983, there was a congressional inquiry into Benghazi, conducted somewhat more rigorously than Allen West's rantings.  Actually, there were EIGHT inquiries, the most recent of which wrapped up just a few weeks ago.

Why so many?  I bet you can guess.  Republicans want to insinuate that Hillary Clinton is somehow responsible for the four deaths in Benghazi, even if they can't prove it (and they can't).  But don't take my word for it.  Read for yourself the Executive Summary of the report issued by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, issued on November 21, 2014 after nearly 2 years of investigation (emphasis mine):

In summary, the Committee first concludes that the CIA ensured sufficient security for CIA facilities in Benghazi and, without a requirement to do so, ably and bravely assisted the State Department on the night of the attacks. Their actions saved lives. Appropriate U.S. personnel made reasonable tactical decisions that night, and the Committee found no evidence that there was either a stand down order or a denial of  available air support. The Committee, however, received evidence that the State Department security personnel, resources, and equipment were unable to counter the terrorist threat that day and required CIA assistance.

Second, the Committee finds that there was no intelligence failure prior to the attacks. In the months prior, the IC provided intelligence about previous attacks and the increased threat environment in Benghazi, but the IC did not have specific, tactical warning of the September 11 attacks.

Third, the Committee finds that a mixed group of individuals, including those affiliated with Al-Qa'ida, participated in the attacks on US. facilities in Benghazi, although the Committee finds that the intelligence was and remains conflicting about the identities, affiliations, and motivations of the attackers.

Fourth, the Committee concludes that after the attacks, the early intelligence assessments and the Administration's initial public narrative on the causes and motivations for the attacks were not fully accurate. There was a stream of contradictory and conflicting intelligence that came in after the attacks. The Committee found intelligence to support initial assessment that the attacks had evolved out of a protest in Benghazi; but it also found contrary intelligence, which ultimately proved to be the correct intelligence. There was no protest. The CIA only changed its initial assessment about a protest on September 24, 2012, when closed caption television footage became available on September 18, 2012 (two days after Ambassador Susan Rice spoke), and after the FBI began publishing its interviews with US. officials on the ground on September 22, 2012.

Fifth, the Committee finds that the process used to generate the talking points HPSCI asked for --- and which were used for Ambassador Rice's public appearances --- was flawed. HPSCI asked for the talking points solely to aid Members' ability to communicate publicly using the best available intelligence at the time, and mistakes were made in the process of how those talking points were developed.

This is the summary of a report which a Republican-led congressional committee took two years to produce.  Trey Gowdy's committee just wrapped up after another 2 years and $7 million, and despite being widely recognized as a partisan endeavor to hurt Hillary's presidential bid, was also unable to reach any damning conclusions.  That's because whatever your opinions about Hillary's or Obama's politics, they didn't do anything wrong when it comes to Benghazi.  Look elsewhere.

The Emails

I have done my research, and the verdict is in: Comey got it exactly right when he said that Clinton and her staff "were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information."  And he was also right when he said "Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case."

So if you want to condemn Clinton for being careless with sensitive/classified information, that's perfectly fair.  If you decide that you can't vote for her because of this carelessness, that's fair too --- although I personally think Trump as president poses a much greater threat, in terms of both preserving our national security and carelessness generally.

Disagree?  Before making your final decision, you should at least familiarize yourself with all of the relevant documents, as I have done:

• Clinton's statement regarding her email server.
• The OIG report regarding the use of personal email accounts by all Secretaries of State over the past 20 years.
• FBI Director James Comey's statement regarding his recommendation not to prosecute Clinton.
• Comey's testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee

Before getting into the details about what Clinton did wrong, let's first explain why it's pretty clear that Comey made the right decision to recommend against prosecution.

Comey Got it Right

First of all, the notion that Comey is somehow corrupt and beholden to Clinton is laughable.  He's a lifelong Republican, who served as Deputy Attorney General in the George W. Bush administration, and who contributed to both John McCain and Mitt Romney's presidential campaigns.  If he were going to let politics influence his investigation, he most likely would have been looking for an excuse to prosecute Clinton.

Next, there is Comey's testimony that there has only been one prosecution in the last 99 years for the same type of 'gross negligence' Clinton showed.  All of Comey's critics are insisting that Clinton should be treated just like everyone else --- and with one exception, 'everyone else' in similar circumstances wasn't prosecuted.

More telling, however, is the complete lack of discussion of Colin Powell's use of personal email when he was W's first Secretary of State.

State Department regulations require all employees to surrender "all documentation related to the official business of the Government" when they leave their position; however, this requirement has never been applied to any Secretary of State, including Albright, Powell, Rice and Clinton.  So Clinton was under no legal obligation to provide any of the emails on her personal server, but neverhteless turned over more than 55,000 printed pages containing more than 30,000 email threads in December 2014, and later gave the FBI access to her decommissioned server.  Many Republicans are accusing Clinton of failing to make a full disclosure, possibly deleting some incriminating emails.  Conveniently for them, these accusations are impossible to disprove.

The telling thing, however, is that no one --- certainly not the Republicans on the House Oversight Committee --- are making the same accusations about Colin Powell, who also used a personal email account for official business, and who has, to date, turned over ZERO of those emails.  Indeed, the OIG report states the following:

At a minimum, Secretary Powell should have surrendered all emails sent from or received in his personal account that related to Department business.  Because he did not do so at the time that he departed government service or at any time thereafter, Secretary Powell did not comply with Department policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act. In an attempt to address this deficiency, NARA requested that the Department inquire with Secretary Powell’s 'internet service or email provider' to determine whether it is still possible to retrieve the email records that might remain on its servers. The Under Secretary for Management subsequently informed NARA that the Department sent a letter to Secretary Powell’s representative conveying this request. As of May 2016, the Department had not received a response from Secretary Powell or his representative.

Powell used his personal email account for business reasons on a daily basis, likely generating thousands of emails.  But we'll never see them, because when the OIG asked for them, Powell ignored the request.  Again, conveniently for Republicans, we'll never know what classified information Powell may have sent out in his personal account.

Furthermore, the OIG states that "While the limited number of respondents also asserted they did not use personal email accounts for official business, OIG discovered some personal email usage for official business by Secretary Powell’s staff through its own review of  selected records."

Are congressional Republicans demanding an FBI investigation into Powell's use of a personal email account?  Are they demanding perjury charges be filed against Powell's staff who lied about using personal email accounts?  They are not, because they're not truly interested in national security.  They're interested in attacking Hillary Clinton.


What Clinton Did Wrong
So it's true that Clinton shouldn't be prosecuted.  But it's also true that using her own personal email server was a serious breach of security, and she should have known better.  Simply put, computer systems get hacked, and the computer systems of government officials are enticing targets.  The State Department published numerous warnings while Clinton was SoS, including at least one such warning issued directly to Clinton.  And while it's possible that Clinton's server was not compromised --- Comey stated that ". . .  we did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail domain, in its various configurations since 2009, was successfully hacked," that doesn't mean it wasn't.  A good hacker gets in and out undetected.

The redemption for Clinton, if there is any, is that she clearly made a concerted effort only to transmit non-sensitive, or 'sensitive but unclassified' information  via this server, showing a clear understanding that use of the server carried risk, and an effort to minimize that risk.

Seriously.  Out of 30,000+ emails reviewed by the FBI, only 110 of them were found to have contained classified information at the time they were sent or received (~2000 more of them contained information that later became classified, but you can't blame Clinton for that).  That's less than 0.3%.  And to those who correctly say that even one classified email sent out over such a system is too many, it's important to point out that of those 110 emails, only three actually carried markings indicating that they were classified.  So at worst, one could argue that Clinton knowingly transmitted 3 classified emails over her personal email server, or less than 0.01%.

Sure, Clinton said she didn't send any classified emails out, and you can call her a liar if you want to.  But only if you remember every detail of every email YOU sent between 2009 and 2013.  And yes, Clinton should have considered the possibility that some emails might not be properly marked as classified.  That once again falls into the 'gross negligence' category.

There's no question this was a mistake, and as I said before, perhaps this lapse in judgment leads you to believe Clinton is unfit to be president.  Just consider the judgment of her opponent before you vote.

Also, should Clinton win, I think it's quite unlikely she's going to make this mistake again.

First Things First

You should know who you're dealing with.  Whenever you read something on the internet, especially a blog from someone you've never met, you should take into account that person's background.  Determine whether they might have an agenda, an axe to grind, whether they're telling you the truth as they understand it, or if they're spinning, or just outright lying to you in the hope some slime will stick.

You should do that ALL the time, especially when it comes to politics.  Trust no one, at least until you get a feel for where they're coming from.

In my case, I'm going to make it easy for you.  I'm a lifelong Democrat.  I first gained an awareness of politics during Watergate, and I haven't seen anything in the intervening 42 years to lead me to believe that the Republican party is anything more than Robin Hood's evil twin, which exists for the primary purpose of taking from the poor to give to the rich.  Sure, there are other ways in which the Republican party is awful; the culture wars do a wonderful job of trying to maintain white male hegemony over the rest of the country, but I'm more or less confident that the true conservatives simply latched on to those issues as a convenient way to get people to vote for them, so they would continue to be in a position to take from the poor and give to the rich.

On the other hand, Democrats rarely champion anything that I get very excited about.  For most of those 42 years, I voted for the Democrat because the Republicans are so very, very awful.  I wasn't even excited about Obama in 2008 --- he seemed too moderate.  And while I thought Obamacare was a poor substitute for universal single-payer health care, it's certainly far, far better than the system the Republicans propose, which is, essentially, nothing.  I've read arguments stating that Obama is the most progressive president since FDR, and I'm sure that's probably true.  I expect posterity will remember him as one of our better presidents --- in the top 25%, anyway --- but I've been disappointed in his record on human rights, especially considering he studied constitutional law.

But whatever.  I think you have a fair idea about where I'm coming from.

As for the current election, Hillary is yet another Democrat I'm not particularly excited about.  I didn't participate in my state's caucuses, and I didn't care too much whether Hillary or Bernie ultimately won.  On the Republican side, however, they have ramped up the awfulness of their nominee considerably.  Other than those who get their information solely from FOX News or other tentacles of the right wing noise machine, it's clear that the Republican party has devolved into a parody of itself.  If the consequences of a Republican victory weren't so serious, it would be comical.  Cruz, Paul, Bush, Rubio, Fiorina, Carson, Christie, Kasich . . . clowns, every last one of them.  And then there's Trump, the king clown.  How anyone can look at this guy and not see that he's basically a bad used car salesman is beyond me.  Qualified to be president?  About as qualified as Homer Simpson.

And that's before we even look at his campaign promises.  I could go on and on, but suffice it to say if you actually support the policies this guy is championing, you must have flunked your high school civics class.  Practically everything he's proposing is un-American, and some aspects of his platform amount to war crimes.  Again, it would be comical if it weren't so serious.

Anyway, that pretty much sums up where I'm coming from when I write this blog.  So you might expect that I'm only doing this because I'm in the tank for Hillary, but that's not true.  As I've started to pay more attention to the election, I am frankly dumbfounded to find that there are people who oppose Trump as strongly as I do, but who also think Hillary is corrupt, a criminal, generally bad, etc.  So I thought I would take the time to figure out where all of this Hillary hatred is coming from.  Who knows, maybe these folks have legitimate reasons for hating her so much.

Or maybe it's just more right-wing conspiracy nonsense.  I guess we'll see.  But I guarantee I'll do my best to be straight with you.  After all, I just told you my background; I didn't have to do that.  Also, I'm not a slave to some partisan agenda.  For example, in 2004 when I wrote the blog Bush Campaign Lies, I actually acknowledged that 9 of the 37 alleged John Kerry 'flip-flops' genuinely were flip-flops.  I do my best to adhere to the truth.