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.