Secretary of State

Another fabricated ‘scandal’ from the ‘Beat Hillary Fight Club’

by

Cartoon_31Rep. Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi! “Beat Hillary Fight Club,” leaking information to the conservative media entertainment complex, has been ginning up a “scandal” that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “outed” a CIA source in one of her e-mails that his committee is looking into. Gowdy says new emails show Clinton confidant naming CIA CIA source, pushing Libya interests (FAUX News). So when Scooter Libby and Karl Rove out an actual CIA spy,well that’s just fine because IOKIYAR.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Maryland), the ranking member of the Benghazi! committee, made a startling charge against chairman Gowdy:

To further inflate your claim, you placed your own redactions over the name of the individual with the words, “redacted due to sources and methods.”  To be clear, these redactions were not made, and these words were not added, by any agency of the federal government responsible for enforcing classification guidelines.

Predictably, commentators began repeating your accusations in even more extreme terms, suggesting in headlines for example that “Clinton Burns CIA Libya Contact.”

Contrary to your claims, the CIA yesterday informed both the Republican and Democratic staffs of the Select Committee that they do not consider the information you highlighted in your letter to be classified.  Specifically, the CIA confirmed that “the State Department consulted with the CIA on this production, the CIA reviewed these documents, and the CIA made no redactions to protect classified information.”

Read more

Kevin McCarthy catches Benghazi! Fever

by

On Monday I saw this headline: Benghazi panel now longest congressional investigation — longer than even Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the GOP’s previous witch hunt into Whitewater.

BenghaziThis is despite the fact that, prior to Rep. Trey Gowdy taking the reins of  the House Select Committee on Benghazi, there had already been seven Previous Investigations: the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Committee on Armed Services, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Committee on the Judiciary, and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.  These committees, in addition to the independent Accountability Review Board, have issued nine reports on the attacks.

On Wednesday the Beltway media exploded with an unforced error admission against interest by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who hopes to succeed John Boehner as Speaker of the House next week, on Sean Hannity’s show that the House Select Committee on Benghazi is just what we always knew it was, a partisan political device to attack Hillary Clinton and to attempt to undermine her campaign with a never ending investigation into something that has already been investigated to death:

“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” McCarthy asked. “But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought.” “I give you credit for that,” said Hannity. “I’ll give you credit where credit is due.”

Read more

Justice Department: Secretary Clinton had authority to delete personal emails

by

The editors of the New York Times, who have long engaged in the Clinton Rules of  “scandal” mongering reporting, somehow missed this highly relevant piece of information to report this week. The Times was more interested in exacting an act of contrition and apology from Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton’s Long Road to ‘Sorry’ Over Email Use.

Ruby Cramer at BuzzFeed News reports, Justice Department Lawyers: Clinton Had Authority To Delete Personal Emails:

Hillary-Clinton-textingIn a little noticed brief, filed on Wednesday to a federal court, Department of Justice lawyers outlined a comprehensive defense of the contentious decision by Hillary Clinton to wipe the private email server she used as secretary of state: The attorneys assert that, regardless of whether she used a personal or government account, Clinton was within her legal right to handpick the emails that qualified as federal records — and to delete the ones she deemed personal.

“There is no question that former Secretary Clinton had authority to delete personal emails without agency supervision — she appropriately could have done so even if she were working on a government server,” write the Justice Department attorneys, representing the State Department in the brief.

The lawyers add that under policies issued by the State Department and by NARA, the National Archives and Records Administration, government employees “are permitted and expected to exercise judgment to determine what constitutes a federal record.”

Read more

Secretary of State intervenes in redistricting case before SCOTUS

by

MicheleReaganArizona’s queen of voter suppression, Secretary of State Michele Reagan, has decided that she wants to join the pantheon of truly despicable secretaries of state alongside Katherine Harris (FL), Ken Blackwell (OH), and Kris Kobach (KS).

This partisan hack is the reason why elections should be managed by an independent nonpartisan election commission, rather than a partisan secretary of state.

Howard Fischer reports, Arizona secretary of state wants redistricting plan voided:

Secretary of State Michele Reagan has joined with Republican interests in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to void the state’s legislative redistricting plan.

In new filings with the high court, attorneys for Reagan point out the population differences among the 30 legislative districts created in 2011 by the Independent Redistricting Commission. They said this raises constitutional questions because it effectively gives voters in some districts more power than others.

But what’s particularly problematic, they said, is that the disparity was done deliberately to achieve a result of improving the chances of Democrats getting elected to the Legislature.

Uh-huh. What Howie fails to mention is that “competitiveness” is one of the criteria enacted by a citizens initiative, Prop. 106 (2000), which created the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission: “‘Competitive districts’ are favored if competitive districts do not significantly harm the other goals…” You remember, this is the citizen initiative that Republicans tried and failed to kill in the U.S. Supreme Court this year.

Read more

Clinton Rules of reporting: The e-mail ‘scandal’ that isn’t

by

Hillary-Clinton-textingWhen the supposedly “liberal” New York Times engages in the Clinton Rules of reporting, something it did with reckless abandon in The Hunting of the President (Bill Clinton) during the 1990s, it gives the imprimatur of acceptable media standards to the mainstream media to similarly engage in scandal mongering reporting without any substance.

Such is the case with all the media hyperventilating over the so-called Clinton e-mail “scandal” (the first rule of Clinton Rules is that everything is a “scandal”).

Jeffrey Toobin recently explained at The New Yorker that the first thing the public needs to know is that The Government Classifies Everything:

As [Sen. Daniel Patrick] Moynihan explained in his book “Secrecy: The American Experience” and explored during a lifetime in public service, the definition of what constitutes a government secret has never been clear. Classified information is supposed to be defined as material that would damage national security if released. In fact, Moynihan asserted, government bureaucracies use classification rules to protect turf, to avoid embarrassment, to embarrass rivals—in short, for a variety of motives that have little to do with national security. As the senator wrote, “Americans are familiar with the tendency to overregulate in other areas. What is different with secrecy is that the public cannot know the extent or the content of the regulation. Thus, secrecy is the ultimate mode of regulation; the citizen does not even know that he or she is being regulated!”

Read more