And President Obamas secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, who back in Nixons day was a congressional lawyer-investigator herself, now finds herself on the receiving end of congressional inquiries.
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Besides the uncovering of a private e-mail server Clinton used while she was secretary of state, no other lapse in judgment was uncovered by the committee or the seven ones that
preceded it. It should not shock us that Clinton could remain composed in the face of rank amateurs turning a terrorist attack into political fodder, but we should be awed that anyone could do this for 11 hours. In fact, it may be the craziest thing I have ever written anywhere, and under the influence of all measure of substance, mind you, and that in itself is so off-the-charts freaky it can not seriously be dissected by anyone not considered a blithering idiot. “They were already on the system”.
Hillary Clinton’s handling of Stevens, though, fits in neatly with her general MO of handing off major portfolios to people she trusted; indeed, now that she’s running for president, it is interesting to reflect that even as secretary of state she evinced a certain presidential-style aloofness.
Gowdy appeared to orchestrate the hearing so that his one tidbit of new information was revealed late in the day, when Clinton might be exhausted and more likely to stumble: a previously unreported email to her daughter, Chelsea, blaming the Benghazi attack on terrorists at a time when other administration officials were saying it began as a spontaneous demonstration. “I’m not aware of the source of that”. Carly Fiorina stated she can be Clinton’s “worst nightmare”. But polls show voters still question Clinton’s honesty.
It was not, he said to Clinton, “about you”.
If I could sum up what Hillary stands for in one word it would be ‘ Fairness’.
About 10 p.m. that night, Clinton issued a statement that said in part, “Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior, along with the protest that took place at our Embassy in Cairo yesterday, as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet”. We went after Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan over a decade ago.
“I don’t see it”, Cummings said. A better way to put it would be that at the time, it wasn’t explicitly prohibited because it wasn’t contemplated in the rules that federal officials would do all their emailing about public business outside official email channels. The responsibility for doing that was assigned to the head of each federal agency. Even now, Libya looks little better, three years after Stevens’ death and under a new secretary of state, Kerry, said to be more involved in policy details.
The frontrunner Democratic presidential candidate tried to deflect Republican criticism of her handling of the deadly 2012 attack during a testy 11-hour hearing before the House Select Committee on Benghazi on Thursday. Hillary Rodham Clinton is the right person, at the right time, to accomplish that for all of us.
The Accountability Review Board cited a “lack of transparency, responsiveness, and leadership at senior bureau levels” and “shortfalls in Washington coordination” contributing to a “woefully insufficient” security force at the compound.
However, the House Intelligence Committee, in the course of its own comprehensive two-year investigation into the attack, cleared both Clinton and President Obama of any wrongdoing, according to NBC News.
CNN has reached out to the Clinton campaign for comment.
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Gowdy’s committee couldn’t decide exactly what Clinton was supposed to have done wrong. With all her experience at congressional hearings, both asking and answering questions, she knew it was the witness who had ultimate control over pace and tone. But as with the One-in-All and All-in-One of the Lovecraftian universe, opening that gate leads only to madness and oblivion: What lies beyond is the “amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity”, otherwise known as the legislative agenda of the House Freedom Caucus.
