Is James Comey, the head of the FBI, mentally unstable?

Judge Andrew Napolitano has compiled a record of Comey’s actions over the last nine months or so; actions that display such wild irrationality that our suspicion of derangement seems justified.

In 2015, a committee of the House of Representatives that was investigating the deaths of four Americans at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, learned that the State Department had no copies of any emails sent or received by Clinton during her four years as secretary of state. When committee investigators pursued this – at the same time that attorneys involved with civil lawsuits brought against the State Department seeking the Clinton emails were pursuing it – it was revealed that Clinton had used her own home servers for her emails and bypassed the State Department servers.

Because many of her emails obviously contained government secrets and because the removal of government secrets to any non-secure venue constitutes espionage, the House Select Committee on Benghazi sent a criminal referral to the Department of Justice, which passed it on to the FBI. A congressionally issued criminal referral means that some members of Congress who have seen some evidence think that some crime may have been committed. The DOJ is free to reject the referral, yet it accepted this one.

It directed the FBI to investigate the facts in the referral and to refer to the investigation as a “matter,” not as a criminal investigation. The FBI cringed a bit, but Director James Comey followed orders and used the word “matter”.

So Comey followed an order that was out of the ordinary. Why? 

Was he protecting Hillary Clinton?

This led to some agents mockingly referring to him as the director of the Federal Bureau of Matters. It would not be the last time agents mocked or derided him in the Clinton investigation.

He should not have referred to it by any name, because under DOJ and FBI regulations, the existence of an FBI investigation should not be revealed publicly unless and until it results in some public courtroom activity, such as the release of an indictment. These rules and procedures have been in place for generations to protect those never charged. Because of the role that the FBI has played in our law enforcement history — articulated in books and movies and manifested in our culture — many folks assume that if a person is being investigated by the FBI, she must have done something wrong.

In early July 2016, Clinton was personally interviewed in secret for about four hours by a team of FBI agents who had been working on her case for a year. During that interview, she professed great memory loss and blamed it on a head injury she said she had suffered in her Washington, D.C., home. Some of the agents who interrogated her disbelieved her testimony about the injury and, over the Fourth of July holiday weekend, asked Comey for permission to subpoena her medical records.

When Comey denied his agents the permission they sought, some of them attempted to obtain the records from the intelligence community. Because Clinton’s medical records had been digitally recorded by her physicians and because the FBI agents knew that the National Security Agency has digital copies of all keystrokes on all computers used in the U.S. since 2005, they sought Clinton’s records from their NSA colleagues. Lying to the FBI is a felony, and these agents believed they had just witnessed a series of lies.

But  he did not want her statements to be verified. Why? Was he protecting her?

When Comey learned what his creative agents were up to, he jumped the gun by holding a news conference on July 5, 2016, during which he announced that the FBI was recommending to the DOJ that it not seek Clinton’s indictment because “no reasonable prosecutor” would take the case. He then did the unthinkable. He outlined all of the damning evidence of guilt that the FBI had amassed against her.

He held a news conference in which he “outlined all of the damning evidence against her”. 

That is to say, he explained why she should be indicted.

So he wasn’t protecting her. 

But he was. He would not recommend to the Department of Justice that she be indicted.

This double-edged sword – we won’t charge her, but we have much evidence of her guilt – was unprecedented and unheard of in the midst of a presidential election campaign. Both Republicans and Democrats found some joy in Comey’s words. Yet his many agents who believed that Clinton was guilty of both espionage and lying were furious — furious that Comey had revealed so much, furious that he had demeaned their work, furious that he had stopped an investigation before it was completed.

While all this was going on, former Rep. Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Clinton’s closest aide, Huma Abedin, was being investigated for using a computer to send sexually explicit materials to a minor. When the FBI asked for his computer — he had shared it with his wife — he surrendered it. When FBI agents examined the Weiner/Abedin laptop, they found about 650,000 stored emails, many from Clinton to Abedin, that they thought they had not seen before.

Rather than silently examine the laptop, Comey again violated DOJ and FBI regulations by announcing publicly the discovery of the laptop and revealing that his team suspected that it contained hundreds of thousands of Clinton emails; and he announced the reopening of the Clinton investigation. This announcement was made two weeks before Election Day and was greeted by the Trump campaign with great glee.

The glee was premature. Just as Comey’s public statements were.

But he wasn’t protecting Hillary.

No wait – he was.

Having again done something dramatic that was “unprecedented and unheard of in the midst of a presidential election campaign”, again rousing expectations that the great intelligence-gathering bureau was about to reveal that it had found evidence of Hillary Clinton’s turpitude and criminality, he let the big balloon he had sent up drop to an empty shred:

A week later, Comey announced that the laptop was fruitless, and the investigation was closed, again.

At about the same time that the House Benghazi Committee sent its criminal referral to the DOJ, American and British intelligence became interested in a potential [alleged] connection between the Trump presidential campaign and intelligence agents of the Russian government. This interest resulted in the now infamous year-plus-long electronic surveillance of Trump and many of his associates and colleagues. This also produced a criminal referral from the intelligence community to the DOJ, which sent it to the FBI.

This referral and the existence of this investigation was kept – quite properly – from the press and the public. When Comey was asked about it, he – quite properly – declined to answer. When he was asked under oath whether he knew of any surveillance of Trump before Trump became president, Comey denied that he knew of it.

But he must have known of it. Why did he deny it? Keeping quiet about it is one thing – proper, as Napolitano says – but outright denying it is another.

What was going on with the FBI?

How could Comey justify the public revelation of a criminal investigation and a summary of evidence of guilt about one candidate for president and remain silent about the existence of a criminal investigation of the campaign of another?

He might do it because he wanted to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

But if he’d wanted to damage her campaign, he could have done it much more effectively by recommending her indictment, justified by all the reasons he himself had outlined.

How could he deny knowledge of surveillance that was well-known in the intelligence community, even among his own agents?

Why would the FBI director inject his agents, who have prided themselves on professional political neutrality, into a bitterly contested campaign having been warned it might affect the outcome? Why did he reject the law’s just commands of silence in favor of putting his thumb on political scales?

What but derangement can explain it? Is the answer to all these questions that James Comey is mad?

*

Update May 2, 2017.

Cliff  Kincaid writes at Canada Free Press:

FBI Director James Comey has been caught going around to secret Congressional briefings in recent weeks touting the lurid fake “Trump dossier”.  He has been claiming that it is a major foundation of the FBI’s investigation of purported Russian collusion with Trump to interfere in the election — months after the FBI had already assessed the “dossier” as non-credible.

Comey seems not to grasp the nature of the damage he’s inflicting on the Bureau and its reputation for efficient information-gathering and law enforcement. He is lost in a “wilderness of mirrors”, to use intelligence jargon popularized by the CIA’s legendary anti-communist mole-hunter James Jesus Angleton.

This “Trump dossier” is the controversial document supposedly composed by “ex” British MI6 agent Christopher Steele through the group known as Fusion GPS. Paid for by still-unidentified Hillary Clinton supporters, it was “opposition research” against then-candidate, now President, Donald Trump.

Fusion GPS has been revealed to be a Russian lobby firm …

The House and Senate Intelligence committees have been investigating the wrong alleged scandal. It’s not Trump and his associates who should be under scrutiny; it’s Hillary Clinton and her paid operatives — and their ties to Russia. …

In view of reports that the FBI relied on the discredited “dossier” to justify getting a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court warrant against one-time Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning issued a statement demanding that Comey either step down or be fired. …

Comey’s conduct is almost as bizarre as the wild charges in the “Trump dossier”. In fact, he has been promoting the “Trump dossier” even as his own FBI and the rest of the Intelligence Community (IC) have been “distancing themselves from it” …

Comey must go. …

Comey has become a major embarrassment to the FBI.

Q: Why do people help and protect the Clintons?

A: Because they are afraid of them.  

They fear for their lives, and with good reason.

Aaron Klein writes at Breitbart:

Dave Schippers, who served as the Chief Investigative Counsel for the House Judiciary Committee’s probe into whether Bill Clinton committed impeachable offenses, stated in an exclusive radio interview that he is “terrified” of Hillary Clinton.

Schippers is one of the few people who personally viewed – indeed he helped to collect – the roomful of evidence in the impeachment probe. He says the evidence included 60,000-plus pages of written documents, video and “hours and hours” of tape recordings, all of which are still under lock and key.

During the interview, which aired on this reporter’s talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” Schippers, unprompted, raised questions about the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster. He further claimed, “We know that there were people who disappeared.”

Regarding his stated fear of Hillary, Schippers said:

Today, I am still terrified of Hillary. Absolutely I am terrified. Because if she gets into office. In fact, I’ve told my wife, I said, ‘If Hillary gets elected, look for the FBI or somebody to come and pick me up the next day.’ And I think I’m the only one left. [Former Congressman] Henry Hyde is dead. [Independent Counsel Kenneth] Star didn’t really hurt her. Yeah. I was scared when I was out there …  I’ve been terrified ever since. Because things happen. Things happen.

Hyde, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, had asked Schippers, a Democrat, to lead the House impeachment probe.

During the interview, Schippers raised questions about the death of Foster, whose body was discovered on July 20, 1993 in Virginia’s Fort Marcy Park. An autopsy concluded the cause of death was a “perforating gunshot wound mouth-head.” …

Schippers said he believed that Foster was a “weak link in the chain of evidence”, and that his investigative committee was barred from probing the lawyer’s death.

He stated:

Vince Foster was probably as close to Hillary as anybody on the face of the Earth. He knew all about the (Rose) law firm. He knew all about Whitewater. He knew all about the money she made, the $100,000 she made overnight in the commodities market. He knew everything. And I think he was a weak link. In my opinion, he was a weak link in the chain of evidence. And obviously, we could never have called him as a witness. But I was going into that investigation. I was going to call FBI agents. I was going to call the Park Service. I was going to call the coroner and everybody else. We weren’t allowed to do it. We were stymied. Just stopped dead in our tracks. And I don’t know why.

Five official or governmental investigations concluded that Foster committed suicide. The nature of Foster’s work, as well as the six days it took before Foster’s suicide note was found, led to speculation and conspiracies about his death.

I asked Schippers, “Are you saying, if I am hearing you correctly, that there are legitimate questions that you believe should be asked about the deaths surrounding the Clintons, like Vince Foster and others?”

“Absolutely. Absolutely,” he replied.

Schippers further claimed that “We know that there were people who disappeared.”

He continued:

“When we started our investigation, Henry Hyde said, ‘How wide do you want to go?’ And I said, ‘Get us an open investigation. We have so many things that we want to investigate.’ And we got an open investigation where we were permitted to investigate as far as whatever came up in the impeachment inquiry.

“Immediately after the 1998 election, the leadership in the House put the brakes on.

We had a meeting and Henry Hyde said the House has told us that we’ve got Monica Lewinsky and we can go no further.We are not permitted to do any additional investigation. And I said, ‘My God, we’ve got at least three murders and other things that we are going into.’ And he says, ‘I’m sorry we can’t do it.’”

Schippers described the room at the Ford House Office Building where the evidence was housed during the impeachment probe as having armed guards outside. He said those who were permitted to enter were not allowed to bring anything in or out.

He said he was one of the few people who actually reviewed all of the evidence in the impeachment case. He said that only 65 House members accepted an invitation to review the evidence in the room and that all senators declined before they voted against impeaching Clinton.

Asked about the specifics of the evidence, Schippers said he is barred from answering the question. However, he replied, “Let me say this. Sixty-five Congressmen saw that evidence. And 64 voted to impeach. Take your own conclusion.”

And this is from the Political Insider:

Twenty-three years ago during the Clinton administration, Deputy White House Council Vincent Foster was found dead in his car.

But did he die in his car? Did he own the gun that shot him? Was he shot once or twice? A lot of evidence that pointed to the scene being fixed to look like suicide was suppressed.

This scandal shocked the country, and raised massive questions about just how dangerous the Clintons are.

Foster’s apparent suicide was quite suspicious. Two investigators – Robert Fiske and Kenneth Starr – separately concluded that Foster shot himself and died, due to suicide.

But over time, major questions have been raised about what may have really killed him. Now, recently discovered evidence blows the case wide open!

Discovered in the files of the National Archives and Records Administration, Starr’s lead prosecutor Miguel Rodriguez submitted a 2-page resignation letter and a 31 page memo about the injuries Foster sustained. Rodriguez notes in the letter details about injuries around Foster’s neck which were not reported in official government documents.

At the time, the FBI claimed that Foster’s neck injury photos were underexposed, and therefore useless to them.

Rodriguez claims that after he produced additional damning evidence of a possible Foster murder coverup, he became a target and was investigated internally!

In the letter, he explained 12 ways in which the case has mishandled and compromised. Then, he noted:

“I steadfastly maintained, and continue to maintain, that I, at all times, conducted myself as an experienced and trained prosecutor, with years of federal prosecutorial experience and federal grand jury experience.”

These records indicate Foster didn’t really die from one .38 caliber gunshot … but two gunshots! The other shot was on the right side of his neck, made by a “Small caliber” bullet hole.

This raises serious questions about Foster’s motives for suicide. He was tied to Hillary Clinton’s roles in White House scandals at Whitewater and the White House Travel Office. …

The theory is, as Vince Foster was one of Hillary’s closest friends, he knew too much about these scandals. In fact, he may have had a romantic relationship with the then first-Lady.

Foster had been a long-time friend and companion to Hillary. The two shared a brokerage account called Midlife Partners. When Barbara Walters asked Hillary if she had been having an affair with Vince Foster, Hillary lowered her eyes and told the 20/20 cameras, “He was a very special man.” When he died, Hillary said publicly that Vince Foster was the last person who would have committed suicide. Friends reported she was genuinely shocked and aggrieved.

Why, then, did Hillary lie under oath about the last time she saw Vince Foster?

Testifying before the Office of the Independent Counsel (OIC) in 1994, she claimed that the last time she had spoken to Vince Foster was on the phone “the Friday or Saturday before Father’s Day.” Yet documents from the National Archives, acquired by the New York Megaphone, show that Foster’s assistant, Tom Castleton, reported he “saw Hillary Clinton in Foster’s office approximately four times during the five weeks he was employed.” Castleton didn’t start working for Foster until after Father’s Day, 1993. …

Hillary Clinton asked Vince Foster to help her spy on her libertine husband in 1990. Foster hired Jerry Parks, an Arkansas investigator who later worked as the head of security for the Clinton/Gore campaign. According to Parks’s widow, “Jerry asked Vince why he needed this stuff on Clinton. He said he needed it for Hillary.”

When Vince Foster showed up dead in a Washington-area public park in the summer of 1993, Parks was terrified.

Two months later Parks was shot nine times at close range, at a stoplight, in his SUV, in Little Rock. Parks’s home was then raided by eight Federal agents, including officers from the FBI, IRS, Secret Service, and (unusual for a domestic case) the CIA.

If true, this means Vince Foster was murdered to make sure he didn’t tell the world what he knew about President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary. He was too honest, and therefore couldn’t be trusted anymore.

This is actually worse than transmitting classified documents on a home email server… This is murder!

Not sure about that. Hillary endangered the lives of many Americans with her insecure emailing, all too easily hacked. Her recklessness with her emails probably contributed to the murders of Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans at Benghazi on 9/11/12. The attackers knew in advance where the Ambassador would be that night. How did they know?

And while Vince Foster and Jerry Parks may very well have been murdered on the orders of Hillary, did she not certainly cause the violent deaths of uncountable numbers in Libya, Iraq, Syria, and the Mediterranean sea? 

But to return to the death of Vince Foster: even if he did kill himself, there is a strong case for believing that Hillary drove him to do it:     

This is from the Washington Times:

The FBI found that a week before Foster’s death, Hillary held a meeting at the White House with Foster and other top aides to discuss her proposed health care legislation.

Hillary violently disagreed with a legal objection Foster raised at the meeting and ridiculed him in front of his peers, former FBI agent Coy Copeland and former FBI supervisory agent Jim Clemente told me. Mr. Copeland was Mr. Starr’s senior investigator and read the reports of other agents working for Mr. Starr.

During the White House meeting, Hillary continued to humiliate Foster mercilessly, both former FBI agents say.

“Hillary put him down really, really bad in a pretty good-size meeting,” Mr. Copeland says. “She told him he didn’t get the picture, and he would always be a little hick town lawyer who was obviously not ready for the big time.”

Indeed, Hillary went so far as to blame Foster for all the Clintons’ problems and accuse him of failing them, according to Mr. Clemente, who was also assigned by the FBI to the Starr investigation and who probed the circumstances surrounding Foster’s suicide.

“Foster was profoundly depressed, but Hillary lambasting him was the final straw because she publicly embarrassed him in front of others,” says Mr. Clemente, who, like Mr. Copeland, spoke about the investigation for the first time.

“Hillary blamed him for failed nominations, claimed he had not vetted them properly, and said in front of his White House colleagues, ‘You’re not protecting us’ and ‘You have failed us’,” Mr. Clemente says. “That was the final blow.”

After the meeting, Foster’s behavior changed dramatically, the FBI agents found. Those who knew him said his voice sounded strained, he became withdrawn and preoccupied, and his sense of humor vanished. At times, Foster teared up. He talked of feeling trapped.

On Tuesday, July 13, 1993, while having dinner with his wife Lisa, Foster broke down and began to cry. He said he was considering resigning.

That weekend, Foster and his wife drove to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where they saw their friends, Michael Cardoza and Webster Hubbell, and their wives.

“They played tennis, they swam, and they said he sat in a lawn chair, just kind of sat there in the lawn chair,” Mr. Copeland says. “They said that just was not Vince. He loved to play tennis, and he was always sociable, but he just sat over in the corner by himself and stared off into space, reading a book.”

Two days later, Foster left the White House parking lot at 1:10 p.m. The precise time when he shot himself could not be pinpointed. After Park Police found his body, they notified the U.S. Secret Service at 8:30 p.m.

Based on what “dozens” of others who had contact with Foster after that meeting told the agents, while Foster was already depressed, “The put-down that she gave him in that big meeting just pushed him over the edge,” Mr. Copeland says. “It was the final straw that broke the camel’s back.”

No one can explain a suicide in rational terms. But the FBI investigation concluded that it was Hillary’s vilification of Foster in front of his colleagues, coming on top of his depression, that triggered his suicide about a week later, Mr. Copeland and Mr. Clemente both say.

Mr. Starr issued a 38,000-word report, along with a separate psychologist’s report on the factors that contributed to Foster’s suicide. Yet Mr. Starr never mentioned the meeting with Hillary, leaving out the fact that his own investigation had found that Hillary’s attack had led to her friend’s suicide.

Mr. Starr never told Mr. Copeland or Mr. Clemente why he decided to exclude the findings from his report. But Mr. Clemente says, “Starr didn’t want to offend the conscience of the public by going after the first lady. He said the first lady is an institution.”

Q: How can anyone want Hillary Clinton to be president of the United States? 

A: ?

The Clintons’ corruption is like an infectious disease. Everything they touch becomes as rotten as they are.

Hillary Clinton corrupted the State Department – as well as the FBI and the Department of Justice. And the press.

The Washington Examiner gives a summary account of how the State Department became frantically preoccupied with devising ways to cheat and deceive, in order to support Hillary Clinton’s lies which she concocted to conceal her criminal activity:

High-level State Department officials worked behind the scenes last year in several key ways to ensure the release of Hillary Clinton’s emails inflicted as little damage as possible on the Democratic nominee, according to notes made public by the FBI on Monday.

Patrick Kennedy, State’s undersecretary for management, was at the center of efforts to prevent the FBI from upgrading Benghazi-related emails to a classified level.

Although the State Department quickly denied wrongdoing on the part of Kennedy and dismissed GOP calls for his removal on Monday, themFBI notes prompted fresh scrutiny of the administration’s approach to the Clinton email probe.

The 100 pages of “302s”, or summaries of interviews conducted by theFBI, that were released this week shed light on the quiet push to manipulate the handling of Clinton’s emails amid multiple investigations into her record-keeping.

Outsiders tampered with document reviews

Unnamed people who were given “special appointments” in order to assist career State Department officials with the review of Clinton’s emails raised suspicions among some observers, who called their involvement in the process “abnormal”.

Their employment histories “appeared to create a conflict of interest”, the FBI said. The Freedom of Information Act review process is typically confined to career officials in order to prevent political bias from affecting decisions about which records are withheld or redacted.

Officials manipulated redactions

At least one of the people brought in to work on Clinton’s emails “was possibly involved in the Lois Lerner, Internal Revenue Service situation”, referring to the tax agency’s targeting of conservative nonprofit groups ahead of the 2012 election.

Multiple witnesses told the FBI they felt agency leadership circumvented normal procedures when preparing emails, particularly those mentioning Benghazi and Libya, for release to Congress and the public. At least one of the 296 Benghazi-related emails made public last summer was released in full despite the fact that it contained classified information, the FBI said. In other emails, the names of public officials were redacted even though FOIA requirements stipulate that those names should have been released.

Some record-keeping officials said they felt “intimidated” each time they proposed upgrading and redacting part of an email because it was classified. Those officials described the “immense pressure” they felt to avoid classifying anything within the 296 Benghazi documents.

After reviewing the Benghazi-related emails last year, career officials in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs suggested classifying “four or five” of the documents.

However, an unnamed State Department official said he was “frustrated” with the move and instead lobbied the bureau to redact the classified portions of those emails under a different exemption, which is typically used to withhold internal conversations about government decision-making.

Kennedy tried to block classifications

The State Department’s undersecretary for management [Patrick Kennedy] made repeated attempts to convince the FBI not to classify a Benghazi-related email as his agency prepared to hand over hundreds of documents to the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

Kennedy offered a “quid pro quo” to the FBI if agents ruled against upgrading one email to the “secret” level.

Actually, that’s badly expressed. Kennedy wanted the FBI agents to downgrade it from the secret level – as the the following makes clear.

An unnamed witness told investigators that Kennedy attempted “to influence the FBI to change its markings” and asked FBI agents if they could “see their way to marking the email unclassified.”

Later, an FBI agent who has since retired offered to “look into the e-mail matter” if Kennedy would agree to approving the FBI’s request to send additional personnel to posts in Iraq.

The FBI said the deal never came to fruition and said in a statement Sunday that the FBI agent who responded favorably to Kennedy’s overtures was no longer with the bureau.

So he or she was fired. Scapegoated. But Patrick Kennedy retains his job!

Some emails disappeared

Clinton’s legal team at first informed the State Department that it had prepared 14 banker boxes of printed emails for production to the government. However, when officials arrived at her lawyer’s office to retrieve the emails, they found only 12 boxes.

“Officials were unsure what happened to the other two boxes,” the FBI wrote.

The 12 boxes that did end up in State Department custody contained 52,455 pages of emails, packed into the boxes “with no folders or known method of organization.”

The idea was, plainly, to make it as difficult, arduous, and time-consuming a task as possible to get them into useful order.

Clinton’s lawyers knew emails contained “Top Secret” intel

Katherine Turner, an attorney at the law firm representing Clinton, told FBI agents in August of last year that she had obtained six laptops from Clinton’s staff, each of which likely contained “Top Secret classified information”.

But at a meeting with agents in her office, Turner “declined to provide consent to search the laptops” and pushed for her clients’ protection of what they considered “privileged communication”.

Ultimately, Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, two of the aides involved in sorting Clinton’s work-related emails, received immunity deals to turn over their laptops. Those agreements provided for the destruction of those laptops after agents reviewed their contents.

A promise to destroy evidence so there can be no future review of it!  Could the criminality of the Obama administration be demonstrated more strikingly?

‘Shadow Government’ tried to stop email releases

A group of high-ranking State Department officials, dubbed the “Shadow Government” by witnesses who spoke to the FBI, pushed to release all 30,000 of Clinton’s emails at the same time, in Jan. 2016, rather than over the course of several months starting in summer 2015. The powerful group met every Wednesday afternoon to discuss how to handle FOIA requests for Clinton’s emails. Regular attendees included Secretary John Kerry’s chief of staff and Kennedy.

“Shadow Government” members argued the release of Clinton’s emails should happen all at once to facilitate “coordination”. The move would have overwhelmed reporters with thousands of email chains and prevented the controversy from lingering over the course of the proposed rolling releases.

Ultimately, the career record-keeping officials won out, and the emails were released in batches stretching from May 2015 to Feb. 2016.

As if “reporters” would have actually reported any wrong-doing! As if they would have done anything voluntarily to spark “controversy”!

President Obama and the Clintons have taken the government of the United States into deep criminality.  

In this time of painful stress and deep dread leading up to the most important US presidential election ever, the great actor Jon Voight speaks eloquently to us and for us. (We politely overlook his appeal to “God”.)

Hillary Clinton, she of the Benghazi Massacre, retorts when she is criticized for her actions and inactions in connection with that disaster, that “eleven hours of questioning” by the Foreign Relations Committee “found nothing” to reproach her with.

(Also that an earlier inquiry into the event had positively exonerated her – which indeed it did, being conducted by one of her accomplices who saw no reason even to question her. See our post, Send in the whitewasher, November 3, 2012.)

It now emerges that the Foreign Relations Committee hearing was not an entirely honest inquiry to determine the truth of what happened, but in part a staged performance, scripted in advance by the Clinton gang.

Catherine Herridge reports:

Newly released emails suggest a senior Hillary Clinton aide stage-managed her first hearing on the Benghazi terrorist attack by feeding specific topics Clinton wanted to address to Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez, who at the time was acting chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

“We wired it that Menendez would provide an opportunity to address two topics we needed to debunk (her actions/whereabouts on 9/11, and these emails from Chris Stevens about moving locations,)” Clinton media gatekeeper Philippe Reines wrote to Chelsea Clinton the morning of the Jan. 23, 2013 hearing.

Right out of the gate, the first hearing question from Menendez that day covered both topics referenced by Reines.

Menendez asked for Clinton’s “insights on the decision-making process regarding the location of the Mission”. … [And] “Can you also in your response, you touched upon it in your opening statement, but what actions were you and your staff taking the night of September 11 and into September 12?”

The then-secretary of state had an answer on both fronts. She told the committee that “[Ambassador] Chris [Stevens] was committed to not only being in Benghazi but to the location,” and that on the night of the attack, “I was notified of the attack shortly after 4:00 p.m. Over the following hours, we were in continuous meetings and conversations both within the department with our team in Tripoli, with the interagency and internationally.”

Stevens was among four Americans killed in the attack.

The emails were obtained by the group Citizens United as part of its ongoing Freedom of Information Act request to the State Department for emails from Chelsea Clinton and Hillary Clinton’s closest aides.

“This email chain provides a rare behind the scenes look at which Benghazi-related issues the Clinton camp had concerns about going into Secretary Clinton’s January 2013 testimony on Capitol Hill, and what they had apparently plotted out beforehand with a Democrat committee member to deal with those concerns,” Citizens United said in a statement. “Citizens United will continue to release all new Benghazi emails we receive through our FOIA lawsuits as they come in — the American people have a right to know the full picture.”

Fox News asked the Clinton campaign as well as Menendez’s office if they coordinated before the 2013 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing; what was meant by the term “wired”; and how the email exchange was consistent with the principle of independent congressional oversight. Both confirmed receipt of Fox’s questions.  The Senator’s office said they would not be commenting.  The Clinton campaign said they would advise Fox if they decided to react to Reines’ email. In 2013, the New Jersey senator – who is now facing federal public corruption charges – at the time of the hearing was about to become chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, replacing John Kerry who was in line to replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. …

A previous release of emails from a separate FOIA action showed that on the night of the attack, Clinton told her daughter, who used the email pseudonym Diane Reynolds on clintonemail.com, that the attacks were the work of an “Al Queda-like group” – with no mention of an obscure anti-Islam video Clinton publicly linked to the 2012 terrorist attack. Chelsea Clinton uses the same pseudonym in the Menendez email.

Reines is a founding member of the Clinton-aligned consulting group Beacon Global Strategies. The online bios for its founders and managing director suggest no group knows more about the Benghazi terrorist attack and the Obama administration’s response.

One of its senior counselors is former CIA Acting Director Mike Morell, who heavily edited the controversial Benghazi talking points, which helped establish the administration’s initial flawed narrative about the attack. Morell recently endorsed Clinton to the New York Times, but later was criticized for not fully disclosing his relationship to Beacon.

In a follow up Q-and-A with the Times, Morell wrote: “Among the many things I do in my post-government life — teaching and writing, serving on corporate boards, speaking publicly on national security issues — is work with Beacon Global Strategies, a firm that has prioritized nonpartisanship. The firm’s advisory board — composed of appointees of both Republican and Democratic presidents, as well as career military officers — make that priority clear. It all stems from a strong and shared belief that our national security is paramount and needs to be devoid of partisan politics.”

Superb hypocrisy!  

The Clintons and their hoodlums lie so consistently that they are no longer expected to be truthful.

A vote for Hillary is a conscious vote for dishonesty.

But why should it matter? She’s Hillary Clinton. She’s above the law. She’s beyond good and evil. She’s entitled to power and riches. And she needs to be the first woman president of America.

Understood?

The House Select Committee’s report on the lethal attack by Muslim terrorists on the US mission in Benghazi on 9/11/12, now released, is a damning indictment of the Obama administration, exposing its mendacity, incompetence, and callousness.

The whole document is a must read.

Everything in it needs to become common knowledge.

We select a section that seem to us particularly interesting and yet have seen no mention of elsewhere.

The report is titled:

Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi June 29, 2016

Betrayal in Benghazi: A Dereliction of Duty

We quote from pages 52 – 55:

Right around 8:00 p.m. Eastern time [on the night of the attack], Tripoli DCM (now Acting Chief of Mission) Greg Hicks spoke by phone with Secretary Clinton and her aides, telling them in no uncertain terms that it had been a terrorist attack and that the “Innocence of Muslims” YouTube video was a “non-event” in Libya …

A State Department “Call Sheet” stamped with the 11 September 2012 date states clearly as well that “Armed extremists attacked U.S. Mission Benghazi on September 11, setting fire to the Principal Officer’s Residence and killing at least one [of the] American mission staff, Information Management Officer Sean Smith … ”

Further, Secretary Clinton was personally in contact with foreign leaders, including Libyan General National Congress President Mohammed Yousef el-Magariaf and Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Mohamed Qandil. At 6:49 p.m. Eastern time the night of 11 September, Clinton was on the telephone with Magariaf, discussing the attack and frankly discussing with him the Ansar al-Shariah claim of responsibility for it.

Nevertheless, Secretary Clinton spoke with President Obama around 10 p.m. Eastern Time, and shortly thereafter (at 10:08 p.m.) issued a formal State Department statement that blamed the attack on the YouTube video. The statement read, in part: “Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet.” This State Department statement was coordinated with the White House. “Per Ben [Rhodes’] email below, this should be the USG comment for the night” …

Then comes a fact that seems to have been overlooked by commentators, but which makes it absolutely clear that the video story was concocted as a deliberate lie to mislead the public:

The cover-up in fact had begun even earlier, kicked off apparently while the battle was still raging in Benghazi, by a White House attempt to “reach out to U-tube to advise ramifications of the posting of the Pastor Jon Video”,  referring to a video by Oregon-based Pastor Jon Courson, entitled “God vs Allah”. 

The administration had already (by 9:11 p.m. Eastern Time, 11 September/ 3:11 a.m. Benghazi Time, 12 September) decided to blame an online video for the attack, but hadn’t quite settled on which video.

Ponder that. They hadn’t “quite settled” what video they would claim was responsible for provoking the attack in Benghazi!

Again, there was no question that Secretary Clinton knew it was an Islamic terror attack: she’d emailed her daughter Chelsea at 9:12 p.m. Eastern Time to tell her that an “Al Qaeda-like group” was responsible.

As the administration response to the Benghazi attack was taking shape, the one question never specifically asked by anyone seems to be about where Hillary Clinton, [Defense Secretary] Leon Panetta, General David Petraeus and President Barack Obama actually were throughout the night of 11-12 September 2012. In 2014, former national security spokesman Tommy Vietor told Fox News’ Bret Baier that President Obama was not in the Situation Room that night, but somewhere else in the White House. But aside from hints that emerge from various timelines and emails pried years after the fact from government databases, we still don’t know for sure where any of them, especially the President, were that night, or what they were doing.

The next morning, on 12 September, President Obama did appear and spoke in the White House Rose Garden about the Benghazi attack, saying “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.” Nevertheless, he refused to call the Benghazi attack forthrightly a terror attack, a pattern that would persist for weeks. 113 That same day, CBS’s Steve Kroft asked the president directly, “Mr. President, this morning you went out of your way to avoid the use of the word “terrorism” in connection with the Libya attack. Do you believe that this was a terrorist attack?” And Obama refused to answer the question directly, saying instead, “Well, it’s too early to know exactly how this came about, what group was involved, but obviously it was an attack on Americans.”

CBS sat on this exchange, refusing to air it even after the infamous moment in the 16 October presidential debate between Obama and Governor Mitt Romney. At that time, moderator Candy Crowley interjected to wrongly say that Obama had called the Benghazi attack an act of terror on 12 September. Then, on the afternoon of 12 September 2012, Clinton spoke by telephone with Egyptian Prime Minister Qandil. According to the official State Department record of that call (obtained by Judicial Watch), Clinton clearly told him, “We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack — not a protest.” After PM Qandil replied back to her in a redacted segment, Clinton added, “Your [sic] not kidding. Based on the information we saw today we believe the group that claimed responsibility for this was affiliated with al Qaeda.”

Despite knowing that the attack at Benghazi was a pre-planned Islamic terror attack by a group affiliated with al-Qa’eda, the Obama administration decided to lie about it and tell the American people that the attack was the result of a video. Statements over the following days from Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, and from Clinton herself continued to push the narrative that the attacks were because of the YouTube video. On 14 September, Clinton attended the transfer of remains ceremony for those killed in Benghazi at Andrews Air Force Base. According to handwritten notes that Charles Woods, father of Tyrone Woods, kept, Clinton told him, “We are going to have the filmmaker arrested who was responsible for the death of your son.” …

She said the same to the mother of Sean Smith, whose coffin was also being carried behind her as she spoke.

And on 15 September, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the filmmaker who produced “Innocence of Muslims”, was duly arrested in California, accused of violating his probation, and ultimately sentenced to one year in jail on unrelated charges. This looks to many like a clear case of official U.S. government submission to the Islamic Law on slander.

It was precisely that.

Of course the actual events in Libya were the most atrocious part of the story. They were caused by the foreign policy of President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Neither of whom gave a damn for the hell that broke out in Benghazi that night, for the suffering and death of their ambassador, or of the men who died trying to protect him and the US mission.

Obama and Hillary Clinton cared only to save their own political reputations and stay in power. They deserve no power. Their reputations should be mud for all time.

This is an extract from the film The Caliphate:

Hillary Clinton is not a person who deserves respect or esteem.

She caused immeasurable harm as Secretary of State. Untold numbers of people in the fragile societies of North Africa and the Middle East have been uprooted, tortured, raped, enslaved, and killed in many atrocious ways as a result of policies which she insisted on. In the case of Libya, both the CIA and the Pentagon advised the Obama administration against bombing the country, but bombed it was, because she got her way. As a result, Libya is in chaos, and four Americans, including a US ambassador, were murdered there, in Benghazi. She could have sent help to them, but chose not to.

Then she lied about what had happened, and goes on lying about it.

A liar and cheat she has been throughout her public career, but surely sank to her lowest when she not only lied to the families of the dead men about what had happened in Benghazi, but repeats over and over again that THEY are lying when they all, separately, relate the lie she told them.  The same lie, and a very silly one. That some residents of Benghazi, who had not liked what they had heard about an obscure video made by an American, expressed their hurt feelings by setting out on a  peaceful protest which turned suddenly, at the gates of the US mission, into a murderous onslaught, miraculously equipped with an arsenal of light and heavy arms. She promised them – each of them in separate conversations – that that wicked video-maker would be punished for it.

The story is outrageously stupid and unbelievable. A plain lie. And she told it not only to the grieving relatives, but to the whole world on television. Other members of the administration, including Obama himself at the United Nations, repeated the same idiotic tale, to all the world through the media.

But she says she did not say it. Never did. “Absolutely” not.

And so she brands the bereaved as liars! She tells the world that they are lying. Oh, she simpers that she does not blame them for “misremembering“ what she said to them. She understands their grief, which made them misremember. She feels for them. But they are lying.

She is a low, dishonest, despicable human being …

… and millions of Americans want her to be their President! 

*

Watch and hear two lying hypocrites, and weep!

Our fervent hope that the deeply corrupt Hillary Clinton will not only fail to gain the presidency, or even the Democratic Party’s nomination, but actually go to prison, has found much encouragement of late. Our breath quickens, our pulses beat faster.

Judge Andrew Napolitano writes at the Washington Times:

The self-inflicted wounds of Hillary Clinton just keep manifesting themselves. She has two serious issues that have arisen in the past week; one is political and the other is legal. Both have deception at their root.

Her political problem is one of credibility. We know from her emails that she informed her daughter Chelsea and the then-prime minister of Egypt within 12 hours of the murder of the U.S. ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, that he had been killed in Benghazi by al Qaeda. We know from the public record that the Obama administration’s narrative blamed the killings of the ambassador and his guards on an anonymous crowd’s spontaneous reaction to an anti-Muhammad video.

Over this past weekend we learned that her own embassy staff in Tripoli told her senior staff in Washington the day after the killings that the video was not an issue, and very few Libyans had seen it. We also know from her emails that the CIA informed her within 24 hours of the ambassador’s murder that it had been planned by al Qaeda 12 days before the actual killings.

Nevertheless, she persisted in blaming the video. When she received the bodies of Ambassador Stevens and his three bodyguards at Andrews Air Force Base three days after their murders, she told the media and the families of the deceased assembled there that the four Americans had been killed by a spontaneous mob reacting to a cheap 15-minute anti-Muhammad video.

Mrs. Clinton’s sordid behavior throughout this unhappy affair reveals a cavalier attitude about the truth and a ready willingness to deceive the public for short-term political gain. This might not harm her political aspirations with her base in the Democratic Party, but it will be a serious political problem for her with independent voters, without whose support she simply cannot be elected.

Yet, her name might not appear on any ballot in 2016.

That’s because each time she addresses these issues — her involvement in Benghazi and her emails — her legal problems get worse. We already know that the FBI has been investigating her for espionage (the failure to secure state secrets), destruction of government property and obstruction of justice (wiping her computer server clean of governmental emails that were and are the property of the federal government), and perjury (lying to a federal judge about whether she returned all governmental emails to the State Department).

Now, she has added new potential perjury and misleading Congress issues because of her deceptive testimony to the House Benghazi committee. In 2011, when President Obama persuaded NATO to enact and enforce a no-fly zone over Libya, he sent American intelligence agents on the ground. Since they were not military and were not shooting at Libyan government forces, he could plausibly argue that he had not put “boots” on the ground. Mrs. Clinton, however, decided that she could accelerate the departure of the Libyan strongman, Col. Moammar Gadhafi, by arming some of the Libyan rebel groups that were attempting to oppose him, and thus help them to shoot at government forces.

In violation of federal law and the U.N. arms embargo on Libya she authorized the shipment of American arms to Qatar, knowing they’d be passed off to Libyan rebels, some of whom were al Qaeda, a few of whom killed Ambassador Stevens using American-made weapons. When asked about this, she said she knew nothing of it. The emails underlying this are in the public domain. Mrs. Clinton not only knew of the arms-to-Libyan-rebels deal, she authored and authorized it. She lied about this under oath.

After surveying the damage done to his regime and his family by NATO bombings, Gadhafi made known his wish to negotiate a peaceful departure from Libya. When his wish was presented to Mrs. Clinton, a source in the room with her has revealed that she silently made the “off with his head” hand motion by moving her hand quickly across her neck. She could do that because she knew the rebels were well equipped with American arms with which to kill him. She didn’t care that many of the rebels were al Qaeda or that arming them was a felony. She lied about this under oath.

My Fox News colleagues Catherine Herridge and Pamela Browne have scrutinized Mrs. Clinton’s testimony with respect to her friend and adviser Sidney Blumenthal. Recall that Mr. Obama vetoed Mrs. Clinton’s wish to hire him as her State Department senior adviser. So she had the Clinton Foundation pay him a greater salary than the State Department would have, and he became her silent de facto adviser.

They emailed each other hundreds of times during her tenure. He provided intelligence to her, which he obtained from a security company on the ground in Libya in which he had a financial interest. He advised her on how to present herself to the media. He even advocated the parameters of the Libyan no-fly zone and she acted upon his recommendations. Yet she told the committee he was “just a friend”.  She was highly deceptive and criminally misleading about this under oath.

It is difficult to believe that the federal prosecutors and FBI agents investigating Mrs. Clinton will not recommend that she be indicted. Inexplicably, she seems to have forgotten that they were monitoring what she said under oath to the Benghazi committee. By lying under oath and by misleading Congress, she gave that team additional areas to investigate and on which to recommend indictments.

When those recommendations are made known, no ballot will bear her name.

And Sarah Westwood writes at the Washington Examiner:

A former U.S. attorney thinks Hillary Clinton could face a criminal indictment from the FBI within the next 60 days.

Joe DiGenova, a Republican U.S. attorney appointed by President Reagan, said Clinton’s “biggest problem right now” is the open FBI investigation into the contents of her private emails.

“They have reached a critical mass in their investigation of the secretary and all of her senior staff,” DiGenova said  … “And, it’s going to come to a head, I would suggest, in the next 60 days.” …

“It’s going to be a very complex matter for the Department of Justice, but they’re not going to be able to walk away from it,” DiGenova said. “They are now at over 1,200 classified emails. And, that’s just for the ones we know about from the State Department. That does not include the ones that the FBI is, in fact, recovering from her hard drives.”

The former U.S. attorney noted Clinton has yet to be interviewed by the FBI, a step he said will likely occur before agents make their findings public.

But DiGenova warned the decision to charge Clinton personally with a crime lies with Attorney General Loretta Lynch, putting the Obama administration in a difficult political position.

“I believe that the evidence that the FBI is compiling will be so compelling that, unless [Lynch] agrees to the charges, there will be a massive revolt inside the FBI, which she will not be able to survive as an attorney general. It will be like Watergate. It will be unbelievable,” DiGenova said. “The evidence against the Clinton staff and the secretary is so overwhelming at this point that if, in fact, she chooses not to charge Hillary, they will never be able to charge another federal employee with the negligent handling of classified information. … The intelligence community will not stand for that. They will fight for indictment and they are already in the process of gearing themselves to basically revolt if she refuses to bring charges.”

And then there is this too, from the pro-Hillary Washington Post, about Bill’s angry women and Hillary’s enabling; inescapably revived in the public memory, much as the left-biased media (most of them) would like it to be forgotten:

The ghosts of the 1990s have returned to confront Hillary Clinton, released from the vault by Donald Trump …

The fresher [sic] case being made is that Hillary Clinton has been, at a minimum, hypocritical about her husband’s treatment of women, and possibly even complicit in discrediting his accusers.

And it is being pressed at a time when there is a new sensitivity toward victims of unwanted sexual contact, and when one of the biggest news stories is the prosecution of once-beloved comedian Bill Cosby on charges that he drugged and assaulted a woman 12 years ago — one of dozens who have accused him of similar behavior.

In November, Hillary Clinton tweeted: “Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported.” She has made women’s issues a central focus of her campaign and is counting on a swell of support for the historic prospect of the first female president. …

Trump started hammering on Bill Clinton’s behavior in retaliation for Hillary Clinton’s assertion … that Trump has demonstrated a “penchant for sexism”.

“Hillary Clinton has announced that she is letting her husband out to campaign but HE’S DEMONSTRATED A PENCHANT FOR SEXISM, so inappropriate!” Trump tweeted on Dec. 26. …

[And] Trump amped up his rhetoric, calling Bill Clinton “one of the great women abusers of all time” and saying Hillary Clinton was his “enabler”. …

Last month, a woman in the audience at a Clinton campaign event in New Hampshire asked her: “You say that all rape victims should be believed. But would you say that about Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey and/or Paula Jones?”

Clinton responded: “Well, I would say that everyone should be believed at first until they are disbelieved based on evidence.” …

There was, of course, plenty of evidence that Bill Clinton was guilty of sexually assaulting the women who accused him. Though he lied and lied, there was DNA evidence that he had had sexual relations with an intern. He paid damages to one of his victims. He was disbarred in Arkansas. He was impeached.

But Hillary put it all down to “a vast right-wing conspiracy”.

There is also this from Fox News Insider, talking about a film that will remind everyone of the horrors of Benghazi for which Hillary is largely responsible, and which she has consistently lied about.

Ahead of the release of the film 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, Megyn Kelly spoke to three of the heroes who fought on the night of the terror attack in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead.

In a powerful Kelly File exclusive, Mark “Oz” Geist, Kris “Tanto” Paronto and John “Tig” Tiegen reflected on the 2012 attack and reacted to Michael Bay’s much-anticipated film. …

Tiegen told Megyn that he was surprised during the attack that they were given a “stand-down” order and offered no help, even after Amb. Chris Stevens had been missing for hours.

“13 hours. Nobody comes. That’s the big deal,” Tanto added.

Megyn noted that Hillary Clinton and the White House have relied on Congressional investigations that concluded there was no “stand-down” order given at the annex.

Paronto said it’s “just silly” and Tiegen pointed out that investigators believed everything else the men testified about.

“It’s kind of funny. Everything we testified to, they agreed with us 100 percent. Pretty much from us eating a candy bar to shooting all our ammo, but for some reason they don’t want to believe that we were told to stand down,” said Tiegen. …

Paronto concluded that the film is important because it helps honor the sacrifice and service of those who lost their lives at Benghazi and those who selflessly risked their lives to save others.

The three men finally disobeyed the order to stand down, and went to see what they could do to save the people at the mission. They were too late to save the Ambassador – who suffered an atrocious death and whose body was hideously defiled – but they did save some thirty others. They are heroes, treated by the Obama administration as villains.

The film itself should go far towards destroying the last defenses the Democrats and Hillary Clinton herself are desperately trying to shore up.

In addition to all that, there are questions about Hillary’s health.  What the long discussion of her affliction amounts to is that this (morally rotten) woman is (also) physically sick and frail. She is not strong enough to do the gruelling job of the presidency – even to do it badly. A long rest in prison might do her good.

So give it up, Hillary!

Democrats, your party’s Plan A may very well be scuttled.

What’s your Plan B? That old Socialist, Bernie Sanders? Hmmm.

Here is Hillary Clinton, when the coffins of the men who died in Benghazi and members of their families were beside her, blaming “a video” for the violent attack that killed them:

And here she is asserting that she did not say that:

Hillary Clinton lies not just by habit, but by nature. She is a liar as a tortoise is a creature with a shell. Her lies are her carapace.