The Patriot Post - Alexander's Column 6-24-2015

________________________________________
The Patriot Post - Alexander's Column 6-24-2015
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
________________________________________

Clinton's Benghazi Cover Up 3.0
The Blumenthal Emails

By Mark Alexander

Jun. 24, 2015

“If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference?” —John Adams (1775)

In an address to the nation in 2010, Barack Obama1 declared what I suggest will be the defining words of his administration’s legacy: “The only people who don’t want to disclose the truth are people with something to hide.”

Seasoned political observer Jonah Goldberg noted that Obama’s deceptions2 amount to “the biggest lies about domestic policy ever uttered by a U.S. president.” While I concur with that assessment, Obama and his secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, Hillary Clinton, are in a dead heat for “biggest lies about foreign policy.”

Though Obama promised to have “the most transparent administration in history,” his has without question been the absolute polar opposite. But history tells us that if Hillary Clinton makes it to the White House she’ll make Obama look like a piker.

Getting to the truth of any matter in this era — an era in which progressive falsehoods are routinely enabled and propagated by the Leftmedia — is often exceedingly difficult. This is especially true when dealing with accomplished masters of the art of lying3 like Obama and Clinton. Indeed, they have taken executive-level deception and obfuscation into uncharted depths.

Under the Obama/Clinton watch, our nation’s paper tiger foreign policy has resulted in numerous colossal failures. The most catastrophic of these so far would include the expansionist “Russian Spring4,” our abrupt abandonment of Iraq5 after securing a hard-won victory over the region’s jihadists, and the resulting rise of the “JV” Islamic State6 whose mayhem is now spreading across the Middle East.

However, the foreign policy failure that is most viscerally linked to Clinton’s malfeasance7 as secretary of state is the September 11, 2012, embassy attack in Benghazi8, Libya — and her subsequent efforts to cover for Obama and further her own political aspirations with a series of deliberate deceptions about that attack.

Clinton’s failure to provide adequate security for our diplomatic team in Libya — despite repeated requests from Ambassador Christopher Stevens himself — resulted in the deaths of Stevens and three other Americans: Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty. That failure was inexcusable, but it is her effort to cover up the attack — to frame it as a “spontaneous protest” over an obscure YouTube video — that is beyond indefensible.

On January 23, 2013, Clinton testified on Benghazi before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee — the day before she introduced her successor, John Kerry9, who is another case study in foreign policy ineptitude and malfeasance.

In her testimony, she lamented, “For me, this is not just a matter of policy, it’s personal. I stood next to President Obama as the Marines carried those flag-draped caskets off the plane at Andrews. I put my arms around the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters.”

But at the same time she was “comforting” family members, she was actively advancing the faux video protest narrative, even though, within 24 hours of the attack, it was clearly understood by the Pentagon, CIA and Clinton’s own State Department that it had been carried out by Ansar al-Shari'ah, an al-Qa'ida-affiliated group.

Clinton stood in front of those flag-draped caskets and declared to the families of the dead, “We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with. It is hard for the American people to make sense of that, because it is senseless and totally unacceptable.” She then shamelessly assured Charles Woods, the father of slain former Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods, “We will make sure the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.”

Once the ruse was discovered, Clinton ensured that any “smoking gun” evidence linking her to the phony politically motivated protest narrative would be difficult to find.

In March 2015, The New York Times first reported that Clinton maintained all of her official communication on a “private” email server in her home rather than on official DoS secure servers — a colossal violation of State Department policy, security standards and any modicum of common sense. There had been no public mention of that private server prior to the Times' report, though the State Department had been vigorously fending off Freedom of Information Requests for Clinton’s emails.

Once that news broke, Trey Gowdy, Republican chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, ordered Clinton to turn those emails over to the government.

Clinton obviously kept all her communications on a private server to maintain complete control over them and to cover her tracks wherever necessary — which would aid her run for White House in 2016.

It was no surprise, then, to learn that Clinton and her black-bag team had already sorted through and deleted some 32,000 of the 62,320 emails that she’d sent or received from her server during her tenure as secretary. These communications, she assured us, were simply not relevant to State Department activities — or to the Select Committee on Benghazi investigation.

What we knew, prior to establishing what we will likely never know from Clinton’s email, is that her Benghazi cover-up is now in its third political iteration.

The first iteration was the 2012 pre-election cover-up, which The Patriot Post covered in detail8. Clinton propagated the false video protest narrative to provide Barack Obama cover for his “al-Qa'ida on the run” campaign theme, just weeks ahead of the first 2012 presidential debate with Mitt Romney.

At that time, we believed that Clinton’s principal co-conspirators were, first, then-CIA Deputy Director Michael J. Morell. He retired from the CIA in 2013 and went to work for Beacon Global Strategies, founded by Philippe Reines, who The New York Times describes as Clinton’s “principal gatekeeper.” Morell also is a commentator for CBS News, whose president is David Rhodes, brother of Barack Obama’s then-Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes. (Ya can’t make this stuff up.)

The other principal was then-UN Ambassador Susan Rice, who appeared on five Sunday morning network news programs to utter a carefully crafted talking point: “What happened this week in Benghazi was a result, a direct result, of a heinous and offensive video that was widely disseminated.”