Russian ambassador Michael McFaul (under SoS Hillary) tweets: “As ambassador in Russia, I enjoyed multiple ways to communicate with Secretary Clinton. Email was never one of them.”
She communicated with her ambassadors, but not by email. So what do these emails from Blumenthal have to do with anything at all?
PredictIt now has Clinton favored in both IA and NH. New Hampshire is quite close and and could flip back and forth several times before any votes are cast. It will take a little more than that for Sanders to take a lead in Iowa.
But… but… but… Obama didn’t say “terrorism”, he said “act of terror”. Waaahhhh! He was supposed to say “terrorism”. And Susan Rice thought it might have been a spontaneous reaction to a movie when the investigation just started! Waaaahhhh! And Hillary lied, people died, Benghazi!
Actually, within one hour of the State Department’s official statement (by Nuland, IRRC) that it was a demonstration based on a movie on the internet, Clinton emailed “members of her (Clinton’s) family” that it was indeed a terror attack.
Congressman Jordan’s question was legit. Why were they telling the American people one story, and a wholly different story privately?
Why are the two things mutually exclusive? It could be a terrorist attack motivated by a movie. It wasn’t, but at the time it was a reasonable possibility.
Because you release information after it’s been vetted. And you use different language around friends and family than you do in a professional capacity.
That the utterly pathetic GOP can only find this, is the best possible thing to say for Clinton. They have to make up utter drivel and shout inchoate outrage at trivialities to sway the great dumb masses of low-information voters.
It;s only pathetic if it’s ineffective. McCarthy was right: they have brought down Clinton’s numbers, so why not try to do a little more damage? I’d say they are achieving their objectives just by letting Clinton talk.
Really, Blumenthal wasn’t an “advisor”? Oh, of course, becuase if he was advising her she would have been violating the President’s express wishes to keep her slimy little friend away from official business.
As iiandyiiii points out, those two are not mutually exclusive by any stretch. You have to be a halfwit or just hyperpartisan to not grant that a demonstration based on a movie on the internet could have been hijacked opportunistically by violent extremists aka terrorists committing a terror attack. Hardly a stretch when swaths of the Muslim world were aflame that very fucking day with protests that were explicitly about the video.
All of this is treated in more thorough a fashion in an oldie but a goodie… wherein among other gems doorhinge so memorably coined “Ol’ Hillary’s Ol’ State Department.”
If the committee continues to perform like they are right now, I hope they call Hillary Clinton to testify every day :).
What does this have to do with Ambassador Stevens? Or are you conceding that this is nothing more than a fishing expedition to find something to stick to Hillary?
If emails from her buddy are the best they’ve got, then good luck!
It’s pathetic because it’s outright lies, predicated on dead Americans. That evil nonsense works, isn’t an argument for its use. And certainly not a good indicator that the craven cunts doing it need the reins of power.
It wasn’t, and she, and her Department, her experts and spokespeople, knew it wasn’t. It wasn’t just the email to her family. She also told the President of Libya and the Prime Minister of Egypt that it was a terrorist attack. And they still went on about the video when talking to the American people.
It being a terrorist attack doesn’t preclude it being about the video.
This line of attack is nonsense. Obama called it a terrorist attack the day after. Just nonsense.
They’re not mutually exclusive.
Does anyone actually have a link to the full version of the email to the PM of Egypt? Has that been released?
Press Secretary Nuland said there was no connection between the protests over the video and the Benghazi attack.
Here is Clinton’s own contemporaneous statement to the Prime Minister of Egypt:
“We know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with film.”
Neither of those statements (and there were others) square with what they were telling the American people at the time.
No one’s been more skeptical of the GOP on the Benghazi thing than I have, but I’m going to admit this email is probably the closest thing to a smoking gun I’ve seen come out of any of the Benghazi hearings. The full sentence from the email, as read out by Rep. Jordan, is:
I’d like to see the fuller context. But clearly that statement is different from “It was a protest AND a planned attack,” or “It was a protest that was hijacked and evolved into an attack.” I mean, “It was a planned attack, not a protest” is pretty damned definitive. Now, maybe Clinton was lying to the PM of Egypt. Or maybe after the email was sent, she got new intel that suggested that it did have something to do with the film. But it’s a little harder to explain this email than some of the other spaghetti that’s been thrown up against the wall.
Without that context it’s meaningless. A terrorist group claimed responsibility early on, so this might have been after that, but before they retracted their claim.
Also, the administration called it a terrorist attack the day after. No one hid that. They just thought the film might have been connected somehow, since that’s what early intel said.
(bolding added)
Which is directly contradicted by “We know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film.”
Maybe Clinton disagreed personally with the admin on this, and was expressing “her own” opinion to the Egyptian PM (Hisham Kandil). Or maybe there’s some critical missing context from the email. Or maybe new intel came to light in the interim, between Clinton sending that email and Obama speaking at the Rose Garden. Maybe Clinton didn’t personally write or sign off on the email. All sorts of things are possible. But that’s the kind of thing you have to believe to reconcile what Clinton’s email said and the message that the administration put forth.
Which is why I suggested this might be between the Al-Queda affiliate taking credit, and finding out they had nothing to do with it. Without the context, it’s meaningless.
The fact that the GOP hasn’t posted the context, suggests to me that the context is important. That line from the email is already making the rounds of the RW derposphere.
Yes, both good points.