| | | Hillary Clinton's Damning Emails Could End Her Candidacy 738 Comments
05/22/2015 06:51 PM ET
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 The State Department released 296 emails from Hillary Clinton’s private account on Friday. AP View Enlarged Image
Leadership: Now that 350 pages of Hillary Clinton's carefully selected emails have been gifted to the New York Times, Americans can see just how badly the former secretary of state botched the job in Libya and elsewhere.
Clinton went to extraordinary lengths to keep her supposedly public emails — she was a public employee, after all — private.
She kept them on an account outside the Department of State's system, on her own server in her own home. And she had more than one account. All of these acts are breaches of State Department rules.
Worse still, when the emails suddenly became an issue and Congress asked to see them, she conveniently erased a hard drive. You know, an accident.
Then, in a Nixon-like move, she agreed to hand over 30,000 emails to the State Department. But she printed them, forcing the State Department to spend five weeks redigitizing them, the Washington Post reported.
This email dump only scratches the surface: State handed over just 850 pages of the emails to the House Select Committee on Benghazi, and someone there leaked about 350 pages to the Times.
Even so, the emails are damning, both of Clinton's conduct as a public official and her character. To wit:
• As Libyan rebels tightened their grip on the capital and dictator Moammar Gadhafi, State Department Director of Policy Planning Jake Sullivan emailed Clinton that she now had "leadership/ownership/stewardship of this country's Libya policy from start to finish."
The email was meant to be a triumphal pat on the back for Clinton's adroit handling of Libya's rebellion, one of the great debacles in U.S. diplomatic history.
Despite her "ownership," Clinton later blamed the Sept. 11, 2012, Benghazi tragedy — in which terrorists murdered Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others in our own diplomatic compound — on an obscure movie, "The Innocence of Muslims."
• The Clinton emails also show that she compromised State Department security by keeping "sensitive but unclassified" emails on her private server. "This includes the whereabouts of State Department officials in Libya when security there was deteriorating during the 2011 revolution," the Times reported.
• A year and a half before his untimely and unnecessary death, then-special envoy Stevens became so concerned with security in the country that he thought about leaving, Hillary's emails also show.
And the emails indicate that old Clinton hand Sidney Blumenthal emailed Clinton regularly about Libya, a country in which he had business interests. One email stands out. Just two days after Benghazi, Blumenthal emailed Clinton, saying that the attacks "had been planned for approximately one month" and had been perpetrated by "well-trained, hardened killers" who belonged to the Libyan terrorist gang Ansar al-Sharia.
Blumenthal completely contradicts the phony story,which Clinton and others concocted, of a spontaneous uprising resulting from the video that we mentioned earlier.
As we said, this information is damning of Clinton's "ownership" of U.S. Libya policy. It may even scuttle her run for president. What else will emerge in the thousands of other pages of emails yet to be inspected? |
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