Summer 2016—Crooked Hillary: Why Benghazi And The Email Scandal Actually Matter
Hillary Clinton must not be allowed to become the
next President of the United States. To have Hillary Clinton as president would
place thousands of innocent lives at risk; it is my sincere and sober belief
that if Mrs. Clinton were to become the next chief executive of our country,
people would die—people who would otherwise live if Americans chose a more
qualified leader of the so-called free world.
That paragraph up above is filled with all sorts of
bold language. Allow me to reassure the reader that I was not under the
influence of stimulants when I composed those lines of text, nor was I fresh
off a binge of conspiracy website visits or a fit of passionate but unthinking
right-wing fury.
The most important role fulfilled (hopefully) by the
President of the United States is protector of the American people. Without
true national security, nothing else about American ways of life even matter.
National security should always be the first priority of the federal government
and, by extension, the chief of the executive branch of that government.
A large portion of the federal government’s concern
with national security involves foreign policy, the strategies chosen by the
state to safeguard our national interests.
Unfortunately, during the last seven and a half
years, President Obama and his foreign policy team—at one time dominated by
Hillary Clinton, Obama’s Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013—have demonstrably
failed in every decent regard to safeguard the national interests of the United
States or the interests of America’s allies.
What has happened to the world since Barack Obama
became president? At the beginning of Obama’s presidency, some experts believed
that al-Qaeda was nearly extinct; now, groups like al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the
Taliban have gained footholds in the Middle East and in regions beyond, killing
even more people in their murderous march towards a future where the entire
globe falls under the sway of radical Islam. The military and diplomatic gains
of the American invasion of Iraq have been lost as legitimate governments in
Iraq, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States have been subjected to
increased violence and instability. Premature troop withdrawals in both Iraq
and Afghanistan have led to the very same unending wars that President Obama
and Hillary Clinton claimed to be so interested in ending.
At the beginning of the Obama presidency, the Middle
East was stabilizing under the banner of an American-led rejection of extremist
Islam. Now, because of President Obama’s unclear priorities in confronting the
Arab Spring—and because of Hillary Clinton’s confusing and meddlesome approach
to the fall of Colonel Gaddafi in Libya—the Middle East is falling prey to
extremist groups from both the Shia and Sunni sects. Worst of all, ISIS is now
seen by many Muslims as a newer, cooler, and hipper version of al-Qaeda, and
thousands of radical Islamic fighters are flocking to its banner; ISIS is
finding it increasingly easy to export its brand of violence to Europe and even
to the shores of the United States.
Why did all of this happen?
The answer to that question is, of course,
incredibly complex. Part of the answer lies with the ideology of liberalism as
espoused by Barack Obama, contemporary liberalism’s particularly un-American
champion.
I have written about Barack Obama’s dangerously
flawed foreign policy in other blog posts. In those posts and elsewhere, I have
chronicled the dangerous failures of Obama’s brand of left-wing ideology, which
teaches that America is bad for the world and that America must end its
destructive War on Terror without even first verifying victory in places like
Afghanistan and Iraq. I think I have made a strong case against Barack Obama
and the policies pursued by his administration, and how those policies have
gutted the US military, morally bankrupted our diplomatic efforts, and created
a much more dangerous and destabilized world order.
What I haven’t done before as part of this blog is
emphasize that Hillary Clinton—albeit for very different reasons—is a natural
inheritor and successor to President Obama’s dismal national security and
foreign policy legacy.
I have heard now for many years that news items like
Benghazi and the Hillary Clinton email controversy are just that: news items
milked by the Republican opposition for the simple, selfish purpose of tearing
down Hillary Clinton, the imminent Democratic candidate for US president.
Today, I would like to explain to you, the reader, why I think both Benghazi
and the email scandal actually matter—and why I think they should be the
central issue of this presidential election cycle.
Barack Obama’s foreign policy—and, by extension, his
stewardship over America’s national security—has been a disaster. As I have
already stated, most of this disaster can be attributed to Barack Obama’s
liberal ideology.
Hillary Clinton is also ideologically motivated by
liberalism, but I actually believe that political orthodoxy is less of a
motivator for her, especially when compared to her life-long drive and ambition
to seize and hold onto political power. Mrs. Clinton’s thirst for power is
truly unquenchable, and her willingness to use morally questionable methods to
achieve electoral success should not be ignored or underestimated. I have told
my friends, associates, and acquaintances that Hillary Clinton is the closest
thing in this country to a chieftain of a political mafia, and the story of
corruption I am about to outline to you now will hopefully convince you that
Mrs. Clinton cares more about her own political career and prestige than she
does about the lives of ordinary Americans, let alone the ideals and principles
that make America great.
On September 11th, 2012, the first
American ambassador killed in the line of duty since 1979 was brutally murdered
by Islamist militants as part of a coordinated attack upon a US diplomatic
compound in Benghazi, Libya. On that horrible evening, Ambassador Chris
Stevens—along with Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean
Smith—was counted among the casualties of a terrorist assault that later
claimed the lives of Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, two CIA contractors who
were killed at a second location in Benghazi a few hours after the diplomatic
compound was hit.
After the Benghazi attacks took place, officials in
the US government reported that the attacks had been the result of a so-called
spontaneous protest sparked by the angry reactions of many Libyans to an
anti-Muslim video then circulating on the internet.
On September 14th, just a few days after
the violent deaths of Americans in territory known to be frequented by
individuals and extremist groups that openly pledge their allegiance to radical
Islam, President Obama’s White House Press Secretary told reporters that “we
don't have and did not have concrete evidence to suggest that this [the
Benghazi attack] was not in reaction to the film…we have no information to
suggest that it was a preplanned attack. The unrest we've seen around the
region has been in reaction to a video that Muslims, many Muslims find
offensive. And while the violence is reprehensible and unjustified, it is not a
reaction to the 9/11 anniversary that we know of, or to U.S. policy.”
Apparently, the Obama White House didn’t seem to
care one bit that on that very same day, the US embassy in Tripoli, Libya specifically
warned the State Department in an email not to promote the idea that an
anti-Muslim YouTube video was the cause of the attack. The embassy took this
step because they not only wished to prevent the spread of rumors that simply
weren’t true, but they feared that calling further attention to the video would
further inflame the already dangerous situation on the ground in Libya. At one point
in the embassy’s email, an anonymous official was quoted as saying that “it is
becoming increasingly clear that the series of events in Benghazi was much more
[sic] terrorist attack than a protest which escalated into violence.”
Two days after the White House spoke out on the
matter, the US ambassador to the United Nations had this to say about the
horrible events in Benghazi:
“Based on the best information we have to date, what
our assessment is as of the present is in fact what began spontaneously in
Benghazi as a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo
where, of course, as you know, there was a violent protest outside of our
embassy—sparked by this hateful video. But soon after that spontaneous protest
began outside of our consulate in Benghazi, we believe that it looks like
extremist elements, individuals, joined in that—in that effort with heavy
weapons of the sort that are, unfortunately, readily now available in Libya
post-revolution. And that it spun from there into something much, much more
violent… we
do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was
premeditated or preplanned… I
think it's clear that there were extremist elements that joined in and
escalated the violence. Whether they were al Qaeda affiliates, whether they
were Libyan-based extremists or al Qaeda itself I think is one of the things
we'll have to determine.”
By September 25th, President Obama
himself appeared to speak at the United Nations. Despite the two weeks that had
passed since the attacks on Benghazi and information that was quickly coming in
to point blame for the attack on radical Islamic terrorism, the president
seemed more determined than ever to concoct an artificial story blaming the
terroristic violence on a YouTube video—“a crude and disgusting video that
sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world.”
In analyzing these statements and others coming from
the Obama administration in the aftermath of the Benghazi attacks, it seems
very clear to me that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and those working under
their direction did everything they could to hide the real reasons for this
attack from the public. The real reasons, it was eventually discovered, had
everything to do with what most commonsensical members of the public had
already figured out in the first few days after the attacks: that radical
Islamic jihadists had been responsible for the massacre in Benghazi, and that
the despicable acts had been premeditated and carefully planned and
coordinated.
Some people in the know saw through the
administration’s lies, and have since spoken out about it. Deputy National
Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said that officials representing the administration
sought to “underscore that [the] protests [in Benghazi were] rooted in an
Internet video, and not in a broader failure of policy.” Pete Hoekstra, former
chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said that the
Benghazi incident was “the culmination of a foreign policy on Islamic terrorism
that was grounded in wishful thinking and self-delusion.”
The Obama White House did everything it could
then—as it does now—to conceal the true nature of the Benghazi attacks: that
Islamist terrorists planned and carried out the attacks on the US consulate and
the CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya; that Islamic radicals in Libya and throughout
the Middle East have been slowly yet steadily gaining ground ever since the
departure of the George W. Bush administration; and that President Obama’s
constant drumbeat in celebration of civilization’s supposed victory over the
dark world of Islamist terrorism is nothing more than empty-headed, politically
expedient rhetoric designed to keep Democrats in power for the duration of
Obama’s two terms in office—and beyond.
It is now well-known that in the days leading up to
the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, State Department officials denied
requests for additional security to be placed at the Benghazi compound.
It has now been proven that the ridiculous notion of
a US consulate and a CIA annex being attacked and destroyed as part of a
spontaneous street protest is absolute nonsense, and that the assaults were
indeed premeditated and linked to Islamic terrorists who specifically targeted
the United States and its personnel and assets on the anniversary of the 9/11
terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, DC.
Ultimately, Hillary Clinton, in her role as
Secretary of State, was responsible for the security lapses that endangered the
diplomatic and CIA personnel in Benghazi. The State Department, under her
stewardship, failed to protect US diplomats in Libya. Even members of Clinton’s
own political party who were charged with investigating the whole sordid affair
admitted that “security measures in Benghazi were woefully inadequate.”
Ultimately, the Obama administration was guilty of
attempting to hide the politically damning truth: that Obama’s rhetoric about
the War on Terror winding down was dangerously incorrect, that denying the
presence of terrorism in the Benghazi affair was part of Obama’s false
narrative that our nation’s foreign policy efforts in places like Afghanistan,
Iraq, and Libya were so successful as to merit the drawdown of the US military
presence in the wider Middle Eastern region.
Hillary Clinton willfully went along with Obama’s
lies; she publicly appeared to blame the Benghazi attack on a YouTube video
while privately blaming terrorism. Further evidence uncovered in the
congressional investigation of the Benghazi attacks has determined that while
many people in Clinton’s State Department went along with Obama’s propaganda,
others were not so happy about the administration’s loose approach to the
truth—a fact that in and of itself indicates that at least some kind of corrupt
and morally questionable course was followed by a significant segment of the
federal government in giving its explanations of the Benghazi affair to the
public.
The Obama administration was revealed for what it
truly was and is still today: a pack of corrupt liars. In the months and years
ahead, as Congress pursued its investigations into what went wrong in Benghazi,
it was determined that the Obama administration willfully subverted the
investigative process with intentional and coordinated stonewalling. All of
this was done to hide the reality of the administration’s separate and distinct
Benghazi narratives: the privately-held admission that the strikes were
premeditated terrorist attacks, and the publicly-proclaimed narrative that the
deaths of Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods, and Glen Doherty were
nothing more than the unfortunate symptoms of a justifiable Muslim street
protest.
After the Benghazi tragedy, the authorities began
investigating the Hillary Clinton State Department in order to determine the
facts of the case. On June 28th, 2016, Congress released a report on
the Benghazi investigation. In this report, it was confirmed that the Obama administration
knew perfectly well in the immediate aftermath of the attack on the American
consulate in Benghazi that it had been planned and directed by Islamist
radicals, and that these same radicals had acted in commemoration of the
original 9/11 attacks.
Journalist John Podhoretz seized upon the
revelations in the Benghazi report, and shared the following thoughts in “Benghazi
lies were just standard procedure under Obama,” an article that incisively
connected Hillary Clinton’s corruption to her political ambitions:
“The Benghazi report released Tuesday makes clear
that one dreadful constant of President Obama’s foreign policy is simply this:
Deflect. Muddy the picture. Question the motivation. Blame the wrong culprit
when naming the right culprit might interfere with your narrative, or if doing
so might oblige you to act when you do not wish to act.
“Sound familiar? Of course it does. After the
attacks in San Bernardino and Orlando by home-grown terrorists, administration
officials made a point of refusing to name the enemy publicly — in this case,
ISIS, which had not yet come into existence at the time of Benghazi.
“On the day following Orlando, the president himself
said we had yet to discern ‘the precise motivations of the killer,’ even though
everyone knew by that point he had called 911 to swear his allegiance to ISIS
while he was killing people.
“Two weeks after the Orlando shooting — two weeks —
Attorney General Loretta Lynch said, ‘I cannot tell you definitively that we
will ever narrow it down to one motivation. We will look at all motivations.’
“With Benghazi, as with Orlando, the reason for
these evasions is to make mystery and ambiguity a part of the narrative in
order to buy the White House and the administration time and space — the time
to control the story and the space to impress upon its supporters the
impracticality and uselessness of responding to these acts of war.
“That’s why the first administration statement on
the Benghazi attacks, made by Hillary Clinton, specifically made reference to
the anti-Islamic video ‘Innocence of Muslims,’ which had just created an
international scandal — but did not make reference to the Islamic terrorists
who perpetrated it. It came only an hour before Hillary emailed Chelsea and
assigned blame to al Qaeda elements.
“Due to the Benghazi committee’s efforts to secure
the facts of the case, the world came to learn about Hillary Clinton’s
mishandling of public email — an irresponsible and reckless act that more than
anything else jeopardizes her presidential ambitions.
“But when it comes to radical Islam and the Obama
administration, the truth is always the first casualty. Hillary is hoping her
presidential bid isn’t its last.”
Ironically, the fallout over the Benghazi scandal
led directly to the latest of Hillary Clinton’s many public scandals: the
matter of the private emails servers.
In March, 2015, the American public was made privy
to the disturbing but predictable discovery that Hillary Clinton had
exclusively used her family’s private email server for official communications
during her tenure as US Secretary of State. By using these private, unsecured
servers instead of official State Department email accounts, Hillary Clinton
put the national security of the country at risk by allowing thousands of
classified, secret, and sensitive official emails to potentially fall into the
hands of America’s enemies.
As part of the Benghazi investigation, it was
learned that Hillary Clinton deleted numerous emails on her private server
which made it “impossible to ever represent to those killed in Benghazi that
the record is whole.”
When the discovery concerning Clinton’s private
server was made, the authorities initiated all sorts of investigations to
determine the extent of the damage done and the potential of criminal
negligence on the part of Clinton and her aides. The investigations were
stalled by none other than Clinton herself, who, for months, refused to turn in
the email server she used in her suburban New York City home.
The tale of Hillary’s email scandal begs this
prescient question: if any other common citizen of the United States had been
proven to have mishandled sensitive and classified government documents or to
have obstructed justice and the investigations of any of America’s law
enforcement agencies, would that citizen realistically survive the public
outcry and legal consequences to become a serious contender for the position of
President of the United States?
Ultimately, the FBI discovered that at least 110 of
the emails sent and received by Hillary Clinton on her private server contained
classified information. Of those, a “very small number” were actually marked as
“classified.” At the very least, this proves that Hillary Clinton was either
dishonest or grossly negligent (or both) when she repeatedly asserted that none
of the emails were marked as classified when she sent or received them.
The FBI also discovered that she had used an
unsecured mobile device in territories controlled by “sophisticated
adversaries” of the United States, and that it was very possible that Clinton’s
poor handling of email information violated the nation’s security. Worst of
all, the FBI concluded that Hillary Clinton, during her time as Secretary of
State, used multiple private servers for her personal and government business,
not just a single server at her home in New York. This made it very, very
difficult for the FBI—or anybody else, for that matter—to truly and accurately
determine the amount of classified information that was put at risk by Hillary
Clinton’s actions; according to the Director of the FBI, Jay Comey, Clinton
“should have known that an unclassified system was no place” to handle such
emails.
In the matter of the email servers, it is my
personal opinion that Hillary Clinton should be held accountable and punished
for her own actions and the actions of her aides and advisors. Jonah Goldberg,
writing in an article published on May 27th, 2016 under the title, “All of
Hillary Clinton’s Lies Are Premeditated,” had this to say about Hillary
Clinton’s character:
“By setting up a secret e-mail server in her home in
Chappaqua, N.Y., without proper authorization from any legal or security official,
Clinton displayed a cavalier disregard for national security and an outrageous
desire to hide her doings from Freedom of Information Act requests, government
archivists, Congress, the press, and, ultimately, the American people.
“Neither of the [presidential] candidates is worthy
of the office in my eyes, but voters might discount many of [Donald] Trump’s
deceits as symptoms of his glandular personality. Much like Vice President Joe
Biden, who always gets a pass for launching errant fake-fact missiles from the
offline silo that is his mouth, Trump is often seen as entertainingly
spontaneous. Meanwhile, Clinton — who
lives many time zones away from the word ‘entertaining’ — is marketing herself
as the mature and upstanding grown-up. She does nothing spontaneously. And that
means all of her lies are premeditated.”
I would never classify myself as a Donald Trump
supporter, and quite frankly, I didn’t even want to mention his name in this
blog post, but the quote from Mr. Goldberg forced my hand.
This blog post isn’t about Donald Trump, and neither
is this election. As I’ve been consistently arguing for the past year or so,
the 2016 presidential election is about Barack Hussein Obama, and the dangerous
legacy that he could potentially be leaving us with in the form of a White
House controlled and dictated by Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Mrs. Clinton must not be allowed to win this
upcoming November.
When it comes to choosing any president, I believe
the American people should judge the candidates’ national security and foreign
policy credentials before anything else is considered. And when those very
credentials are considered for Mrs. Clinton, any thinking and reasoning
American should be able to figure out that a Clinton White House would do
absolutely nothing to effectively protect the United States or to keep its
citizens safe from attack.
There are millions and millions of people in this
country—many of whom have never been interested in politics before—who are
terrified and angry over what Barack Obama and the Democrats have done to this
country. These people don’t necessarily understand politics very much, but they
aren’t stupid; they know that something has gone tremendously wrong with this
country. These people recognize that Barack Obama’s America has turned out to
be nothing more than a tragic mess. These people recognize that the dream of a
peaceful and prosperous world community established and led by the United
States of America is being abandoned and demolished.
These people recognize that a Clinton presidency
would just be more of the same kind of irresponsible leadership we’ve come to
expect from President Obama. While Obama’s ideological motivations differ only
slightly in type and degree from Hillary Clinton’s personally corrupt and morally
repugnant personal motivations, the results for the United States would be the
same: weakness in our nation’s security and weakness in our nation’s foreign policy.
Weakness invites attack from the enemy, and because of President Barack Obama’s
eight years in office, America’s enemies have been growing in number and power.
They are waiting in the wings, so to speak…and they thrive on America’s current
famine of leadership.
I opened this blog by stating my sobering opinion
that if Hillary Clinton becomes president, innocent people will die. I stand by
this belief, and I urge it upon others for their serious consideration. Hillary
Clinton cares more about holding onto power and prestige than anything else;
this has been displayed quite thoroughly in her conduct under public scrutiny.
Any politician that cares so much about their own power that they are willing
to lie to the American public on behalf of their superiors; to hinder, delay,
and interfere with law enforcement authorities and their investigations into
corruption; to maneuver themselves both rhetorically and legally so as to
operate above the law without fear of repercussions or accountability; to
mishandle sensitive government secrets and to open up those secrets to
compromise by hostile powers; and to treat the lives and safety of government
employees with carelessness and an attitude of expendability that approaches
that of the despots of olden times—any politician that acts in the way Hillary
Clinton has acted does not deserve to be President of the United States.
If Hillary Clinton becomes president, America’s
enemies will be licking their chops, anticipating the victories they will
surely enjoy as they wage their campaign of terror and death on a bloated,
bureaucratized, and politically correct ex-superpower that is led by a
president who cares more for her own selfish interests than she does the lives
and property of ordinary citizens.
For the sake of innocent life, America’s national
security, and the rule of law as one of the Founding pillars of the nation, I
desperately urge my fellow American voters to keep Mrs. Clinton out of the
White House now in 2016 and forevermore in any future elections to come.
America simply cannot afford another eight years of
Barack Obama’s inept national security policies and intentionally defeatist
foreign policies. If Hillary gets into the White House, you can expect more of
the same…
…only this time around, the number of monthly
scandals will triple. Between Hillary and Bill, the historical record tells us
we can expect nothing less.
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