Judicial Watch: Benghazi Emails Confirm Clinton Email Cover-Up
Article by Tyler O'Neil in "PJMedia":
On Monday, Judicial Watch
released new emails involving former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
and the Benghazi controversy that had been covered up for years and that
would have exposed Clinton's private email account if they had been
released to Judicial Watch in a FOIA request win 2014. One long withheld
email, which provides talking points for a call with senators and
therefore fits the criteria of records concerning "talking points or
updates on the Benghazi attack," should have been disclosed in 2014, but
it was hidden from Judicial Watch for years.
"This
email is a twofer – it shows Hillary Clinton misled the U.S. Senate on
Benghazi and that the State Department wanted to hide the Benghazi
connection to the Clinton email scheme," Judicial Watch President Tom
Fitton said in a statement.
"Rather than defending her email misconduct, the Justice Department has
more than enough evidence to reopen its investigations into Hillary
Clinton."
Following the terrorist attack in Benghazi in 2012, Hillary Clinton and other Obama Administration aides repeatedly blamed an amateur video,
refusing to call the attack an act of terrorism. While Clinton made
public statements linking the attack to the video, she emailed her
daughter Chelsea blaming an "al Qaeda-like group" for the attack. In a
call with Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Qandil, Clinton said, "We know
the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned
attack — not a protest."
The
amateur video did trigger protests in Egypt and elsewhere, but the
timeline of Clinton's statements suggests that she and other Obama
officials crafted a narrative blaming the video for the attack in order
to downplay the threat of terrorism and bolster Obama's re-election
chances in November 2012.
The email Judicial Watch released Monday confirmed that Clinton was briefed on deceptive talking points for a meeting with senators that likely involved her blaming the attack on the video. Far more explosive, however, is the claim that Clinton's email scandal would have been revealed far earlier had the State Department not engaged in a cover-up.
Judicial
Watch filed a FOIA request for documents related to Benghazi talking
points in May 2014. The organization later filed a lawsuit demanding the
publication of documents withheld.
According to Judicial Watch, "The Clinton email finally released this month was first identified
by the State Department in September, 2014 but was withheld from
Judicial Watch despite it specifically referencing talking points. After
it was specifically described in an Office of the Inspector General report,
the court ordered its production. It was only after Judicial Watch
informed the State Department it was prepared to file a motion with the
court to compel production of the records that the Department relented
and produced the 2012 email in question."
It
appears Clinton set up her infamous home-brew server partly to avoid
the transparency mandated by law. U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth
ordered the State Department to produce the email on August 22, 2019. Last year,
Lamberth denounced Clinton's private email server as "one of the
gravest modern offenses to government transparency." He further pondered
whether "the State Department's attempt to settle this FOIA case in
2014" may have been "an effort to avoid searching — and disclosing the
existence of — Clinton's missing emails."
A Clinton spokesman confirmed the existence of the home-brew server in March 2015, and Judicial Watch claims its FOIA lawsuit led directly
to this disclosure. Had the State Department turned over this newly
uncovered email in 2014, the email scandal would have broken months
earlier. This might have enabled a true competition in the 2016
Democratic primary — rather than the effective coronation of Hillary
Clinton. Clinton's unpopularity — always high — hit a fever pitch in
November 2016, bolstering the election of Donald Trump.
Ironically, it is plausible that Trump is president right now thanks in part to this cover-up.
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