So much for the re.....oh, never mind:
Emails that a longtime confidant to Hillary Rodham Clinton recently handed over to the House committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, raise new questions about whether the State Department and Mrs. Clinton have complied with a series of requests from the panel.
The emails, provided by Sidney Blumenthal, a close adviser to Mrs. Clinton, include information about weapons that were circulating in Libya and about the security situation in Benghazi in the year and a half before the attacks. The committee has asked the State Department and Mrs. Clinton several times in the past year for emails from her and other department officials about “weapons located or found in” Libya and about the decision to open and maintain a diplomatic mission in Benghazi.
Looks like Blumenthal screwed up. Or maybe Her Nib hadn't briefed him on what to release and what to stonewall. Or maybe her IT people never got around to teaching him how to press the "delete" button.
Seriously, this is a shockingly out-of-character breach in the normally air-tight Clinton coverup apparatus. La Clinton Nostra is like Alvin Kurtzweil's description of the Syndicate in X-Files: Fight The Future after one of its assassins "almost" shot Fox Mulder through the head: "These people don't make mistakes". To see one of the Clintons' top lieutenants effluviate what Trey Gowdy's Benghazi Committee needs to confirm even a portion of what Mrs. Clinton has been trying to conceal is little short of astonishing. It's like if H.R. Haldeman had voluntarily coughed up five of the missing minutes on the June 21st, 1973 Nixon Oval Office recording.
But even in this internal security blunder, you can still see the trademark Clintonoid multiple degrees of separation:
The early lead on the Sherlock Holmes reveal is State. The select committee has demanded documents from State about Libya in general, including the issue of arms sales and U.S. involvement in them. Under John Kerry, the State Department has refused to comply on the basis of being too broad a demand, and has instead narrowly complied by releasing documents only related to the attack on the consulate in Benghazi in September 2012.
However, that is a problem in two ways. First, the scope of the select committee includes U.S. policy in Libya and the entire arc of the failures that led to our lack of security and response in the attack, and not just the attack itself. Second, Congress has a legitimate oversight function on all of State’s activities, and it has assigned those oversight responsibilities to the select committee in regard to their performance on Libya. They have a requirement to comply with this demand.
A legal requirement, as opposed to the power to enforce it. Big difference, Ed, as evidence by the fact that Foggy Bottom still refuses to comply.
But look at the bigger purpose: State is serving as a shield between the House Select Committee and Hillary. Oh, I'm sure that no matter how deep anybody probed, they wouldn't find any "smoking gun" communique from Mrs. Clinton to John Kerry "requesting" that he stonewall Trey Gowdy on her behalf. Remember, once again, that she was a junior lawyer on the staff of the House Nixon impeachment inquiry and learned from all of Tricky Dick's mistakes. The first rule of all coverups is never leave your own fingerprints on the "corpse".
Which is what makes Blumenthal's blurt so jaw-dropping:
It is not clear whether the State Department possesses the emails between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Blumenthal and did not hand them over. It is also possible that Mrs. Clinton never provided them to the department and deleted them off the server that housed the personal account she used exclusively when she was secretary of state.
Mr. Gerlach said that the committee had not told the department which emails Mr. Blumenthal handed over and that it would take some time for officials to determine whether the department had the emails. [emphases added]
In other words, Hillary probably set up the State Department to be her shield on two of her biggest scandals without John Kerry or anybody else at Foggy Bottom even being aware of or realizing it.
And then Sid Blumenthal of all creatures, the ultimate Clinton minion, suddenly goes Forrest Gump and says, "Here ya go, Trey". Now I really have seen everything.
Not that this will measurably raise the infinitesimal chances of Mrs. Clinton being brought to justice on Benghazigate or anything else. This isn't "flame," but simply an even bigger waft of "smoke".
But it reestablishes that the constant drip, drip, drip of all these anti-Hillary stories - Benghazi, the emails, the Clinton Foundation, her nine-figure fortune overhanging her pathetic "I'm fighting for the little guy" bloviations that were trite when her heroine Eleanor Roosevelt was living in the White House - is going to inexorably cripple her presidential ambitions like an endless procession of rats gnawing off her feet.
It's the ultimate reality show.
Can't wait for the next episode.
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