Citing “lessons learned from online engagement with ‘Bernie Bros,’” a pro-Hillary Clinton Super PAC is pledging to spend $1 million to “push back against” users on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Instagram.

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Moussa Koussa.

That is the name of the “classified source” in an old email from Hillary Clinton released last week by Republicans purportedly investigating the 2012 attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Under the instructions of the Benghazi committee’s chairman, Republican Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, Koussa’s name was blacked-out on the publicly issued email, as Republicans proclaimed revealing his identity would compromise national security. The media ran with it, saying Clinton had sent classified information through her personal email account.

But the CIA never said the name was secret. Nor did the Defense Intelligence Agency or the FBI. No, Koussa’s role as an intelligence source is about as classified as this column. He is the former intelligence chief and foreign minister of Libya. In 2011, he fled that country for Great Britain, where he provided boodles of information to MI6 and the CIA. Documents released long ago show Koussa’s cooperation. Government officials have openly discussed it. His name appears in newspapers with casual discussions about his assistance. Sanctions by the British and the Americans against Koussa were lifted because of his help, and he moved to Qatar. All of that is publicly known.

[font size="3"]But, as they have time and again, the Republicans on the Benghazi committee released deceitful information for what was undoubtedly part of a campaign—as Kevin McCarthy of the House Republican leadership has admitted—to drive down Clinton’s poll numbers.[/font] Republicans have implied—and some journalists have flatly stated—that Clinton was reckless and may have broken the law by sending an email that included thirdhand hearsay mentioning Koussa’s name. The reality is that the Republicans continue to be reckless with the truth.

[font size="3"]The historical significance of this moment can hardly be overstated, and it seems many Republicans, Democrats and members of the media don’t fully understand the magnitude of what is taking place. The awesome power of government—one that allows officials to pore through almost anything they demand and compel anyone to talk or suffer the shame of taking the Fifth Amendment—has been unleashed for purely political purposes.[/font] It is impossible to review what the Benghazi committee has done as anything other than taxpayer-funded political research of the opposing party’s leading candidate for president. Comparisons from America’s past are rare. Richard Nixon’s attempts to use the IRS to investigate his perceived enemies come to mind. So does Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting during the 1950s, with reckless accusations of treason leveled at members of the State Department, military generals and even the secretary of the Army. [font size="3"]But the modern McCarthys of the Benghazi committee cannot perform this political theater on their own—they depend on reporters to aid in the attempts to use government for the purpose of destroying others with bogus “scoops” ladled out by members of Congress and their staffs. These journalists will almost certainly join the legions of shamed reporters of the McCarthy era as it becomes increasingly clear they are enablers of an obscene attempt to undermine the electoral process.[/font]

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In fact, no previous assault on a diplomatic outpost has received this kind of relentless expression of congressional outrage. There weren’t investigations that were anything on this scale about the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983 (63 killed), on the U.S. Embassy annex northeast of Beirut in 1984 (24 killed) or on the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa, Yemen, in 2008 (18 killed). Republicans didn’t believe these exact same scenarios that took place under Republican presidents merited similar zeal to dig down to some unexposed, imaginary “truth.”

In fact, Benghazi was just one of 21 major assaults on an American diplomatic facility in the last 20 years; the personnel murdered there were among about 90 other Americans hired by the government to work in diplomatic outposts who were killed in terrorist attacks from 1998 through 2012, according to a State Department report. Apparently, their killings—like the deaths of thousands of Americans at Pearl Harbor and in the World Trade Center—were seen as less important than murder of four people in a North African country in the midst of a government overthrow.

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Closed Sessions & Selective Leaks of Information

[font size="+1}However, while Gowdy has intoned that certain information was going to be treated “as if it was classified,” he is making that designation himself, with no authority to do so since classification is handled by the executive branch, not Congress. Staff members of the committee who do not have security clearance attended testimony that involved such supposedly top-secret information. The government did not authorize even the transcriber of the testimony to hear classified information.[/font]

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The other reason to keep the testimony secret has rapidly become clear: so that they can selectively—and often incorrectly—portray to reporters what was said in the statements. For example, prior to the committee’s interview with Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff asked to testify in public out of concern that the Republicans would leak and misrepresent details of what she said. Her request was denied, and the committee made one of its proclamations about treating the unclassified information as classified.

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Other false stories repeatedly found their way into the press. There was the “criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton” article that appeared in The New York Times; once the story was knocked down, the Times sheepishly acknowledged its sources included officials from Congress. (The “Clinton is under criminal investigation” story has continued; she’s not.) The Daily Beast falsely reported that Blumenthal testified he was in Libya on the day of the Benghazi attack.
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[font size="3"]Articles in other publications even falsely portrayed documents obtained by the committee.[/font] For example, on June 18, Politico ran an article stating that, based on information obtained from “a source who has reviewed the email exchange” that Clinton and Blumenthal were sending emails back and forth to utilize Media Matters and the White House to neutralize criticism of her about Benghazi. But the representation to Politico was a lie: The quoted emails had nothing to do with each other, but were literally different discussions about different topics conducted days apart. The article also stated that the “sources” claimed that a particular Clinton email had never been produced by the State Department, in one of many suggestions of a cover-up. In truth, the email had been turned over by the department four months earlier. It is marked with identification numbers STATE-SCB0045548-SCB00450.

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The Truth About Clinton’s Emails

Since March, the Benghazi committee has delved into another topic with almost zero relevance to the attack: Clinton’s use of a private email system. Emails that have been produced have done nothing to refute the conclusions by all of the other government investigations of the attack. Indeed, if the Benghazi committee truly believes that the private email issue is of such importance, it needs to pass the issue to another congressional committee for investigation so that the inquiry into the terrorist attack can resume.

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For example, the committee’s interim report from May included the false—and clearly political statement—describing Clinton’s use of a personal account as “the former secretary of state’s unusual email arrangement with herself.” No, this was an arrangement made with the State Department allowed under the rules listed in the Federal Register, which is why Colin Powell had the exact same set-up when he was secretary of state under former President George W. Bush. While that doesn’t mean the approach is wise, it’s hardly unusual given that a Republican who held Clinton’s job did it too.

[font size="3"]Senior White House staffers and presidential advisers did the same thing during the Bush Administration; at least 88 officials—including the White House Chief of Staff and Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser—used personal emails to conduct official business over a private internet domain called gwb43.com, which was maintained on a server at the Republican National Committee. More than 22 million of those emails were deleted.{NOTE: the 22 milllion emails were 'found' ... only after the Executive Office of the Presidency was sued by two private groups to release the emails_Bill_USA}[/font]

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By comparison, Clinton’s use of her personal email was more limited than Powell’s. In his book It Worked For Me, he wrote that he used a personal email account set up on a laptop to exchange information not only with his principal assistants and ambassadors but also with foreign ministers overseas. Like Clinton, he used a second email account for classified information. Powell has also said he did not preserve any of the emails from his personal account from the time, either by printing them or saving them on a storage device. None of this is to suggest that Powell did anything wrong. It does, however, raise a question Republicans have yet to answer: Why is Clinton’s use of private emails a controversy, much less a scandal, if Powell’s was proper?

Critics also rage that Clinton’s emails on the nonclassified personal system were not secure. Yet no one ever points out that hackers have proved that the State Department’s nonclassified system, which she otherwise could have been using, is one of the more insecure systems in government. In 2006, unknown foreign intruders hacked into the State Department system and downloaded terabytes of information, including emails and attached documents. This year, Russian hackers gained access to the State Department’s unclassified email system despite repeated efforts by American government experts to lock them out. The hackers used the State Department system as a “backdoor” to crack into the White House’s unclassified system, which allowed them to obtain documents like Obama’s nonpublic schedule. So if Clinton had used the State Department’s unclassified system for the emails she sent from her personal account, they almost certainly would now be in the hands of Russian hackers.

But government records show that no hacker has been found to have gained access to Clinton’s private server, something that is far easier to determine given the limited number of accounts it holds and the comparative ease of running security analytics through such a small system. Nor was there any other form of unauthorized intrusion into the email, and no one else had access to the account itself. In fact, after Clinton left government, multiple hackers tried to break into the system but failed. The server was located at Clinton’s home, which is guarded by the Secret Service. Numerous security consultants, IT specialists and government experts put systems in place to prevent breaches; those systems were continuously updated to account for new spyware, malware, viruses and related hacking techniques.

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Finally, despite the relentless yet failed effort to locate information sent through Clinton’s email system that was deemed classified at the time, one major point has been overlooked: The secretary of state had the power to declassify any department document she chose. Every modern president has issued rules regarding the authority to classify and declassify documents. During the Bush administration, for example, Vice President Dick Cheney held that authority, so he often decided on his own to declassify documents that his office then provided to members of Congress and the press.

The finalized public version of the rules under Obama was issued on December 29, 2009, through a document called “Executive Order 13526-Classified National Security Information.” Through that order, a senior official with the authority to deem a document in an agency or department as classified also had the power to declassify it. So the question is moot. Clinton could take a classified State Department document, declare it unclassified and send it to whomever she chose. Of course, that would not apply to classified information she received from, say, the CIA—but remember, if an intelligence organization deemed the material to be secret, it would have been sent to Clinton through the closed system at the State Department and not to her personal email.

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Then comes the controversy about Clinton erasing emails. The words sound terrible, but the reality is not.

[font size="3"]The State Department delivered the first request for emails on October 28, 2014, to several previous secretaries, including Clinton; this was done as part of an effort by the agency to update its record keeping to stay in compliance with federal requirements. Powell, as he publicly stated, had none to provide because they had all been deleted. Clinton instructed her lawyers at Williams & Connolly to review all of the emails on her behalf to determine which were work-related and which were not.[/font]

[font size="3"]Multiple methods were used. First, a computerized search was conducted of every email sent to an account ending with “.gov,” which would include all the documents sent to every official government email. That found 27,500 emails, all of which were already preserved in federal systems. Then another search was conducted using the first and last names of more than 100 officials with the State Department and others in the government. Next, manual reviews were performed in case there were unrecognized email addresses or typographical errors that would have prevented those documents from being located. In addition, the lawyers searched for a number of other specific terms, including the words Benghazi and Libya. These last three steps located more than 2,900 other emails. Printouts of the 30,490 emails were then provided to the State Department. Some critics have suggested there was something untoward about the fact Clinton sent paper records. But that is the procedure that is required by the State Department in a document called the Foreign Affairs Manual.

Once all of the reviews were completed, Clinton deleted all of the remaining emails deemed to be unrelated to her work. While at first that struck me as foolish, it is now clear it was necessary. The committee, which has leaked misleading information and publicly accused Clinton of wrongdoing, was demanding access to the server so it could decide, [font color="red"]contrary to the requirements of law[/font], which documents should be produced. It’s safe to assume that every personal, private detail of Clinton’s life that might have been captured in her emails would immediately appear as “scoops” in the morning newspaper or discussed by committee members on national television.[/font]

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HARTFORD, Conn. — Hillary Clinton accused gunmakers and the gun lobby on Thursday of using their money and power to coerce members of Congress to do their bidding, as she promised to work for new gun-control measures if elected president.

"We need a national movement," Clinton said at a community meeting in a YMCA here, drawing applause. "The gun lobby is the most powerful lobby in Washington," more so than Wall Street, big Pharma and more, she said, adding, "They have figured out how to really intimidate elected officials at all levels, who basically stop thinking about this problem because they are too scared of the NRA," the National Rifle Association.

Clinton cited the massacre of Connecticut schoolchildren four years ago as only one example of a gun culture gone too far. She tied some gun violence to difficulty getting mental health treatment for some who need it, and said gun-control activists are too often targeted for online harassment.

"There has been a concerted effort to undermine the real-life experiences of people who speak out," Clinton said. "Blame the victim, blame the victim's mother , blame the victim's family, blame the victim's neighborhood," she said. "Find somebody to blame instead of saying — you know what, we've just got too many guns in this country."

She repeatedly promised to try to build on the Brady bill, which was passed during her husband's administration, and said the gun lobby has effectively blocked most gun-control efforts since then. She said common-sense gun control can be achieved without infringing on the Second Amendment and with the support of gun owners.

I belong to a number of pro-Bernie Sanders groups on social media, and the sheer volume of anti-Hillary posts by individuals from conspiracy or conservative websites is staggering. These people link Breitbart, Infowars, March Against Monsanto, The Daily Caller and other websites to make their claim that Hillary Clinton is the worst person ever – or that President Obama was a gay prostitute in his younger days.

As I have repeatedly stated before, I am a Bernie Sanders supporter, despite our minor differences on science and genetic technology. I switched from No Party Affiliation to Democrat for the first time in years, simply so that I could vote for Bernie.
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TPM's Josh Marshall: Experts Agree Clinton Indictment "Chatter Is Just Plain Ridiculous." As reported by Talking Points Memo editor, Josh Marshall, law professors and former federal prosecutors have told him "to a person" that the chances of an indictment are a "far-fetched" idea and that "on the possibility of an indictment, most of this chatter is just plain ridiculous -- a mix of ignorance and tendentiousness":

[div style="border:1px solid #000000;" class="excerpt"] As a legal matter, the chances of Hillary Clinton facing any kind of indictment are very, very low.

Start with the fact that as far as we know, she is not actually even being investigated for anything, let alone facing a looming indictment. The simple facts, as we know them, just don't put her in line for an indictment. The first reason is the facts, which rest heavily on intent and reckless negligence. The second is tradition and DOJ regulations which make professional prosecutors very leery of issuing indictments that might be perceived or in fact influence an election. This was my thinking. But as the press coverage has become increasingly heated, I started trying to figure out if there was something I was missing - some fact I didn't know, some blindspot in my perception. So I've spoken to a number of law profs and former federal prosecutors - based on the facts we know now even from the most aggressive reporting. Not like, is this theoretically possible? Not, what the penalties would be if it happened. But is an indictment at all likely or is this whole idea very far-fetched. To a person, very far-fetched.

So why the press coverage? I think it's a combination of reasons. The most irreducible and perhaps most significant is simply prestige reporter derp and general ignorance of the legal system. Second is journalists' perennial inability to resist a process story. And third, let's be honest, wingnut page views. (TPM, 2/1/15)

(NOTE: IC IG: INtelligence Community Inspector General Bill_USA}

IC IG made a referral detailing the potential compromise of classified information to security officials within the Executive Branch. The main purpose of the referral was to notify security officials that classified information may exist on at least one private server and thumb drive that are not in the government's possession. An important distinction is that the IC IG did not make a criminal referral - it was a security referral made for counterintelligence purposes.

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Appearing Sunday morning on CBS News’ Face the Nation, a smiling Hillary Clinton trolled the Republican presidential front-runner who boasts so incessantly and tiresomely about his poll numbers and primary victories. “I’ve gotten more votes than anybody running on either side,” said the New York Democrat. “I’ve gotten more votes than Donald Trump, although I’m sure he doesn’t want to hear it,” she added with a laugh. “And we’ve gotten them from a wide, broad base.”

Is she right? My back-of-the-envelope calculations show that Clinton has received more than 4.1 million votes in primaries and caucuses, while Trump has received just under 3.6 million. So far she is ahead of the authoritarian vulgarian by about half a million votes. Not huuge, but not bad.
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New York primary voting at some Brooklyn and Queens polling places was a disaster Tuesday morning — with early morning voters arriving to broken machines and belated polling.

Queens resident George Mack said he came to P.S. 52 in Springfield Gardens to vote right at 6 a.m. He, and about 50 other early voters, learned all three machines on site were broken. Volunteers at the school told voters to place their ballots in a slot, and they would all get processed later.

“It’s a recipe for disaster,” said Mack, 55, who voted for Hillary Clinton.

“Somebody at the end of the day is gonna feed (the ballots) through a machine? I don’t have confidence in that.”
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Most attacks on Sanders so far are relatively mild

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When Sanders supporters discuss these attacks, though, they do so in tones of barely contained outrage, as though it is simply disgusting what they have to put up with. Questioning the practical achievability of single-payer health care. Impugning the broad electoral appeal of socialism. Is nothing sacred?

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But c'mon. This stuff is patty-cakes compared with the brutalization he would face at the hands of the right in a general election.

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In a sense, this seems so obvious to me that it feels peculiar to argue for it. But Sanders supporters do not give the impression that they are cognizant of Sander's vulnerabilities.

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Partly this is because the GOP has been very careful so far not to go after Sanders. They show every indication of preferring him as an opponent, so they have no reason to hurt his chances in the primary.

But if he wins, they will rain down fire.

And the organs of the right will feel absolutely no obligation to be fair. They're not going to be saying, like Sanders's Democratic critics, "Aw, Bernie, you dreamer."

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They're going to ask when he stopped being a communist, and when he objects that he was never a communist they're going to ask why he's so defensive about his communist past, why he's so eager to avoid the questions that have been raised, the questions that people are talking about.



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McCarthy tactics then and now

From 1953 to 1955, McCarthy held 117 hearings and even more closed-door interrogations, witch hunts for subversives that thrived on guilt by association: someone had worked for a union, dates a communist, been in a book club that read a book by Marx. Author Johnson writes that reviewing the transcripts of those sessions made it clear that McCarthy, in addition to guilt by association and character assassination, was engaged in an “obsessive hunt for homosexuals,” hounded writers, artists, and composers, attacked the reputations of military leaders.

Today’s McCarthyism has many faces and voices, including the household names of right-wing cable television, a plethora of radio hosts, Religious Right leaders, right-wing organizations and the bogus “grassroots” campaigns they generate – and Members of Congress and other Republican Party officials. Together they engage in character assassination and challenge the loyalty and patriotism of their targets.


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Communism, Socialism, “Obamunism”

McCarthy frightened many Americans with charges that the government was infested with communist sympathizers. His current-day acolytes have made charges long considered beyond the pale of political discourse – comparisons of President Obama and other administration officials with tyrannical figures like Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Chairman Mao – so frequently that they are losing their shock value. Former and likely future presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is among many who have called Obama a socialist, and said of the Obama budget, “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff.”

The same is true of charges that the Obama administration and congressional democratic leaders are communists, socialists, and/or fascists bent on destroying capitalism and the market economy and imposing a socialist dictatorship in America. Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia has compared Obama to Hitler, called Obama and Democratic congressional leaders a “socialistic elite” and warned that they’re planning to create a pretext to declaring martial law. Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL) warned of 17 socialists in Congress. Rep. Michele Bachmann has called the health care reform bill “the crown jewel of socialism.” The Traditional Values Coalition has warned that “Obamunism must be stopped.”

Van Jones, founder of Color of Change and a leading advocate of using “green” technologies to bring jobs to de-industrialized American cities, resigned from his position as a White House advisor after a fierce campaign against him by right-wing pundits who denounced him as a communist.Jones’ resignation was like blood in the water to Glenn Beck and others who have launched a series of smear campaigns against Obama administration officials and nominees.
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But Republicans are doing much more than just sending out debate-night emails that happen to be friendly to Sanders’ cause. American Crossroads, the GOP dark money group founded by Karl Rove, is running ads in Iowa depicting Clinton as a tool of Wall Street.



[blockquote style="padding:10px;background:#eedddd;"]Narrator: “Ever wonder how Hillary Clinton can afford so many ads? Chances are, they were paid for with Wall Street cash. Hillary Clinton’s gotten 54 times more money from Wall Street interests than from all of Iowa. Hillary rewarded Wall Street with the $700 billion bailout—then Wall Street made her a multi-millionaire.”

Clinton: “I represented Wall Street.”

Narrator: “Heh. You sure did, Hillary. Does Iowa really want Wall Street in the White House?”


Karl Rove didn’t suddenly become a rabid critic of Wall Street’s influence, just like the RNC didn’t just turn into overnight Bernie fans. The truth of the matter is a lot simpler: They’d prefer to see Sanders win the Democratic nomination because they think he’d be easier to beat in November.

If you don’t like the implications of that conclusion, there are a couple of ways you might respond. You could point to general election polls showing Sanders with bigger leads on potential GOP opponents than Clinton, but there are flaws with that approach. As Markos Moulitsas put it, “[Y]ou can’t compare a candidate who has been through the media wringer for decades and has universal name ID” like Clinton, to someone like Sanders who is only now reaching the national stage and about whom almost a fifth of voters still have no opinion. Put another way: [font size="3"]If Sanders were to experience the same white-hot glare of hostile GOP attention that Clinton has for her entire public life, that polling gap would disappear, or perhaps even shift in Clinton’s favor.[/font]
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