March 8, 2015

"So, it's strange credibility to believe that if you're on your way to Libya to discuss Libyan policy that there's not a single document that has been turned over to Congress."

On "Face the Nation" today, Bob Schieffer, interviewed Congressman Trey Gowdy, the chairman of the committee investigating the Hillary e-mail controversy. This is what I found most striking:

SCHIEFFER: [B]y using this private account on a private server, she could not only keep those e-mails from the reach of the government, as I understand it, but she could delete the e-mails without anybody knowing it. So she has sent you some e-mails, but are there any gaps in the e-mails you have received so far from her?

GOWDY: Yes, sir. There are gaps of months and months and months. And if you think to that iconic picture of her on a C-17 flying to Libya, she has sunglasses on and she has her handheld device in her hand, we have no e-mails from that day. In fact, we have no e-mails from that trip. So, it's strange credibility to believe that if you're on your way to Libya to discuss Libyan policy that there's not a single document that has been turned over to Congress. So, there are huge gaps. And with respect to the president, it's not up to Secretary Clinton to decide what is a public record and what's not. We need someone -- and, frankly, I have lost confidence in the State Department to make that determination. They're the ones who allowed this arrangement. There's the ones who did nothing abut this arrangement until they got a request from our committee. Frankly, I think your viewers are entitled to a neutral, detached arbiter to determine what's a public record, first of all, because that never should have left the custody of the government, and, secondarily, what is our committee entitled to? We're not entitled to everything. I don't want everything. I just want everything related to Libya and Benghazi.

49 comments:

jr565 said...

Mind the Gaps.

traditionalguy said...

Gowdy is a very good lawyer who represents his client well.

Original Mike said...

Strange credibility, strains credulity.

Whatever.

Jim Miller said...

Maybe "it strains credibility"?

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

I just think that Rep. Gowdy is terrific. He is going to bury the Clintons.

Of course, as I stated before, the Ballad of the Clintons.

No one can stop them from taking over their house, the White House.

Prof.: Watch the Face the Nation segment here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg1z40_ehU8

Humperdink said...

"stains credibility"

traditionalguy said...

What Gowdy has mastered is the art of presenting the facts in a way that makes a case which he leaves one thing that he then turns over to the hearers to fill in to make the missing conclusion. That makes it the hearers' own idea, although it all came from Gowdy.

David said...

So Curt Gowdy now is the greatest broadcaster who ever lived. Just for the success in breeding.

Original Mike said...

"there are gaps of months and months and months."

Speaks to Hilary's laziness. Or her sense of entitlement. She had two years to prepare, but when it came to it she hadn't prepared her document dump. She was left with blocking out entire months rather than having surgically removed the incriminating emails.

bleh said...

I wonder how many other Clinton aides, including State Department personnel, used private email accounts through Hillary's personal server, e.g., whenever something sensitive but presumptively public had to be discussed, they took the conversation private.

Also, I would think someone might have slipped up at some point. I hope someone has made a FOIA request seeking all emails that contain "clintonemail.com" in the body and/or metadata.

And what about Hillary's official correspondence with people in other departments or governmental bodies - with the sprawling federal bureaucracy, tracking down those emails could be nightmarish?

What about her official correspondence with foreigners?

Ken Mitchell said...

Hillary needs to be impeached. I know, she's not in office NOW, but impeaching her will prevent her from EVER running for Federal office again.

I cannot believe her arrogance in thinking she could run her own private off-network, off-site, out-of-government-control mail server. One for the Clinton Foundation? Obviously. But one that mingled State Department messages with Foundation mail?

It's out of the question. She deserves prison; a LONG time in prison.

Mrs. X said...

@original mike
It might not be laziness -- maybe every single email from those months and months was incriminating.

Achilles said...

This says more about democrats and their voters than it does about Hillary. You have numerous examples that she is completely amoral and a drunk. It takes a less than decent person to support that.

Anonymous said...

My apologies again for the repost - but imagine the average citizen doing a "compare and contrast" with another cabinet officer, Gen. Petraeus, and asking "how does this work again?"

I wonder if she'll get same plea bargain deal as General Petraeus. Be interesting to compare the degree of compromise. Madame Secretary uses a guaranteed-to-have-been subverted server to not only inform the Russians and Chinese about U.S. secrets, but provide them a vehicle to blackmail her during the most sensitive of negotiations. The other has indiscrete pillow talk in the manner of a man who is thinking from regions not-above-his-shoulders - with not-an-agent of a foreign government who (while a military officer) was cleared for top secret information.

The only way to keep from being blackmailed is to simply publish it all, every single message that ever lived on or was backed up off of that server. Then there can be no fear of future disclosure. Will await the proverbial cold day. Or perhaps given how inept these people are (probably didn't keep copies or backups) we should beg Mr. Putin for his copy. Or offer a bounty for the Guangzhou high school junior who regularly lifted copies on her alternate Thursday's "how-to-hack-US-servers" computer lab.

Big Mike said...

@aritai, a couple days ago I suggested that Gowdy's committee subpoena the missing records from the Russian embassy. That may still be our best bet.

Diogenes of Sinope said...

Hillary and OBAMA are responsible for this unethical and maybe illegal concealing records. Neither will pay any price for this.

MathMom said...

The fact that she established the domain name on her own personal server on the day of her confirmation testimony says to me that she knew in advance that she had big plans to run the world her way, and that these plans would not pass muster if they saw the light of day. She didn't want to be derailed, and didn't want anyone snooping into "her" business.

This server in the closet of her home is just the high-tech version of the file box that accompanied her everywhere she went when she was First Lady. She had that file box physically close to her at all times. She has always had a problem with making files go missing, all the way back to Watergate. She was fired from her Watergate job for screwing with the files and for unethical conduct. This is her M. O.

She should have been in prison 30 years ago.

Original Mike said...

Don't worry, Trey. Lanny Davis says: "Last time I looked you cannot delete on a hard drive."

Michael K said...

""Last time I looked you cannot delete on a hard drive."

Yes, but landfills can take care of that.

Richard Dolan said...

Team Hillary! has been desperate to make the intertwined email and foreign money stories go away. For good reason. Not going to happen, even with all Hillary!'s flunkies in and out of the media trying to bring it about.

Dems must be getting very nervous.

The Godfather said...

I'm certainly interested in the gaps, but they'll probably fix those somehow (maybe they'll find some emails from that period on Lois Lerner's hard drive). The point we mustn't lose sight of is that the only reason for setting up this special, secret, proprietary email account was to hide things that aren't supposed to be hidden. We may never know what she hid, in fact, it's even possible she ended up not doing anything worth hiding, but we know that she set up a system so that she could hide bad things.

Look, suppose you find a guy with a bunch of pistols that all have the serial numbers filed off and are fitted with silencers. He also has some plastic explosives. You KNOW he was planning something illegal. Can you convict him on that evidence? Maybe, maybe not, but are you going to elect him sheriff?

Michael The Magnificent said...

"I'm not going to have some reporters pawing through our papers. We are the president." - Hillary Clinton, quoted in Blood Sport: The President and His Adversaries (p. 368), James B. Stewart, December 1993

ObeliskToucher said...

We're all missing the point here -- Hilary installed the email server to protect her emails from being disclosed by Edward Snowden.

/Yeah, that's the ticket...

Sammy Finkelman said...

"So, it's strange credibility to believe that if you're on your way to Libya to discuss Libyan policy that there's not a single document that has been turned over to Congress."

Strains credibility!!!

Did nobody catch that obvious error?

You wouldn't even have to hear it. Mr. Arbuthnot, the Cliche expert, could have told you that.

And the word "strange" isn't even proper part of speech. You need a verb there, probably in the present tense.

Michael The Magnificent said...

It won't matter one bit. You could catch Hillary with a dead girl (a la Ted "the swimmer" Kennedy) or a live boy (a la Barney Frank, with his boyfriend running a homosexual brothel out of his townhouse) and leftists would still crawl over broken glass to elect her.

A good friend, though far to the left of me, once wrote me an email, very concerned over Bush's college grades! So I shared with her a Washington Post article detailing how Al Gore's grades weren't any better. Suddenly, grades didn't matter so much to her, and she cast her vote for Al Gore!

Same friend emailed me all concerned with Sarah Palin's lack of experience! When I pointed out how she had more executive experience than Obama, suddenly experience didn't matter so much to her, and she cast her vote for Obama!

The only standards leftists have are double standards.

Sammy Finkelman said...

By the way, Bob Schieffer and Trey Goudy I think, were using the word "gap" in different ways.

Bob Schieffer, I think, was thinking of sequential numbering.

I think there wasn't the slightest clue to that in the material that was turned over to the state Department.

The Clinton people didn't send over an electronic file to the State Department.


They printed out the e-mails they selected, but, if the summaries of what was turned over is correct, it must be that they first made it into a giant file, with e-mails starting and ending in the middle of a page and then there would be the next e-mail.

That's the only way to make sense of the claims of 55,000 pages and 80,000 emails.

Some emails therefore must have been very short, (possibly just a request to call her, or a notice as to when she would call, or when she would meet with someone)

And a lot of the heading information was probably deleted.

Trey Goudy, however, could nevertheless still say there were gaps, because there was nothing from some days in which there should have been something.

Of course, something like "call me" (no subject of discussion mentioned) might not have been considered by the State Department as responsive to the subpeona.

Sammy Finkelman said...

Correction: I see that the strange credibility/strains credibility error was spotted here. There is no question Trey Goudy said "strains credibility"

HoodlumDoodlum said...

The Clintons have no shame. Attempts to change their behavior/punish them/defeat them politically that rely on using shame will fail. The Media recognizes arguments relying on shame, but in practice only deploys them against Repubs.
Good thing we can count on Gen Holder, right?!

sdharms said...

re Petraus: I believe that Broadwell was a set up. Not by a foreign government but by our own.

MaxedOutMama said...

"strains credulity" not "credibility".

Credulity is the the willingness or perhaps capacity to believe something. Gowdy was being precise with his language here.

tim maguire said...

"hdr22"? Who uses a numbers on their personal email account? That's a free-service thing.

Unless, of course...where are hdr's 1-21?

Bad Lieutenant said...

Exactly Tim. We have no clue how deep the rabbit hole goes. We have to push for everything that ever lived on the Clinton servers, to be determined by IT forensics.

Never get it, but it's the proper ask.

Skeptical Voter said...

Hillary said it best. Believing her about her e-mails "requires the willing suspension of disbelief".

I believe she said that about "General Betray Us" in a different context, but it applies here in spades!

Brando said...

What leftists (those who aren't beholden to the Clintons) have to ask themselves is do they really think this is the last impropriety that will be discovered about Hillary? And if they have to not only risk the possibility that the GOP beats her in the general election (which is, at this stage, possible) but also risk having a corrupt kleptocrat as president who has sold out the Left at every opportunity (from favoring every war since Vietnam to selling out gays and harassment victims and cozying to Wall Street), is this really the time to lie down and let her march on uncontested?

As a right-leaner my more immediate concern is the GOP nominating someone who won't flop (or be so horrible that I wouldn't even care if they flop), but if I were on the Left I'd be scrambling to find another option. They simply don't owe the Clintons anything and the time to salvage something for their side is slipping by.

phantommut said...

First pleading brain damage to get out of testifying before the House. Then this.

The real Benghazi story must be really, really bad.

Rich B said...

I am sure that Hilary has a few emails to/from Our Dear Leader on that server. I guess he is just hearing about them now. Of course, the provenance of those emails would not arouse any suspicion in our tech-savvy, light working, sea-rise stopping President.

Ignorance is Bliss said...

Maybe strange credibility is what she was trying for.

After all, her husband is always looking for some strange.

Sammy Finkelman said...

Google says:

https://www.google.com/search?sclient=psy-ab&site=&source=hp&btnG=Search&q="strains+credibility

"About 51,200 results (0.62 seconds)
Search Results

credible
public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/credible.html

Although you will commonly see it said of some far-fetched story either that “it strains credulity” or that “it strains credibility,” the latter is more traditional.

"strains credulity" although aapparently a hypercorrection, ctually has more results on Google:

About 110,000 results (0.46 seconds)

There are only 3 results for:

"strains credulity" "trey goudy"

And one of them is this very web page (because of the comments)

Google is quick to pick up blogs.





Sammy Finkelman said...

http://www.nysun.com/national/clinton-spars-with-petraeus-on-credibility/62426/

On You Tube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjcTb2ORVd0

Senator Harry Reid went further, and said flatly that "the War is Lost"

Three years later, he tried to say this was in agreement with General David Petraeus.

http://www.nevadagop.org/three-years-later-senator-harry-reid-tries-to-fix-his-extreme-beliefs-on-iraq-for-the-november-election

“‘Senator Reid's comment was in agreement with General Petraeus’ assessment that the Iraq war could not be won by military force alone and that a political solution was also needed as part of a two-part strategy – which President Bush refused to pursue,’ said Zac Petkanas, deputy communications director for the Friends of Harry Reid.”

Sammy Finkelman said...

Rich B:

RB> I am sure that Hilary has a few emails to/from Our Dear Leader on that server.

No, I don't think so. If she had sent any, he, or somebody else in the White House who noticed, might have told her not to use that e-mail address for official purposes, so I doubt she took that risk.

In the White House "talking points" Benghazi e-mails, there is nothing at all from Hillary and she is not even mentioned by name as the authority in the State Department.

It is reported that she used to have one 45-minute meeting a week with President Obama, in which she would brief him about international affairs.

Sammy Finkelman said...

Brando:

B> my more immediate concern is the GOP nominating someone who won't flop

Like Mitt Romney who was so flummoxed by President Obama's claim that he had called the Benghazi terrorism, he passed on a softball question about Benghazi by Bob Schieffer of CBS in the third and last debate.

(What Mitt Romney didn't realize, and didn't have good enough staff to tell him, is that Obama had started out closer to the truth and got further and further away from the truth as the week of September 11, 2012 went on, thanks to the absurdity that the CIA was peddling)

And Hillary never fought what what the CIA was saying about it being spontaneous, at least not after they had convinced Obama and company.

Sammy Finkelman said...

Neither did the State Department on Friday, September 14, 2012 dispute the more obviously and patently false claim that the assault had been preceded by (milder) demonstrations. In fact the assault on the villa in Benghazi where the Ambassador was staying was actually a surprise attack, preceded by nothing beyond the setting up of checkpoints by militia on streets of Benghazi, which they had done numerous times in the past.

Everybody in the State Department knew there were no demonstrations in Benghazi, yet they did not fight that claim in the "talking points"

They only fought the claim (which indeed wasn't true in any real sense) that the CIA had warned them, or that the location in Benghazi was not actually a consulate.

All of this must have been on Hillary Clinton's specific instructions. Probably in person, rather than e-mail, but who knows?

The thing that caused Hillary Clinton to say "what difference does it make?" were questions about the "talking points"

In other words, what difference does what we said make? The important point is 4 people working for the U.S. government were killed! But it does make a difference. A big difference.

Sammy Finkelman said...

That is, they corrected the description of the location from "consulate" to "diplomatic post"

Meanwhile the White House was swallowing disinformation.

Nobody else seems to have noticed this in the "talking points" emails released around May, 2013:

http://i42.tinypic.com/2u8e98x.jpg

Tommy Vietor e-mail, Friday, September 14, 2012 8:43 pm EST:
(emphasis added)

There is massive disinformation out there, in particular with Congress. They all think it was premeditated based on inaccurate assumptions or briefings. So I think this is a response not only to a tasking from the house intel committee but also NSC guidance that we need to brief members/press and correct the record.

Well, now, according to the House intel report released in November, 2014, who was the one that had the disinformation, them (members of Congress) or Tommy Vietor?

And Benjamin J. Rhodes wrote on Friday, September 14, 2012 9:34 pm:

http://i42.tinypic.com/2wflqn8.jpg

There is a ton of wrong information getting out into the public domain from Congress and people who are not particularly informed. Insofar as we have firmed up assessments that don’t compromise Intel or the Investigation we need to have the capability to correct the record as there are significant policy and messaging ramifications that would flow from a hardened mis-impression.

Who is the one who had the mis-impression, Congress and the public, or Benjamin J. Rhodes?

Now, you see, there's a lot that went wrong here with intelligence evaluation and analysis.

And it's important to note that Hillary Clinton knew that at least some of what the CIA was saying was flat out wrong, in addition to a lot of it being improbable.

Sammy Finkelman said...

@tim mcguire ..where are hdr's 1-21? (3/9/15, 6:50 AM)

HDR17 through 21 were also used.

Some might have been aliases for other members of her State Department team.

Another explanation is that some of the earlier hdrs might have been abandoned to escape spam or to drop out of contact with some people..

Or she did it to separate different kinds of e-mail.

The joke is that the number 22 stands for the year 2022 when she planned to get divorced, or her ideal age, or that hdr22@aol.com was her original e-mail address.

Sammy Finkelman said...

Unknown at 3/9/15, 7:12 AM

"We have to push for everything that ever lived on the Clinton servers, to be determined by IT forensics."

That's exactly right.

Yesterday, one example of Clinton spin was that nobody had made an accusaiton of illegality.

Well, how could anybody have without any inside information?

We have these disclosure laws to show the outward signs of something wrong. If nobody draws any conclusions, at least for the time being, what's the point of disclosure.

And Democrats are not at all shy about drawing unlikely and improbable and unfair conclusions from disclosures during political campaigns.

Sammy Finkelman said...

sdharms said on 3/9/15, @3:44 AM CDT

"re Petraus: I believe that Broadwell was a set up. Not by a foreign government but by our own."

I think:

1) The affair was real.

2) The emails she supposedly sent were not.

3) Some people at the CIA had discovered the affair, because everything that goes out of CIA headquarters is monitored.

4) They contrived to get rid of the director before the director got rid of them.

5) The case was ginned up with the help of foreign governments.

6) The people in the CIA who started the case against Broadwell with the intention of the affair being discovered in the course of the investigation were foreign intelligence moles.

7) For some Arab country, probably Qatar or Saudi Arabia.

8) Jill Kelley, by the way, knew foreign diplomats.

9) The reason we've had so little success in the war against terror, and the reason such things as failure to look at Osama bin Laden's files happened was because there are pro-terrorist moles in the executive branch.

10) And I don't mean Obama or people brought in in 2009, but people who are there all the time.

11) The pro-terrorist moles aren't really pro-terrorist or working for terrorists - they are just bought off by some government(s) sponsoring terrorism.


ken in tx said...

22 was the age hdr started at Yale Law.

Naut Right said...

HDR fears no electoral consequence, for solid reasons. The election is rigged. Who in their right mind thought a vote of 100% for Obama in several precincts was legit? Yet finding out was something beyond the pale, apparantly.