America does not want to listen to this person as President
1. Why did you make the decision to use a personal email account rather than government email upon becoming secretary of state?2. Why did you believe this approach was necessary and/or preferable to using an official email account?3. Did others working for you at the State Department use personal email for government business? If so, please identify them and explain whether their correspondence has been transferred to the State Department.4. Would it have been appropriate for others working for you at the State Department to use personal email for official purposes? If not, why does a different standard apply to the secretary?5. What steps did you or others working on your behalf take before making this decision to determine whether it complied with applicable laws and regulations, and whether your communications would be adequately secured?6. Specifically, did you consult with officials at the State Department, the White House, or other government agencies to determine whether this approach was permissible?7. If not, why not, given the obvious questions about compliance with federal disclosure laws and concerns about cybersecurity?8. If you did consult with officials, what were you advised? Please provide copies of any email or other correspondence/documentation reflecting these consultations.9. If you were advised that applicable laws and regulations did not permit and/or counseled against the use of private email, why did you decide to proceed with that plan?10. Please explain how the decision to rely on personal email and not to provide the records until after your departure and after being requested complies with, as your spokesman has said, “the letter and spirit of the rules.”11. Specifically, C.F.R. 1236.22, which dates from 2009, provides that “agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system.” What steps did you take to comply with this requirement?12. When emails were turned over to the State Department last year, who in your office determined what emails constituted official business and what standards did they use to make that determination? Did anyone from the State Department oversee or vet this process to ensure that all relevant emails were supplied?13. In 2007, criticizing the George W. Bush White House during the controversy over fired U.S. attorneys, you decried the use of “secret White House email accounts” to conduct government business. Please explain how your use of personal email differed.
How did you and your staff pass classified information via e mail in light of your exclusive use of private/personal accounts?
ccording to highly acclaimed career expert and best-selling author, Marty Nemko, “The data is clear that for the same work men and women are paid roughly the same. The media need to look beyond the claims of feminist organizations.”
• Men are far more likely to choose careers that are more dangerous, so they naturally pay more.• Men are far more likely to work in higher-paying fields and occupations (by choice).• Men are far more likely to take work in uncomfortable, isolated, and undesirable locations that pay more.• Men work longer hours than women do.• Men are more likely to take jobs that require work on weekends and evenings and therefore pay more.• Even within the same career category, men are more likely to pursue high-stress and higher-paid areas of specialization.• Despite all of the above, unmarried women who’ve never had a child actually earn more than unmarried men, according to Nemko and data compiled from the Census Bureau.• Women business owners make less than half of what male business owners make, which, since they have no boss, means it’s independent of discrimination.
“An Analysis of Reasons for the Disparity in Wages Between Men and Women” prepared, under contract, for the U.S. Department of Labor in 1/09 finds:“This study leads to the unambiguous conclusion that the differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a multitude of factors and that the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers.”
Congress is certainly free to raise any questions orobjections and I am sure I will hear that tomorrow when I testify. But, the bottom line is, whose side are you on? Are you on Gadhafi’s side or are you on the side of the aspirations of the Libyan people and the International coalition that has been created to support them? For the Obama Administration the answer to that question is very easy.The first Washington Times installment opens thusly:
Top Pentagon officials and a senior Democrat in Congress so distrusted Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2011 march to war in Libya that they opened their own diplomatic channels with the Gadhafi regime in an effort to halt the escalating crisis, according to secret audio recordings recovered from Tripoli.One month earlier – as Weinergate 1.0 became the focus of conservative media – it was Shoebat.com that was busy revealing Abedin’s irrefutable familial ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. At the time, Shoebat.compublished the shocking list of 63 Muslim Sisterhood leaders; Abedin’s mother Saleha Abedin was on the list.
The tapes, reviewed by The Washington Times and authenticated by the participants, chronicle U.S. officials’ unfiltered conversations with Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s son and a top Libyan leader, including criticisms that Mrs. Clinton had developed tunnel vision and led the U.S. into an unnecessary war without adequately weighing the intelligence community’s concerns.
“You should see these internal State Department reports that are produced in the State Department that go out to the Congress. They’re just full of stupid, stupid facts,” an American intermediary specifically dispatched by the Joint Chiefs of Staff told the Gadhafi regime in July 2011, saying the State Department was controlling what intelligence would be reported to U.S. officials.
The intelligence community gathered no specific evidence of an impending genocide in Libya in spring 2011, undercutting Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s primary argument for using the U.S. military to remove Col. Moammar Gadhafi from power, an event that has left his country in chaos, according to officials with direct knowledge of the dispute.In the wake of Bachmann’s letter to the State Department in 2012, Republican Senator John McCain inexplicably stood by Abedin and denounced Bachmann from the floor of the Senate; it made no sense and McCain ignored ALL of Bachmann’s most legitimate concerns as he railed against her:
Defense officials, speaking in detail for the first time about their assessments of the Libyan civil war four years ago, told The Washington Times that Mrs. Clinton’s strong advocacy for intervention against the Libyan regime rested more on speculative arguments of what might happen to civilians than on facts reported from the ground.
Soon, however, the information being gathered by the intelligence community was at loggerheads with claims of the main supporters for war with Libya, which included French President Nicolas Sarkozy; Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican; Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John F. Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat; and three powerful women close to President Obama: Mrs. Clinton; Susan E. Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; and adviser Samantha Power.There were two other Republican members of Congress who inexplicably defended Abedin in response to Bachmann’s concerns as well. Both had to have been quite privy to what was really going on in Libya a year earlier – House Speaker John Boehner and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HSPCI) Chairman Mike Rogers. Either these two men knew or they were left out of the loop entirely, which would have been an impeachable offense committed by President Obama. The silence on this issue from Boehner and Rogers speaks volumes. If it was done without their knowledge, they should have been up in arms.
Mrs. Clinton ultimately became the most powerful advocate for using U.S. military force to dethrone Gadhafi, both in her closed-door meetings with Mr. Obama, who ultimately made the decision, and in public with allies and the news media.
“That kind of assertion certainly doesn’t comport with the Intelligence Committee, and I can say that on the record,” he told USA TODAY, aligning himself with party leaders who have defended Abedin. “I have no information in my committee that would indicate that Huma is anything other than an American patriot.”
Libyan officials were deeply concerned in 2011, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was trying to remove Moammar Gadhafi from power, that weapons were being funneled to NATO-backed rebels with ties to al Qaeda, fearing that well-armed insurgents could create a safe haven for terrorists, according to secret intelligence reports obtained by The Washington Times.As the Obama administration was arming terrorists in Libya in 2011, the House Oversight Committee was investigating Operation Fast and Furious, which was a gun-walking operation sanctioned by the Department of Justice and its ATF. The operation blew up in the face of the Obama administration when ATF agent John Dodson blew the whistle on the administration after Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was murdered on the night of December 14, 2010 and two of the Fast and Furious guns were found at the scene.
The reports included a 16-page list of weapons that Libyans supposedly tracked to the rebels from Western sources or their allies in the region. The memos were corroborated by a U.S. intelligence asset familiar with the documents as well as former top Gadhafi regime official Mohammed Ismael.
“NATO has given permission to a number of weapons-loaded aircraft to land at Benghazi airport and some Tunisian airports,” the intelligence report said, identifying masses of weapons including tanks and surface-to-air missiles.
That report, which was prepared in English so it could be passed by a U.S. intelligence asset to key members of Congress, identified specific air and sea shipments observed by Libyan intelligence moving weapons to the rebels trying to unseat the Gadhafi regime.
Some within House GOP leadership circles would like Issa to abandon his plan for a committee and floor vote, which was sparked by a 64-page memo last week, which laid out the case for contempt.The contempt vote ultimately came about despite the efforts of Boehner to help slow walk the investigation. At that, Boehner scheduled the contempt vote on the very same day that the Supreme Court was scheduled to issue its historic ruling on the Obamacare law. After the House voted to find Holder in contempt of Congress despite Boehner’s efforts, the Speaker demanded answers and that justice be done. Days prior to Boehner’s statement in the video below, Bachmann sent her letter to the State Department’s Inspector General that inquired about Abedin’s connections to the Brotherhood:
They fear negative political fallout from citing the U.S. attorney general with contempt of Congress in an election year.
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Posted: 04 Jan 2015 08:42 AM PST
(John Hinderaker) Sex scandals tend not to be on my radar screen, so maybe that’s why I missed the Jeffrey Epstein story entirely. For those who–like me, until yesterday–are entirely unaware of Mr. Epstein, here is a brief recap:
Epstein grew up in New York, started out as a teacher, went to work for Bear Sterns and later founded his own investment firm. He appears to have been something of a financial genius; even though the secrecy surrounding his operation brings Mr. Ponzi to mind, apparently it was on the level. Epstein contributed large amounts of money to the Democratic Party and Democratic candidates. He cultivated friendships with the rich and powerful, who evidently liked Epstein in part because he surrounded himself with very young girls who were frequently nude. He seems to have spent most of his time on airplanes and yachts when he wasn’t on his private island in the Caribbean or his principal residences in New York and Palm Beach. Police in Palm Beach got wind of Epstein’s fondness for underage girls and launched an investigation. They prosecuted him, but he got off with a mysteriously light plea bargain under which he pled guilty to only The Epstein story has exploded in the British press in recent days because of Roberts’s recently-disclosed claim that she was “tricked out” to Prince Andrew at an orgy hosted by Epstein. Go here if you want to know more about that. This is where it gets interesting for Americans: among Jeffrey Epstein’s rich and powerful friends was Bill Clinton. Clinton visited Epstein on his Caribbean island and flew with him to various destinations around the world. Virginia Roberts says that she met Clinton twice but denies any sexual relations with him: I only ever met Bill twice but Jeffrey had told me that they were good friends.
Miss Roberts isn’t the first person to be surprised that someone with as much to lose as Bill Clinton isn’t more careful. One can only imagine what Hillary makes of her husband’s friendship with the world’s most notorious pedophile. Miss Roberts says that she is not aware of Clinton sleeping with any of Epstein’s underage girls–not that that is the only issue raised by the Epstein connection. If it were only her testimony, the matter might come to an end there, as one more discreditable Bill Clinton story that most people never hear about.
But there is a joker in the deck: Epstein is a voyeur, and his various residences were equipped with secret cameras and video recorders. Reportedly the Palm Beach police are in possession of a vast trove of photographs and videos of Epstein’s guests engaging in various acts with his underage girls. Are there any of Bill Clinton that could come tumbling out between now and November 2016? Undoubtedly Hillary has asked Bill that question; I assume he said No. Do you think Hillary can trust Bill to tell the truth about this? No, I don’t either. It’s one more worry to add to Hillary’s list.
UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds wonders whether something regarding Epstein and Clinton is brewing:
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