Late yesterday, the State Department released the first batch of emails from Hillary Clinton’s time in office relating the events surrounding the September 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya and, so far at least, there does not seem to be any sort of smoking gun:
Nearly 900 pages of Libya-related e-mails from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private account provide little apparent fuel for a Republican investigation of her actions preceding the September 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi and an alleged administration coverup in its aftermath.
Released Friday by the State Department, the e-mails contain nuggets indicating Clinton received a fairly steady flow of information about the political chaos inside Libya throughout 2011 and 2012. They also provide glimpses into her personal life — including weekends at home in Washington and New York — and into the grinding and sometimes tedious schedule of a secretary of state.
But the huge time gaps between a total of about 300 e-mails, many of which are repeated on page after page as the same messages are forwarded to and from Clinton and among her staffers, indicated that it may not have been her preferred form of communication.
Republicans on the House select committee that has been investigating the Benghazi attacks for the past year seemed to acknowledge the relative lack of new information.
Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said that it was “important to remember these e-mail messages are just one piece of information that cannot be completely evaluated or fully understood without the total record.”
The e-mails were culled by the State Department from a larger trove of some 55,000 pages that Clinton turned over from the private account she used throughout her time as secretary.
The committee, which received the Libya-related e-mails in February, has asked for the entire collection.
“To assume that a self-selected record is complete, when no one with a duty or responsibility to the public had the ability to take part in the selection, requires a leap in logic no impartial reviewer should be required to make and strains credibility,” Gowdy said in a statement.
The ranking minority member of the committee, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), who has been harshly critical of Gowdy, charged him with “dragging out this political charade to harm Secretary Clinton’s bid for president.”
The e-mails were culled by the State Department from a larger trove of some 55,000 pages that Clinton turned over from the private account she used throughout her time as secretary.
The committee, which received the Libya-related e-mails in February, has asked for the entire collection.
“To assume that a self-selected record is complete, when no one with a duty or responsibility to the public had the ability to take part in the selection, requires a leap in logic no impartial reviewer should be required to make and strains credibility,” Gowdy said in a statement.
The ranking minority member of the committee, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), who has been harshly critical of Gowdy, charged him with “dragging out this political charade to harm Secretary Clinton’s bid for president.”
At The Daily Beast, Tim Mak notes that there’s little evidence in the material that has been released to support any of the many conspiracy theories that have risen up surrounding the attack:
If Republicans were looking for a silver bullet to use against Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, the State Department’s Friday document dump about Benghazi wasn’t it.
There’s no illicit weapons Libyan program to be found in the emails, as some have speculated. No ‘stand-down’ order. Just a hectic flow of information to and from Hillary Clinton—about danger, about death, and ultimately, about condolences.
(…)
Throughout the morning after the initial attacks she has a lot of activity: in particular she received a large number of messages expressing condolences to her and the State Department over the death of the ambassador.
“The Ambassador was a perfect role model of the kind of person we need representing us around the world, and the others had so much to give—and already had given so much,” said former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates.
“What a wonderful, strong and moving statement by your boss. please tell her how much Sen. McCain appreciated it. Me too,” wrote a top national security aide for Sen. John McCain.
That weekend, Clinton continued to exchange emails on the Benghazi issue. On Saturday Sept. 15, the day before Susan Rice appeared on cable shows to make the since-rescinded claim that the Benghazi attacks were the result of protests-turned-violent, Clinton was involved arranging calls from her home and the collection of an action memo via classified courier.
The emails give insight into how Clinton operated at the time: using classified couriers to move memos and getting on the phone with other world leaders, rather than using email.
None of the released emails show Clinton being involved with Rice’s appearance on the Sunday shows, or the discussion of what Rice should say. She does, however, receive a transcript of what Rice would eventually say.
This is only the first batch of Benghazi-related email that is due to be released, but at least so far it does not seem that there’s any evidence of the kind of conspiracy behind the entire event that has been fodder on the right for the better part of two and a half years now. Given the fact that four separate Congressional investigations, and an investigation by the State Department’s Inspector General, has not found any such evidence, this isn’t entirely surprising of course. However, while the emails were still secret there was still plenty of room for people to speculate and to claim that the previous investigations were incomplete. If anything, the material that has been released seems to reinforce the idea that the real problems with what happened in Benghazi are rooted in the entire decision to intervene in the Libyan Civil War and the haphazard way that the United States and the rest of the West treated the post-Gaddafi era in that country, something which helped contribute to turning that nation into the haven for chaos and extremism that is today. There also doesn’t appear to be much evidence to support the idea that Clinton was involved in any effort to cover-up anything in the aftermath of the attack through the drafting of talking points for U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice that emphasized the role of an obscure anti-Muslim YouTube video in causing protests that led to the attack.. Again, though, that was something that we already knew thanks to a House Intelligence Committee report that indicated that those talking points were based largely on CIA input and that agency did not change its assessment of the role the film played in the attack until several days after Rice had appeared on the Sunday morning shows.
Again, given the fact that there are still more emails to come out, this will hardly be the end of the Benghazi affair. This is especially true given the fact that it’s been apparent for some time that the House Select Committee investigating the matter is more concerned about the politics of 2016 than anything else. Even with these emails and the others that will follow, which have apparently been available to the committee for some time, there is still the issue of the fact that Clinton was using a private email server for personal correspondence, a move that has led Committee Chair Trey Gowdy and Speaker John Boehner to call on Clinton to make the server available for forensic examination. Through her attorneys, Clinton has refused to comply with this request, which means that we will likely see the House issue a subpoena in the near future that will lead to a legal argument over whether the server should be produced. While these legal machinations are going on, House Republicans will obviously be pointing to the failure to the produce the server to suggest that Clinton has something to hide even though there’s no indication that, at least when it comes to Benghazi, she doesn’t really have anything to hide at all.
While the email released yesterday doesn’t really contain any earth shattering information about Benghazi, The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty notes that they do appear to reveal that Clinton’s management style hasn’t changed much from the days of her dysfunctional Presidential campaign:
For those who have worried that Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign would be a repeat of the chaotic operation she ran eight years ago, her advisers have often pointed to her time in between at the State Department — which by comparison was an archetype of crisp managerial efficiency.
But a trove of newly released e-mails suggests that one of Clinton’s tendencies persisted during her time as secretary of state — an inability to separate her longtime loyalties from the business at hand.
The e-mails from her priccount reveal that she passed along no fewer than 25 memos about Libya from friend and political ally Sidney Blumenthal. Blumenthal had business interests in Libya but no diplomatic expertise there.
Moreover, she did so after the White House had blocked her from hiring Blumenthal at the State Department. The president’s team considered him untrustworthy and prone to starting rumors.
Hers has never been a world that lends itself to an organizational chart. In addition to those who work for Clinton, she maintains a vast network of political allies.
That is not a bad thing in itself. Nor is Clinton the first public official to rely on a kitchen cabinet of advisers, defenders and loyalists.
But as her earlier presidential campaign showed, the environment she creates is one in which lines of authority and decision-making can be undermined by second-guessers and meddlers.
Her back-channel communication with Blumenthal has come to the attention of the House Select Committee on Benghazi. It has subpoenaed Blumenthal to testify in its politically charged investigation of the September 2012 attacks in Libya in which U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed.
In the memos, Blumenthal — who was identified to lower-level State Department officials only as “HRC friend” — said the information was “intel,” gathered from sources he described in such breathless terms as “an extremely sensitive source” or “an extremely well-placed individual.”
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Asked by reporters about the e-mails, which were first reported by the New York Times, Clinton noted that she has “many, many old friends.” She added, “When you’re in the public eye, when you’re in an official position, I think you do have to work to ensure that you’re not caught in a bubble. I hear from a certain small group of people and I’m going to continue to talk to my old friends, whoever they are.”
The Clinton campaign tried to put distance between the former secretary of state and the unreliable advisories that she had passed along.
“Sid provided unsolicited thoughts and suggestions to the secretary on a variety of topics. He was not a U.S. government employee nor asked by the secretary to do so,” said her spokesman, Brian Fallon.
(…)
Yet Blumenthal fits a pattern of allies to whom Clinton has long been drawn — those who share her view that she is surrounded by enemies and dark conspiracies.
“She’s not a paranoid person, I don’t think, but she wants some paranoid people around her,” said one former aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of Clinton’s distaste for those who speak to reporters when not authorized to do so.
On that score, Blumenthal had more than proven himself over the years. Indeed, one of the reasons that the White House objected to putting him at the State Department was that many there believed he had spread toxic rumors about Barack Obama during the lengthy primary battle with Clinton in 2008.
By all accounts, the 2016 Clinton campaign is designed to operate markedly different than the 2008 operation. The question is whether the person at the top of the pyramid has changed very much. These emails would seem to indicate that the answer to that question is no, and while that may not deter her march to the White House it does raise some concerns about what kind of President she would be if she does win. To say the very least, many of the characteristics that Tumulty describes are not desirable in a President.
