Documenting the worst betrayal in US history. Sources include @HouseBenghazi @KenTimmerman @SharylAttkisson Mitchell Zuckoff @BenghaziAttacks @BradleyPodliska
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Questions #1-3 from the @HouseBenghazi Select Committee that the Coward @BarackObama refuses to answer to this day while hiding behind his lawyer:
1. The White House issued a readout of a 9/10/12 meeting indicating “specific measures” had been taken to “prevent 9/11 related attacks.” What were these specific measures, and how did these specific measures differ from specific measures taken on prior anniversaries of 9/11?
2. When did you first learn a U.S. facility in #Benghazi, Libya, had been attacked? What were you told, and by whom? Were you informed Sean Smith had been killed during the initial attack?
3. What orders or direction, if any, did you give to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta upon learning of the initial attack? Did you or anyone at your direction ever modify, withdraw, alter, or amplify the initial orders or direction you gave to Secretary Panetta?
In the summer of 2014, @HouseBenghazi Select Committee Chairman @TGowdySC first discussed sending questions to Pres. Obama with his lawyer W. Neil Eggleston. In a Jan. 2016 meeting, Gowdy again raised with Eggleston the possibility of sending questions to the President.
As part of the proposal, Gowdy offered Eggleston the opportunity to review and comment on the Select Committee's questions in advance. The Obama White House refused every offer to meet and discuss the questions.
None of the questions the committee wanted to ask had ever been directly addressed by the Obama White House publicly, and for most of the questions, Obama is the only person able to answer.
On 6/25/16, Eggleston responded that he had advised Pres. Obama not to answer the Select Committee's questions. Specifically, he noted “implications” for the constitutional separation of powers.
Eggleston wrote “if the President were to answer your questions, his response would suggest that Congress has the unilateral power to demand answers from the President about his official acts."
Somehow Pres. Obama's lawyer did not object to him answering questions regarding the #Benghazi attacks on 60 Minutes and Univision. But to answer questions from the US Congress would, in his mind, create a constitutional crisis.
Every time you hear @BarackObama dismiss #Benghazi as a right-wing conspiracy theory, you would do well to keep in mind that the coward is STILL refusing to answer basic questions regarding his whereabouts while Americans were under siege and perished on his watch.
Benghazi Notes retweeted
TRAIN A LITTLE, A LOT: Six Practical Lessons from Benghazi Hero Dave “Boon” Benton
One of the most important takeaways from my recent conversation with Dave “Boon” Benton on @The_Watch_Floor was his philosophy: “Train a little, a lot.”
You don't need expensive equipment or years of specialized training to become better prepared. You need to start building practical skills and make preparedness part of your routine.
Here are six things you can start doing today.
1. Practice situational awareness.
The next time you enter a restaurant, shopping center, hotel, or other public location, take 30 seconds to assess your surroundings. Identify primary and secondary exits. Consider where you would go if an exit became inaccessible. Pay attention to people, vehicles, unusual activity, and changes in your environment. The objective isn't to treat everyone as a threat. It's to recognize what's normal so you can identify when something isn't.
2. Have the family preparedness conversation.
Sit down with your family and discuss what everyone would do during an emergency. How will you communicate if cellular service is unavailable? Where will you meet if you become separated? What should your children do if something happens while they're at school? Who will check on elderly relatives or family members who need assistance? Don't assume everyone knows the plan simply because you've thought about it. Make sure everyone understands their responsibilities.
3. Develop contingency plans.
One of the most important lessons from operational environments is that circumstances rarely unfold exactly as expected. What happens if your primary evacuation route is blocked? If communications fail? If you're separated from your family? If emergency responders cannot reach you immediately? Think through alternative routes, communication methods, and meeting locations. Consider how your plan would change if multiple emergencies occurred simultaneously. A plan without alternatives can quickly become useless when conditions change.
4. Practice decision-making under pressure.
You don't need a formal training environment to begin thinking through realistic scenarios. What would you do if a fire started in a crowded building? If someone experienced a medical emergency? If you heard gunfire in a public location? If you had only minutes to evacuate your home? Work through your priorities and available options. Learn first aid and CPR, and periodically practice appropriate emergency procedures. The goal isn't to predict every scenario. It's to improve your ability to assess a situation and make decisions without having perfect information.
5. Understand communication and leadership.
One of the lessons Boon discussed from the Benghazi attacks was the importance of commander's intent and trusting your team. During a crisis, people need to understand the objective, their responsibilities, and what they're trying to accomplish. Micromanagement can slow decisions when circumstances demand immediate action. The same principle applies to your family preparedness plan. If the person who normally makes decisions isn't available, does everyone else understand the plan well enough to act?
6. Build resilience through consistent training.
Resilience comes from developing the skills, habits, and confidence to handle adversity. Choose one skill to improve this week. It might be first aid, emergency communications, physical fitness, situational awareness, or learning how to properly use equipment you already own. Practice it, then build on it. Don't buy equipment you don't know how to use. Don't develop emergency plans you've never tested. And don't assume you'll automatically know what to do when something goes wrong. Training builds competence, and competence gives you more options when it matters.
Our challenge to you this week is simple: Take 30 minutes to improve your preparedness. Have a conversation with your family, identify a weakness in your emergency plan, or practice a skill you've been putting off. Then do something else next week. You cannot prepare for every possible threat, but you can become better prepared to respond. Train a little, a lot.
#TheWatchFloor #Preparedness #Resilience #SituationalAwareness
The @HouseBenghazi Select Committee investigation exposed an imbalance of power amongst the 3 branches of federal government in favor of the Obama executive branch.
Threat of contempt of Congress was not sufficient to compel the executive branch to comply with subpoenas.
To restore the usefulness of the congressional contempt power, the Select Committee made 3 recommendations.
Recommendation #1: House and Senate rules should be amended to provide for mandatory reductions in appropriations to the salaries of federal officials held in contempt of Congress.
Recommendation #2: The criminal contempt statute should be amended to require appointment of a special counsel to handle criminal contempt proceedings upon the certification of a contempt citation against an Executive Branch official by the House or Senate.
Recommendation #3: Expedited procedures for the civil enforcement of congressional subpoenas should be enacted to provide timely judicial resolution of disputes.
There was a time when the threat of criminal contempt from a congressional committee was sufficient to compel the Executive Branch to comply with a subpoena.
However, a 2014 opinion by the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel likely ended any remaining usefulness. This opinion advised that the U.S. Attorney retains prosecutorial discretion not to present a criminal contempt citation to a grand jury despite a statutory “duty” to present.
In other words, the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel advised that U.S. Attorneys must substitute their judgment for the judgment of the US House or Senate.
Benghazi Notes retweeted
Fishman and @EthanChorin were Libya experts who knew the USG players. The key was to interview them first, learn the Obama-Clinton divide, then bring Clinton in. The Cmte did it in reverse: it embarrassed itself and never got to the bottom of who ran USG Libya policy.
The @HouseBenghazi Select Committee found that simply issuing subpoenas to the Obama White House and its agencies was not enough to obtain the information they rightfully deserved to conduct their investigation.
Option #1 to compel compliance with subpoenas: Gain the cooperation of the executive branch—particularly the US Attorney—the very entity from which they sought information and an unlikely ally.
Option #2 : Pursue document production from the executive branch via civil contempt, a laborious, slow process and counterproductive to the goal of an expeditious investigation.
Having to choose betwen these two unfavorable options concisely illustrates the dilemma all congressional committees face when demanding information from the executive branch.
The @HouseBenghazi Select Committee missed an opportunity to pinpoint responsibility for U.S. foreign policy in Libya by failing to thoroughly analyze interviews with some witnesses who were not in senior leadership or politically motivated roles. One such witness was National Security Council director for Libya, Benjamin Fishman. In his 1/12/16 interview, he made it clear that Obama made the military intervention decision and was setting the policy in Libya in April 2011.
Then, Fishman pointed out that starting in the Fall of 2011 decisions regarding U.S. operations, including establishing the Benghazi Mission compound and how to handle the deteriorating Spring and Summer 2012 security environment were State Dept. decisions. Post-Qaddafi and post-conflict planning was an international and interagency affair, as Fishman states that the "Defense Dept., State Dept., and probably Treasury Dept., [sic] U.N." were responsible for it." (1/2)
Another such witness was @EthanChorin, an expert on the Middle East and Africa. In his 3/11/16 interview, Benghazi Select Committee staff indentified that Chorin had a close working relationship with Ambassador Stevens. Benghazi Select Committee staff asked for Chorin's and Stevens's insights on what the U.S. hoped to accomplish in Libya. However, they did not attempt to identify who in the U.S. government was responsible for setting strategy and policy in Libya.
Chorin stated that the "various arms of the U.S. Government," including Congress were putting pressure on Stevens to secure and stabilize Libya. But Republican staff did not attempt to clarify the responsibilities of each of the "various arms of the U.S. Government." (2/2)
2,900,357 new valid voter registrations in Texas between 2022-2024 without proof of citizenship. Just a decade earlier this level of voter fraud was impossible without it being exposed and the criminals punished.
So when the Obama Administration was faced with the truth of the Benghazi attacks costing re-election in 2012 they had to orchestrate a cover-up and even stoop so low as to lie to the families of the dead to keep their story alive long enough to preserve votes. Manufacturing voters at this scale was unimaginable.
Now? Those with any real power to stop this WON'T DO ANYTHING. Republicans in office know they will be labeled election deniers which is career suicide, so they have made the safe, easy choice and blamed the midterms on Iran. All news outlets have to do is look at the massive settlement Fox paid Dominion and they are doing the same.
Most older Americans are now conditioned to accept that election results will take weeks to process in the United States of America when they lived their whole lives until now knowing the results within a couple hours on election night.
Now somebody can openly mock God in the bible belt, run "meatless campaigns" in cattle ranch country, justify 9/11, blame food prices on Jews, call parents upset that their girls are forced to undress in front of men outdated and naiive, and know that real voters can do nothing to stop them from ascending to the US Senate. Because the fraud is now baked in, and we are forced to watch our country that brave Americans fight and died for fall apart before our eyes.
I started learning about & investigating election & vote fraud in Texas before the 2020 election. I worked with a group who showed me how Ted Cruz had not narrowly beaten Beto O’Rourke by a narrow margin as the official result showed, they demonstrated he real margin had been 12 percent. And they tried to get Texas leadership back then to do something about it but they instead did nothing. Now they have paid the price. Those chickens have come home to roost. They could hav done what De Santis did in Florida to clean up elections - instead they let all these fake “new” voters be registered & they are so good at stealing know it was seamless this time. And the people who just got power here will never let it go. So how do you fix anything? Ever?
Consistent with @HillaryClinton's freedom from any accountability to the rule of law, during her ENTIRE tenure as Secretary of State the position of State Dept Inspector General was vacant. With a news media obediently looking the other way, nobody held her responsible.
In Sept. 2012, the Office of Inspector General (without an actual Inspector General) reported that Hillary's State Dept Office of Information Program Services, the office responsible for records mgmt. practices “do[es] not meet statutory and regulatory requirements."
In March 2015, the OIG reported that State Dept employees "have not received adequate training or guidance on their responsibilities for using the system to preserve ‘record emails.’ In 2011, employees created 61,156 record emails out of more than a billion emails sent."
This all happened after Hillary, then a US Senator in 2007, denounced “secret White House email accounts” after senior White House officials were found to have conducted some official business over political email accounts.
After @HillaryClinton resigned as Secretary of State to run for the White House, her replacement @JohnKerry in 2013 promised committees investigating #Benghazi "if you’re not getting something that you have evidence of or you think you ought to be getting, we’ll work with you."
On 7/31/15 the @HouseBenghazi Select Committee sent a demand letter to Kerry emphasizing the importance of getting answers regarding Hillary's email usage. In response the State Dept said that its Office of Inspector General would respond to the questions.
In a 1/14/16 meeting, the State Dept Office of Inspector General revealed it had not seen the questions until the week of 1/5/16, more than 5 months after the Select Committee sent the demand letter.
This is proof that Kerry had no intention of cooperating with the Select Committee investigation and that his word as Secretary of State that "we'll work with you" was as worthless as his predecessor Hillary's.
A bizarre and unsubstantiated claim consistently made by @HillaryClinton was that “the State Department had between 90-95 percent of all the [emails] that were work related. They were already on the system.”
Not only could the State Dept not confirm the percentage of emails provided by Hillary per her claim, it did not know where the "90-95" percentage she used originated.
The @HouseBenghazi Select Committee requested that Hillary make her homebrew email server available to a neutral 3rd party for inspection and review. This could confirm which emails were State Dept related as opposed to having to take her untrustworthy word for it.
The Select Committee requests for a neutral third party inspection of Hillary's email server were rejected. Hillary's lie that she turned over all of her work emails was confirmed on 6/12/15 when a non-government witness produced approx. 150 emails/memos sent to or received by her. Approx. 89 of the emails had never been produced to the Select Committee.
On 8/11/14, the State Dept produced to the @HouseBenghazi Select Committee 8 emails to or from @HillaryClinton's personal email account, further exposing the fact that she used this personal account for official State Department business.
Well before the State Dept made this production of 8 emails, it was abundantly clear they knew the complete universe of responsive documents and emails was not housed or situated on State Dept servers.
The policy of the State Dept is: "If a senior official uses his or her private email account for the conduct of official business, she or he must ensure that records pertaining to official business that are sent from or received on such email account are captured and maintained."
On 10/28/14, State Dept Under Secretary for Management Patrick Kennedy sent a letter to 4 former Secretaries of State. That letter sought the return of Federal records, “such as an email sent or received on a personal email account while serving as Secretary.”
Due to the timing of the letter (soon after the formation of the Select Committee), it is laughably obvious that the only reason Kennedy sent the letter is because the Select Committee was demanding access to Hillary's #Benghazi related emails.
It's also funny that Kennedy tried to deflect attention by including other former Secretaries of State as recipients of the letter when his true focus was only on recovering Hillary's emails to answer demands from the Select Committee.
Benghazi Notes retweeted
I drafted WH interview names. The key name was NSC Libya Director Ben Fishman. He knew the key players, attended the crucial 9/11 7:30 pm meeting, and wasn’t a partisan (like Rhodes). I planned to mine his interview for names and info but was fired. His interview was a disaster.
The @HouseBenghazi Select Committee sent a document request to the @BarackObama White House on 12/29/14. While this was not the 1st time Congress had asked the White House for information regarding #Benghazi, it did mark the first time Congress asked the White House for actual documents.
The fact that no prior Congressional committee asked the White House for documents related to #Benghazi destroys the argument from the Left that the Select Committee wasn't necessary because there had already been previous investigations.
The Obama White House did not provide all of the information the Select Committee requested, but the Select Committee was granted access to information no other congressional committee accessed previously.
Regardless of the stonewalling tactics of the White House, a Select Committee investigator for the Republican majority @BradleyPodliska confirmed that there was no real desire to investigate White House personnel for their inaction, lies and cover-up of the Benghazi betrayal. Podliska was reprimanded and eventually fired for pressing the Committee to do more.
Benghazi Notes retweeted
Cmte had no interest in investigating IC, DOD, or WH, judging by staffing and doc requests. 2 staffers covered IC, 2 DOD, and 1 the WH (me). It sent 12 doc requests to all 3 combined vs 15 to State. It feared public backlash for IC or DOD probe. I was told to stand down on WH.
The CIA #Benghazi-related records that the @HouseBenghazi Select Committee was finally permitted to review after a 3-month wait consisted of over 4,000 emails. John Brennan's CIA had never indicated they were withholding such a large volume of material from the committee. Reviewing the records would require a significant time committment.
To make this more difficult, the CIA would only allow four Committee staff members to review its records at CIA headquarters in McLean, VA. In addition, the CIA would not allow Committee staff to retain notes made while reviewing these documents, or even take notes back to Committee offices to discuss with Committee members.
At first, the CIA required Committee staff to keep their notes locked in a safe at CIA HQ, but eventually offered to allow taking notes back to Committee offices, but only if CIA staff 1st reviewed the notes and applied various redactions to them.
As an example of John Brennan's campaign to stonewall the Select Committee, the CIA placed none of these restrictions on the Intelligence Committee’s access to these same materials, which the CIA provided to it to keep in its own offices at the Capitol.
After reviewing the 4,000 #Benghazi emails from the CIA, the @HouseBenghazi Select Committee issued a new document request to the CIA on 4/28/15 for SameTime messages, emails, operational cables and intelligence reports to better understand CIA activities in #Benghazi.
As with the 1st request for the "read-and-return" records, this request for documents was met with strong resistance from John Brennan's CIA. It took another 2.5 months for the CIA to provide documents, but it was an incomplete production with many documents held back.
One of the documents the CIA held back was a critical email it had shared with the House Intelligence Committee previously, so the only logical reason it would have been withheld from the Select Committee was that the CIA played politics with dead Americans.
Because the CIA was withholding documents that were known to exist, the Select Committee issued a subpoena to the CIA on 8/7/15. The 8/7/15 subpoena was for records including the unclassified #Benghazi CIA talking points, as well as SameTime messages, a more efficient communications platform than email used by CIA personnel during and in the immediate aftermath of the #Benghazi attacks.
On 8/28/15, the CIA responded to the subpoena with additional documents, but still refused to send the SameTime messages because "doing so would have serious negative consequences on CIA's work."
It is an extremely arrogant suggestion by John Brennan's CIA that Congress is not entitled to staff communications, considering that, as set forth by the Constitution, Congress provides funding for and has oversight authority over the CIA.
It was only after a 2nd subpoena on 1/20/16 and a threat to hold Brennan in contempt of Congress that his CIA finally relented and produced the SameTime messages and other records to the Select Committee a staggering 11 months after their first request.
Following the lead of @HillaryClinton's State Dept and Leon Panetta's Dept of Defense, it was now John Brennan's turn to slow-walk CIA documents to delay the work of the @HouseBenghazi Select Committee and hold back answers to the families of fallen Americans. On 11/19/14 the Select Committee requested #Benghazi related records that Brennan's CIA had already provided earlier to the the House Intelligence Committee for their investigation. The CIA responded, noting it was “working to try to set up a time next week when we could make the materials available.” They didn't make the materials available the following week.
After the Select Committee repeated its request for CIA Benghazi documents on 12/8/14, a CIA representative responded: “I’ll check in with the folks who are working on that to see if we can make it all available next week.” Nothing happened. The Select Committee made a 3rd request, on 12/11/14, to review these documents. The CIA responded on 12/15/14, noting they would “reach out” to the Committee staff that would be reviewing the documents. The CIA never contacted the Committee.
The Select Committee made a 4th request to the CIA on 1/8/15. On 1/12/15, the CIA responded noting they “have this request as a priority action. We are currently processing the documents.… We hope to have them ready for you in a couple of weeks." After a 3 month delay, the Select Committee finally received the Benghazi documents from John Brennan's CIA. They had already produced these documents earlier to the House Intelligence Committee, so there is no justification for the 3 month delay.
It is ironic that John Brennan likes to present himself as a valiant patriot, yet led the CIA that deliberately slow-walked documents that were needed for the Select Committee to seek answers for the families of fallen Americans. When all is said and done, Brennan is nothing more than a partisan politician whose motivation was to protect the reputation of @BarackObama and himself above all else.
