The thing just will not go away, not even after Rep. McCarthy told us that Benghazi was a hoax perpetrated on former Secretary Hillary Clinton to discredit her.
The story won’t go away in spite of all the bungling of the GOP in its handling. But here we are again with yet another release in the email story arc with a Benghazi angle embedded in it, and at the center of it all appears, again, the guy the White House wanted as far away as possible from the Clinton State Department; the same Sydney Blumenthal Hillary Clinton signed an oath she wouldn’t hire.
She didn’t hire him because she couldn’t. So what did Clinton do instead? She used the stuff he sent her for free, via an email account on a server she ran from her house in Chappaqua, New York. Could that be the reason she decided not to use State Department email? Of all the possibilities one can imagine, that is one of the most likely. While it is entirely possible she wanted to have full control of the paperwork that goes into the historical record, it is more likely this was her way of getting around a White House that denied her wish to work with a close confidante. Whether or not Blumenthal was taking someone else’s money or stood to make a bunch certainly matters, but not anywhere near as much as Clinton’s swaggerin’ disobedience of President Obama and a signed agreement with him.
Which brings me back to the fundamental question I’ve been asking since the email story broke: do we really want someone who will circumvent any rule in order to get her way, no matter how unethical? I mean, she could have refused to take the job if it was that important for her to have Blumenthal on board. Why didn’t she just say no and just work for her husband’s foundation?
Leadership, decisive leadership, must begin with a willingness to operate within defined boundaries, in the best interest of the many. Ethics are paramount to good leadership. Clinton continues to demonstrate neither, but rather the same, slick, just barely squeaking by legality and engaging in questionable ethical behavior that got her and her husband in trouble before.
We deserve so much better…
Benghazi panel to release Sidney Blumenthal emails
October 9, 2015
WASHINGTON — Sidney Blumenthal stood to benefit financially from his unofficial advice to Hillary Clinton on U.S. policy in Libya when Clinton was secretary of State, according to the Republican chairman of the House committee investigating the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi.
“Beyond the pure politics that were occurring at this time, perhaps more disturbing is that at the same time Blumenthal was pushing Secretary Clinton to war in Libya, he was privately pushing a business interest of his own in Libya that stood to profit from contracts with the new Libyan government — a government that would exist only after a successful U.S. intervention in Libya that deposed Qaddafi,” Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina said in a letter Thursday to the Benghazi panel’s top Democrat.
In the biting 13-page letter to Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, Gowdy said he plans to release email traffic within days showing that Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton family confidant, was Clinton’s primary adviser on Libyan policy. More than half the emails sent to and from Clinton regarding Benghazi and Libya prior to the terrorist attacks involved Blumenthal, according to Gowdy’s letter.
“The fact that former Secretary Clinton relied so heavily on an individual for the Libyan intervention, her quintessential foreign policy initiative, whom the White House explicitly prohibited from working at the State Department is mind boggling,” Gowdy wrote.