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Tag Archives: Colin Powell
Putting Roadblocks In Front Of People Looking For The Truth
For those of you sick and tired of hearing about Hillary’s emails–I am too. However, why is the investigation taking so long? Well, The Washington Examiner posted an article today that may explain that. Keep in mind that emails have already been released that show collusion between Hillary Clinton and the Congressional Committee that was investigating her.
The article reports:
Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., blasted the State Department on Thursday for moving quickly to provide a requested email from Hillary Clinton’s server to Democrats on the House Oversight Committee while stonewalling requests from Republicans and the public.
During a hearing about the agency’s handling of Freedom of Information Act requests, Meadows questioned why the State Department handed over an email chain between Colin Powell and Clinton just five days after Rep. Elijah Cummings, the committee’s top Democrat, and seven other minority members asked for it while ignoring a FOIA request for that same email since 2014.
“We try to the best of our ability to respond to committees of Congress,” said Patrick Kennedy, undersecretary for management at the State Department, in defense of his agency’s treatment of records requests.
This is disgusting. We simply need to relocate everyone who has worked in Washington for the past eight years (possibly much longer), and replace them with honest people. Can government bureaucrats be honest people? I don’t know, but it seems that we should be able to do better than the corrupt bunch that is currently running our government. The political and bureaucratic class is doing everything it can to protect its corrupt rear end. The only people who can stop this are the voters. In November it will be obvious whether or not we are going to be a country or a banana republic.
Whoops!
The Hillary Clinton email story is getting old. It is getting old because the Clintons have handled it the way they usually handle scandals–stall, obfuscate, and claim a right-wing conspiracy until people get tired of hearing about it, and then refer to the scandal as old news. Well, there’s old news and there’s old news. One of the problems with the ‘old news’ in the email scandal is that new facts keep coming up–creating new news. There are two new stories that have come out recently that are relevant to the scandal.
The Washington Times is reporting today that the FBI has found nearly 15,000 emails that Mrs. Clinton did not turn over to the government after she left office.
The article reports:
Some of the new documents will contain information that is deemed private under open-records laws, but Judicial Watch, the group that forced Monday’s hearing, said many of the documents will have information that should have been public all along.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said the State Department must keep politics out of the process as it works on the messages, and said speed is important. He said the department has had the 14,900 messages for a month and hasn’t produced any of them yet.
“That’s simply not acceptable,” he said.
The 14,900 emails are on one computer disk. All told, the FBI turned over seven disks. It’s not entirely clear what documents are on the others.
The FBI said the 14,900 emails on disk one were either sent or received by Mrs. Clinton and are not duplicative of the approximately 30,000 emails she turned over and that the State Department already released, under a judge’s order.
Meanwhile, People Magazine posted an article on its website yesterday which includes the following quote from Colin Powell:
“Her people have been trying to pin it on me,” Powell, 79, told PEOPLE Saturday night at the Apollo in the Hamptons 2016 Night of Legends fête in East Hampton, New York.
“The truth is, she was using [the private email server] for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did,” Powell added.
The article in People Magazine also reminds us:
The reported conversation was first brought to light in journalist Joe Conason‘s upcoming Bill Clinton biography, Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton, in which the writer details a dinner party held by Clinton and attended by Powell, Madeleine Albright, Henry Kissinger and Condoleeza Rice.
“Toward the end of the evening, over dessert, Albright asked all of the former secretaries to offer one salient bit of counsel to the nation’s next top diplomat,” Conason wrote. “Powell told her to use her own email, as he had done, except for classified communications, which he had sent and received via a State Department computer … [Powell] confirmed a decision she had made months earlier – to keep her personal account and use it for most messages.”
Powell’s office later released a statement to NBC News, saying he “has no recollection of the dinner conversation.” However, “He did write former Secretary Clinton an email memo describing his use of his personal AOL email account for unclassified messages and how it vastly improved communications within the State Department.”
(The italics are mine.)
No one has argued that the use of a personal email for personal, unclassified communications is a problem. The problem occurs when a private, unsecured server is set up outside of the State Department and used for classified communication. A private server simply does not have the security a server within the State Department would have. A private server is an invitation to hacking by any foreign service worth its salt. It is interesting that in his comments, Colin Powell made clear that he was not willing to take responsibility for Mrs. Clinton’s actions. She is going to have to find someone else to throw under the bus.
The Real War In The Middle East
Michael Ledeen posted an article at PJMedia today about the Syrian civil war.
Mr. Ledeen reminds us of the history of the war in Iraq:
We invaded Iraq in the name of the War Against Terror, which President George W. Bush defined as a war against terrorist organizations and the states that supported them. That should have made Iran the focus of our strategy, since Tehran was (and still is, now more than ever) the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism. Nothing would have so devastated the jihadis as the fall of the Iranian regime, which–then as now–funded, trained, armed and gave sanctuary to terrorist groups from al-Qaeda and Hezbollah to Islamic Jihad and Hamas. Unless we defeated Iran, it would not be possible for Iraq to have decent security, no matter how total the defeat of Saddam and the Baathists, and how well-intentioned the successor government. As you can plainly see.
Mr. Ledeen points out that we have again arrived at the same place.
He further explains:
So, as in Iraq, if you want to win this battle in the terror war (Syria), you must defeat the Iranian regime. And, as in the early years of this bloody century, you can do it without dropping bombs or sending Americans to fight on the ground, because the overwhelming majority of Iranians want to rid themselves of Khamenei and Rouhani and all the rest of their tyrannical oppressors. They can do it, with a bit of political, technological and economic support. They could have done it in 2003, when they were on the verge of declaring a general strike against the regime. Colin Powell and W abandoned them, and it never happened. They could have done it in 2009, when millions of them took to the streets in demonstrations larger than those that led to the downfall of the shah. Hillary Clinton and O abandoned them, and a brutal repression ensued.
We keep trying to take down the tree by only removing its branches because they are easier to chop off. Well, they are not really easier to chop off, and we are never getting to the root of the problem. Unless our Middle East policy drastically changes, we will be fighting the Muslim Brotherhood there for the next fifty years or more.
