Tag Archives: Trey Gowdy

Interesting Take

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On Friday, The Daily Wire posted an article about Trey Gowdy’s recent comments concerning the purpose of impeaching President Trump. The article points out that there is very little hope that President Trump will be impeached in the Senate and that there is very little chance that President Trump will not be re-elected. So what is the goal?

The article notes:

Former Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) told Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Thursday that Democrats are not trying to remove President Donald Trump with impeachment, but instead are focused on kneecapping his second term by flipping the Senate so he can’t get anything done.

“Let’s skip over the process,” Gowdy said. “The process, the three month long inquiry investigation was laughable. But they voted. That’s the House’s prerogative. They voted, not a single Republican went along with them. In fact, they didn’t even keep all the Democrats. But the House exercised its prerogative and they impeached the president.”

“There is no mathematical way he is ever going to be convicted and they know that,” Gowdy continued. “So their goal cannot be to remove Donald Trump from office, it is to neuter his second term. I think he is going to win in November. It’s to neuter that second term by targeting the Cory Gardners and the Martha McSallys and the Thom Tillises and the Susan Collins and Joni Ernst because if Trump wins and doesn’t have the Senate then he is not going to get any judicial vacancies filled and he’s not going to replace a Supreme Court Justice if he or she retires.”

One of the major accomplishments of the Trump administration is the reshaping of the judiciary. President Trump has appointed a record number of judges to serve in the federal appeal courts.

On December 19th, The National Review reported:

Let’s first put the confirmation results in some statistical perspective. From 1981 through last year, the Senate confirmed an average of 45 judges, or 5.5 percent of the judiciary, per year. This year’s total is more than twice the annual average and constitutes 11.9 percent of the judiciary. It’s the second-highest confirmation total in a single year in American history.

Those 102 confirmations include 20 to the U.S. Court of Appeals, the third-highest annual total in history. President Donald Trump has appointed 50 appeals court judges in his first three years, compared to 55 appointed by President Barack Obama — in eight years. And this is only the second time in American history that the Senate has confirmed double-digit appeals court nominations three years in a row. The only downside is that only one current appeals court vacancy exists anywhere in the country right now, the fewest in more than four decades.

The Democrats understand that the legacy of judges will be a lasting legacy. They desperately need to take the Senate in order to stop the continuing confirmations of judges. That strategy is much more logical than a futile effort to unseat a President who is popular with most Americans (although hated by the Washington establishment).

Drip, Drip, Drip…

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There are still a lot of unanswered questions about the whole Russian collusion thing. I suspect the truth will gradually come out over the next two or three months, but I wonder if the dyed-in-the-wool Trump haters will believe the truth when it does come out. Meanwhile, there are some very interesting hints of things to come that periodically show up.

The Gateway Pundit posted an article today about some comments made by Trey Gowdy this morning on “Sunday Morning Futures” with Maria Bartiromo. There is a video in the article, but here are the relevant quotes:

Trey Gowdy: There’s a lot of serious questions that need to be asked. When did the Russian probe begin? When did it become hopelessly co-mingled with the Trump campaign? What was the factual predicate? Where are the transcripts, if any exist between the informants and the telephone calls to George Papadopoulos? Why the defensive briefing so inadequate of President Trump? Why didn’t they do a follow-up defensive briefing? That doesn’t even get to the whole FISA abuse in the fall. That’s just the spring and summer of 2016. There’s lots of questions and I hope Bill Barr finds someone who is skilled enough to answer them…

Maria Bartiromo: I’m really glad you brought that up. The FBI’s conversations with George Papadopoulos. Because when the FBI agent sends in informants to someone they’re looking at, typically those conversations are recorded, right? Those people are wired.

Trey Gowdy: Yeah, if the bureau is going to sends in an informant the informant is going to be wired. If the bureau is monitoring telephone calls there’s going to be a transcript of that. Some of us are fortunate enough to know those transcripts exist. But they haven’t been made public. And I think one in particular has the potential to actually persuade people… There is some information in these transcripts that has the potential to be a game changer if it’s ever made public… If you have exculpatory evidence that was not shown to the court, that ain’t good. I’ve seen it. Johnny (Ratcliffe) has seen it. I’d love for your viewers to see it.

…Trey Gowdy: We can call it a dossier. It sounds official. It’s really something the National Enquirer would blush if they printed it. So we know it was used four times by the United States government. What we’re trying to figure out is if it was used a fifth time in the intelligence assessment and you’ve got Brennan and Clapper and Comey, all three who know full well whether or not it was used in the intelligence assessment, but they’re giving you different versions. So there is information that exists in December of 2016 and I hope anyone who has access to it, Senator Burr, Devin (Nunes), whoever is open minded, go look at that and I think it will help you understand whether or not that dossier, that unverified hearsay, was used five times or just four times by the United States government. It’s pretty bad if it was used four times. It’s REALLY BAD if it was used five times!

So what can we expect? More attacks on Attorney General Barr, attacks on John Durham, and almost manic attempts to remove President Trump from office will occur in an attempt to prevent the truth from getting out. If the truth is about to come out, look for a major distraction–an indictment of someone that can be somehow connected to President Trump or some such other distraction. The people involved in the misuse of government agencies during the Obama administration are going to play hard ball. The only way to prevent this abuse from happening in the future is to play hard ball back. It is going to get ugly, but if justice prevails, it will be fun to watch.

 

It’s Hard To Get Anything Done When You Are A Lame-Duck Congress

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I will admit that I am becoming very cynical about anyone being charged for misdeeds and abuses of power during the Obama administration. It seems as if the House of Representatives is making an effort, but I can’t help but think it is a lame effort that is simply too late.

The Gateway Pundit posted an article today about the upcoming hearings in the House of Representatives. The article notes that on November 22, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Representative Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) issued subpoenas to both former FBI Director James Comey and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Former FBI Director Comey intends to fight the subpoena in court. Former Attorney General Lynch has not yet publicly responded to the subpoena. All they have to do is tie the case up in court until January when the Democrats take control of the House. The Democrats will drop the matter, and the FBI and Justice Department corruption will continue unabated. I hope I am wrong about this, but I doubt it.

The article reports:

“While the authority for congressional subpoenas is broad, it does not cover the right to misuse closed hearings as a political stunt to promote political as opposed to legislative agendas,” Kelley (one of Comey’s attorneys, David Kelley) said.

On November 22, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) issued subpoenas to both Comey and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch. The former FBI Director responded on Thursday, tweeting that he will “resist” a “‘closed-door’ thing” — ironically claiming it was over his concerns about selective leaking.

Comey infamously leaked a memo of a private conversation between Trump and himself at the White House. This led to the Justice Department Inspector General conducting an investigation into classification issues related to his leaked memo.

While Comey may be attempting to claim that he is doing this for the sake of transparency, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) has pointed out that during his last testimony he used the fact that it was public to dodge answering nearly 100 questions.

“So why in the world would he want to go back to a setting where he knows he can’t answer all the questions,” Gowdy asked on Fox News on Monday.

Stall, stall, stall, while the American people hope that someday justice will occur.

Based On What?

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Yesterday Mollie Hemingway posted an article at The Federalist about some recent statements by Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.).

The article reports:

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) recently suggested the FBI did nothing wrong when it used at least one government informant to secretly collect information on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Public reports indicate, however, that Gowdy never even reviewed the relevant documents on the matter subpoenaed by Congress. In fact, a spokeswoman for Gowdy told The Federalist that the congressman doesn’t even know what documents and records were subpoenaed by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI).

So why did he make the statement he made? If he didn’t know what documents were subpoenaed and hadn’t seen them, what was he talking about?

The article continues:

According to government sources who leaked information to The New York Times and Washington Post, the subpoena dealt with an individual who was secretly gathering information on the Trump campaign on behalf of the federal government. Media outlets had reported government officials’ claims they couldn’t comply with the subpoena because revealing any details about the individual would cause loss of life and grave threats to national security. The same media outlets then used leaks from government officials to report the individual’s personally identifying information — up to and including his name.

Along with Gowdy, HPSCI Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) received a classified briefing on the subpoenaed information. Seven other members of Congress did as well. However, multiple press reports indicate the classified briefings reportedly did not satisfy the subpoena.

The story about the spy in the Trump campaign gets stranger by the day. If the FBI was not investigating the campaign, but was investigating attempts to infiltrate the campaign, why didn’t they tell Donald Trump what they were doing? What did they do with any information they gathered? It is particularly odd that they were the ones infiltrating the campaign. Were they also watching Hillary Clinton’s campaign for attempts to infiltrate the campaign?

The article concludes:

During the CBS News interview, co-host Gayle King asked Gowdy if he had received any blowback from GOP lawmakers for his comments about the FBI’s behavior regarding the informant. Gowdy responded oddly, invoking Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), neither of whom were invited to last week’s DOJ briefing.

“The folks who have seen the information I think have the same perspective I have,” Gowdy said, referring to Rubio and Cotton. “Those who have not seen the information, I don’t know what informs their perspective.”

Just as with Gowdy, there is no evidence either Rubio or Cotton has seen all the records HPSCI subpoenaed or even the subpoena HPSCI issued.

We don’t yet know the full story, but this looks like a giant cover-up of seriously illegal political activity by law enforcement agencies that are supposed to be politically neutral.

News From The Coming Week

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Clarice Feldman posted an article at The American Thinker today highlighting things that will be in the news in the coming week. That’s not as much of a challenge as it sounds as many of these stories were breaking late Friday and early Saturday.

The first story deals with the recent budget fiasco.

The article reports:

Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, unhampered because of the filibuster rule, which allows them to block any budget not supported by a Senate supermajority of 60, and aware of the desperate need of our military for funding, publicly rejoiced that they were able to force through Congress a ridiculously extravagant budget.  Fiscal conservatives were furious, but the president had little choice but to sign the bill into law.  “He who laughs last laughs best” is the saying, and in this case, there may be no joy in Demville.  James Freeman at the Wall Street Journal explains:

The political left is getting nervous because a virtuous and lawful reduction in federal spending is suddenly looking much more likely.  This column is told that Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R., Wisc.) is now on board.

Specifically, Mr. Ryan likes the idea of paring back the huge spending hikes in the recently enacted budget bill.  While the budget required 60 votes in the Senate and therefore Democratic support, a “rescission” bill to repeal the spending increases needs only a simple majority in each house.

If the Republicans plan to remain in the majority, they have no choice but to cut this budget. Otherwise the conservative wing of the party will happily vote them out of office for reneging on every promise they made while running for office.

The second story to watch for will be the beginning of criminally prosecuting illegal aliens as they cross the border. Crossing the border is no longer going to be taken lightly.

The third story is the end of the standoff between Congress and the FBI and DOJ.

The article reports:

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse broke the welcome news early Saturday morning.

Until today the only people allowed to review the full Title-1 FISA application were Trey Gowdy, Adam Schiff, Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte and Rep John Ratcliffe.

In an interesting development, the Department of Justice has responded to HPSCI Chairman Devin Nunes notifying him the DOJ will allow all members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees full access to review the unredacted FBI/DOJ FISA application used to gain a Title-1 surveillance warrant against U.S. citizen Carter Page.

According to CNN: ‘Separately, Justice Department spokesman Ian Prior said the department on Monday will supplement its document production to the House Judiciary Committee by producing another 1,000 pages of materials in response to a subpoena issued by committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte.’

This will probably lead to the declassification of the FISA applications. That will probably tell us all we need to know about the Russian collusion investigation and its roots.

The final news article for the coming week will be information about the investigation of the Clinton Foundation.

The article reports:

The story of the Clintons’ misuse of charity solicitation, reporting, and accounting laws begins in 1997 and continues on past Clinton’s term as president where people familiar to us in the present DOJ-FBI investigations failed to prosecute the Clintons for obvious charity fraud and violation of federal and state law on charitable solicitations.  The most recent investigation of the Clinton foundation took place under Rod Rosenstein, then U.S. attorney for Baltimore.  He utterly flubbed the task, as Ortel (Charles Ortel, a retired investment banker) notes.

…At the moment, some state attorneys general are investigating Clinton foundation fraud and illegality.  So are some foreign governments whose laws were violated by the foundation.  While in the U.S. opportunities to prosecute longstanding frauds may be barred by the passage of time and the statute of limitations, this latest Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund transaction seems not to be.  If I were to speculate, I’d suggest that it is not unlikely (now that the Clintons are fairly politically neutered) that whistleblowers inside the foundation, the donors’ offices, and the government – particularly the IRS – may come forward, at long last, to expose the frauds which Rosenstein, Mueller, and Comey seem to have lacked the integrity and guts to do.

This week may be the week that some of the swamp gets drained.t

Does Anyone In Congress Have Any Sense Of Perspective?

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Breitbart reported yesterday that Representative Trey Gowdy plans to investigate the use of private emails by government officials in the White House. The initial focus is on Jared Kushner.

The article reports:

The Washington Post first reported Monday that Gowdy, along with ranking Democrat Elijah Cummings (D-MD), wrote to White House counsel Don McGahn and leaders of two dozen federal agencies requesting information about the use of personal email accounts.

Gowdy succeeded Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) as chairman of the committee as it was coming under increasing pressure to turn up the heat on the administration, just as it had so thoroughly investigated, in 2015 and 2016, Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of state.

Politico first reported Sunday that Kushner, Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, had used a private email account for occasional White House business. Kushner released a statement saying that the emails sent from his personal account were forwarded to his official address and stored in accordance with policy.

The italics are mine. Pray tell, what were the consequences of Hillary Clinton’s having a secret server and deleting thousands of emails? Somehow I seem to remember that there was a lot of talk, but nothing was ever done. In the case of Jared Kushner, the emails were forwarded to his official address and saved. I think there is a difference here.

The article concludes:

“Fewer than 100 emails from January through August were either sent to or returned by Mr. Kushner to colleagues in the White House from his personal email account,” Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Kushner, said in a statement. “These usually forwarded news articles or political commentary and most often occurred when someone initiated the exchange by sending an email to his personal rather than his White House address.”

Kushner’s usage also differs from Clinton’s in that these instances are infrequent, none appear to have been deleted, and there was no indicated classified information sent. Kushner also did not use a homebrew private server to send the emails as Clinton did. Yet it is likely to draw cries of hypocrisy from opponents of the administration considering how central the Clinton emails were to the 2016 campaign.

The Gowdy/Cummings letter asks for the names of any non-career official who has used a personal account for official business, according to the Post, as well as the names of any officials who use “text messages, phone-based message applications, or encryption software.” The letter reportedly says that the requests are in order to see whether the administration is following records retention laws.

If there were no consequences for Hillary Clinton, why even bother to investigate this? So far the law enforcement arm of the Trump Administration has been no better than the law enforcement arm of the Obama Administration. The current administration is probably our last chance to get rid of the corruption in Washington. It is becoming obvious that Congress is not interested in helping.

Some People In Congress Have Forgotten Who They Work For

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The Washington Examiner is reporting today that Democrats on the House Select Committee on Benghazi voted against releasing the findings of the committee.

The article reports:

Sections of witness testimony and internal documents remain classified, although committee Chairman Trey Gowdy has pushed the White House to clear as much information as possible for release.

“We urge the Obama administration to clear for public release all of the supporting evidence and documents referenced in the more than 2,100 footnotes in the report, including all of the transcripts of the committee’s witness interviews and all of the video footage from the drones operating over Benghazi during the attacks,” the committee’s Republican members said in a statement. “The administration should do this as fast as possible so the American people can see all of the evidence for themselves.”

As Americans, we are entitled to see the results of this investigation without any filters. We should be smart enough to read it and draw our own conclusions. It’s time to end secrecy in Washington.

This Might Be The Reason The Investigation Is Taking So Long

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Yesterday The Daily Caller reported that the State Department gave the House Select Committee on Benghazi 1,300 pages of new emails from Ambassador Chris Stevens. There have been seven Congressional committees that have investigated the attack in Benghazi, and this is the first time the State Department has turned over these emails. I don’t know if this sort of behavior is typical of the State Department, but it is definitely typical of the Obama Administration. We saw the same thing with the investigation into the politicalization of the Internal Revenue Service–stall, stall, and stall some more, and then claim that the investigation is dragging on because it is political or that the investigation is old news.

Unfortunately I believe that Hillary Clinton will walk away from her day in Congress unscathed. I believe that there is a reason she insisted on a public hearing. She is going to say that the investigation is political and cite as her proof the fact that thus far there is no smoking gun. Somehow the fact that the information needed to do the investigation has been withheld from the Committee will be overlooked.

The article concludes:

Gowdy (South Carolina U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy, who chairs the Select Committee) gave a different characterization of the emails during his interview on Sunday, however.

He said that Stevens’ communiques show that he began requesting additional security in June 2012, when he was appointed ambassador. Instead of receiving help, though, Gowdy said that State Department officials asked Stevens to help craft “public messaging advice” on the precarious situation in the north African country.

Gowdy said that other emails show that one of Clinton’s top aides, Jake Sullivan, asked Stevens to vet an intelligence report written by Clinton’s longtime friend, Sidney Blumenthal.

In a statement to TheDC, Benghazi Committee press secretary Matt Wolking says that the release of additional Stevens emails proves that the committee “is breaking new ground despite the Obama administration’s many delays.”

It is up to the voters to hold their elected officials accountable. The behavior of Hillary Clinton in regard to Benghazi is unacceptable. Remember–the only person to serve jail time for the attack on Benghazi was the person who made a video that had nothing to do with the attack and the Obama Administration lied about the role of the video in the attack.

Sometimes Lying Just Gets Old

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Yesterday CNN posted the transcript of an interview of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by Brianna Keilar, CNN’s Senior White House Correspondent.

The is part of the transcript:

KEILAR:  One of the issues that has eroded some trust that we’ve seen is the issue of your email practices while you were secretary of state.  I think there’s a lot of people who don’t understand what your thought process was on that.

Can you tell me the story of how you decided to delete 33,000 emails and how that deletion was executed?

CLINTON:  Well, let’s start from the beginning.  Everything I did was permitted.  There was no law.  There was no regulation.  There was nothing that did not give me the full authority to decide how I was going to communicate.  Previous secretaries of state have said they did the same thing.  And people across the government knew that I used one device – maybe it was because I am not the most technically capable person and wanted to make it as easy as possible.

KEILAR:  But you said they – that they did the same thing, that they used a personal server and –

KEILAR:  – subpoena deleted emails from them?

CLINTON:  You know, you’re starting with so many assumptions that are – I’ve never had a subpoena.  There is – again, let’s take a deep breath here.  Everything I did was permitted by law and regulation.  I had one device.  When I mailed anybody in the government, it would go into the government system.

Now I didn’t have to turn over anything.  I chose to turn over 55,000 pages because I wanted to go above and beyond what was expected of me because I knew the vast majority of everything that was official already was in the State Department system.

And now I think it’s kind of fun.  People get a real-time behind-the-scenes look at what I was emailing about and what I was communicating about.

KEILAR:  Wearing warm socks, you said to John Podesta.

CLINTON:  Exactly and – or, you know –

KEILAR:  Working a fax machine –

CLINTON:  – yes, a secure fax machine, which is harder to work than the regular.

So yes, this is being blown up with no basis in law or in fact.  That’s fine.  I get it.  This is being, in effect, used by the Republicans in the Congress, OK.  But I want people to understand what the truth is.  And the truth is everything I did was permitted and I went above and beyond what anybody could have expected in making sure that if the State Department didn’t capture something, I made a real effort to get it to them.

And I had no obligation to do any of that.  So let’s set the record straight.  And those 55,000 pages, they will be released over the course of this year.  People  can, again, make their own judgments.

I know you say you were permitted.  I just am trying to understand some of the thought process behind it.  One former state attorney general, a Democrat, told CNN that they know of no lawyer who would advise someone, a client, facing the kind of scrutiny that you’ve been facing to wipe their server.

I mean, what do you say to that?

CLINTON:  Well, what I say to that is turned over everything I was obligated to turn over.  And then I moved on.  People delete their personal emails, their work-related emails, whatever emails they have on a regular basis.  I turned over everything that I could imagine.

I added the underlines and italics.

So what are the facts? The National Journal posted a picture of the subpoena that Hillary Clinton says she never got. The subpoena was sent to her in March:

SubpoenaOfHillaryClintonThe National Journal reports:

That (Hillary Clinton’s statement that she had never had a subpoena) drew a rebuke from Trey Gowdy, the GOP chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, who said the need to “correct the inaccuracy” led him to break with his practice of not releasing subpoenas the panel has issued.

“The committee immediately subpoenaed Clinton personally after learning the full extent of her unusual email arrangement with herself, and would have done so earlier if the State Department or Clinton had been forthcoming that State did not maintain custody of her records and only Secretary Clinton herself had her records when Congress first requested them,” Gowdy said in a statement.

The subpoena sought Clinton’s messages from 2011 and 2012 related to Libya and the 2012 attack on a diplomatic compound and CIA facility in Benghazi that killed four Americans.

Very few people have honorable reasons for wiping a computer hard disk clean–particularly after they have been subpoenaed.

On March 3, 2015, The Atlantic reported:

On January 13, 2009, Hillary Clinton attended her first confirmation hearing as a Secretary of State nominee. The same day, with Bush officials still under fire for using private email accounts to circumvent public records laws, someone registered Clintonemail.com, a domain that now appears to be at the center of a scandal. “Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department,” The New York Times reported in a story published late Monday. “Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.”

This was willful, flagrant disregard for public records rules.

Why does this matter? Other than the disregard for the Federal Records Act, it means that we will never have an accurate record of Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State. The record we do have will have omissions and changes, and we will have no way of knowing what is missing or what is edited. Evidently Mrs. Clinton did not feel that the law applied to her.

 

This Is Not Really A Surprise

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The hope of the Hillary Clinton for President campaign is that by the time Americans vote, they will be so tired of hearing about Benghazi and Mrs. Clinton’s private email server that they won’t even care. So far that strategy has been somewhat successful, but it’s success may be drawing to a close.

On Monday the Daily Caller posted a story about emails provided to a House Committee by Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton insider.

The article reports:

The new Blumenthal-Clinton correspondence was included in a batch of emails Blumenthal gave in response to a subpoena from the Benghazi committee. He will testify in a closed-door session in front of the panel on Tuesday.

It is unclear exactly why Blumenthal’s emails are only now being provided to the committee, though there are two likely explanations. Either Clinton failed to turn the records over to the State Department in December, or the State Department received the emails from Clinton but for some reason failed to turn them over to the Benghazi committee, which is led by South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy.

This, of course, is contrary to Mrs. Clinton’s claim in March that she had turned over all of her emails.

The article further reports:

Clinton said her handlers had sifted through her private email account to find her official emails. She said her personal emails were deleted. A private email server Clinton used to host the email account has also reportedly been wiped clean.

The rest of Clinton’s emails will be released in increments beginning at the end of the month.

This does matter. However, it will probably not matter to Mrs. Clinton’s supporters. I believe that there is no level of dishonesty that Mrs. Clinton could be guilty of that would derail her presidential campaign. That really does not say good things about the American voter.

 

Unfortunately Both Political Parties Are Involved In Benghazi

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The Republicans control the House of Representatives and the Senate. Therefore,it should be easy to investigate what happened at Benghazi, despite the fact that the Democrats involved are experts at stonewalling. Well, new information that has come to light indicates that part of the problem with the investigation may be that there are also Republicans involved that would like to keep the details of what happened at Benghazi secret.

On Thursday, The Daily Caller posted an article about some new information that has come out as a result of the emails that are finally getting released.

The article reports:

Perhaps most intriguing in the recent email batch is a one-line note to Mrs. Clinton from a top advisor, Deputy Chief of Staff Jake Sullivan. The subject of the September 10, 2011 email is simply “Rogers.” The note in its entirety reads: “Apparently wants to see you to talk Libya/weapons.”

“Rogers” is then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, a Republican. The email was unearthed at the deep end of the document dump and first noted in a piece by Catherine Herridge and Pamela Browne of Fox News.

Chairman Rogers and other GOP House committee chairman spent a good deal of time opposing the formation of the Benghazi Select Committee. As Eli Lake reported last year, Rogers “warned his colleagues” about the committee. Lake reported that “the chairmen of the House Intelligence, Armed Services, and Government Reform committees — Reps. Rogers, Buck McKeon, and Darrell Issa, respectively — all opposed the formation of a select committee on Benghazi.”

The story goes on to detail the connection between Representative Rogers and his wife and Benghazi. In 2014, Representative Rogers abruptly resigned from the House of Representative. About the same time his wife left an executive position at Aegis Defense Services, a private defense contractor. This may be totally coincidental, but it illustrates one thing–America has developed a political class that sometimes puts its personal interests ahead of the interests of our country. That is a major problem in our government right now.

Please follow the link above to The Daily Caller to read the entire story. This story is one more example of why term limits are a good idea. There seems to be something in the water in Washington that makes people compromise the principles they claimed to have before they got there. Maybe if we limit their terms of office, the effect of the water will be minimal.

We owe a debt to Representative Trey Gowdy for continuing this investigation despite opposition from his own party.

This Isn’t Going Away

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This is a copy of a letter posted at the Center for Security Policy. The letter was written to Representative Trey Gowdy, Chairman House Select Committee on Benghazi and signed by a group of American leaders seeking the truth about the attack on the CIA Annex in Benghazi.

This is the letter:

October 10, 2014

Hon. Trey Gowdy
Chairman
House Select Committee on Benghazi
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Mr. Chairman:

As you are well aware, on May 8, 2014, the House of Representatives adopted H. Res. 567 “Providing for the Establishment of the Select Committee on the Events Surrounding the 2012 Terrorist Attack in Benghazi, Libya”. With the publication this week of former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s book, Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leaders in War and Peace, the need for such an inquiry has become both indisputable and even more urgent.

In particular, it is clear that there is more – and likely much more – that has yet to be established about the murderous September 11, 2012 jihadist attack on American facilities in Benghazi and those assigned to them. Indeed, former Secretary Panetta is providing an account of the Benghazi attacks that differs dramatically from what President Obama and his spokesmen presented in the hours, days and weeks after the attack.

For example, when shown a video clip of the former security contractors who defended the CIA Annex, who described how they were told to stand down that night by their superiors, Mr. Panetta agreed that Congress needed to investigate their story. Secretary Panetta has claimed that he set in motion a number of military units that night. Why was none of them directed to actually reach Benghazi? Who gave the ultimate order to U.S. military forces not to come to the rescue of our people in Benghazi that night? Was it the Secretary of State? The President? Or someone else? If so, on whose authority?

In addition, Mr. Panetta is saying in the course of his book tour that he disagreed with the assessment of CIA Director David Petraeus that the attacks were a demonstration turned violent. But what was the source of Gen. Petraeus’ assessment, since we know from other congressional committees that the CIA station chief in Tripoli was emailing the Director’s deputy, Mike Morell, within 48 hours of the attacks, telling him emphatically there had been no demonstration in Benghazi that night?

The need for full accountability for what really happened in Benghazi – and to establish how to prevent such murderous attacks on our foreign missions in the future – has taken on even greater urgency in light of recent developments with ominous implications for American diplomats, military personnel and security contractors overseas. These include:

  • This summer, we had to evacuate our embassy in Tripoli, Libya because of threatening jihadist operations there.
  • This week, our embassy in Sanaa, Yemen has come under attack – reportedly putting another 80 Americans at risk from jihadists who are openly boasting of their plans to kill Americans.
  • Should Baghdad fall to the Islamic State in coming weeks or, more likely, the Green Zone come under enemy fire, some1000 of our countrymen and women could be at risk.

Has our government learned the lessons of Benghazi? Does it have actionable plans in place that will provide for the defense of our embassies and people in Sanaa or Baghdad?

We believe that Congress has a responsibility to get to the bottom of such questions as a matter of the utmost urgency. Otherwise, more American lives may be on the line and needlessly lost.

Clearly, the fact that the House of Representatives is in recess is not an impediment to holding hearings in the immediate future as you and other Members of Congress have been returning to Washington in recent days to hold high-profile hearings concerning a Secret Service scandal and the spread of Ebola. It strains credulity that Congress cannot find time for hearings about an act of war in which four Americans – including our ambassador – were killed, with many others seriously wounded as sovereign American territory was attacked by terrorist enemies determined to murder more of us. We know for a fact that the Islamic State, al Qaeda, Iran and a growing universe of jihadists are busy plotting to create more Benghazis, here and elsewhere.

What is the select congressional committee doing to prevent that?

We respectfully request that you make plain to the American people, who are seeking the truth and anxious to avoid any repetition of Benghazi that might arise from its continued suppression, that you will promptly secure the testimony under oath of Secretary Panetta and the other principals and key subordinates who have first-hand knowledge of the events that took place on the night of the 11th of September. In light of the stakes, hearings for this purpose should be held this month, not weeks and weeks from now.

Sincerely (signatories as of 4:15 PM DST – 10/10/14),

  • Andrew C. McCarthy, Chairman, Benghazi Accountability Coalition
  • Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., President & CEO, Center for Security Policy
  • Charles Woods, Father of Ty Woods, victim of 9/11/2012 terror attack in Benghazi
  • Michael Ingmire, Musician, Writer, Activist, Uncle of Sean Smith, victim of 9/11/2012 terror attack in Benghazi
  • Allen Roth, President, Secure America Now
  • Sandy Rios,  Director of Governmental Affairs for AFA
  • Paul Caprio, Director of Family Pac Federal
  • Kenneth Blackwell, former U.S. ambassador, UN Human Rights Commission
  • Richard A. Viguerie, Chairman, ConservativeHQ.com
  • Dick Brauer, Colonel, US Air Force (Retired), Co-Founder of Special Operations Speaks and member, Citizens Commission on Benghazi
  • Ken Benway, Lieutenant Colonel, US Army (Retired), Co-Founder of Special Operations Speaks
  • Dennis B. Haney, Lietenant Colonel, US Air Force (Retired), Special Operations Speaks
  • Daniel W. (Jake) Jacobowitz, Political-Military Consultant
  • Andrea Lafferty, President, Traditional Values Coalition
  • Rev. Lou Sheldon, Chairman & Founder, Traditional Values Coalition
  • Thomas McInerney, Lieutenant General, USAF (Retired), Citizens Commission on Benghazi
  • Wayne V. Morris, Colonel, US Marine Corps, (Retired), Citizens Commission on Benghazi
  • Kevin M. Shipp, Citizens Commission on Benghazi
  • Charles Jones, Brigadier General, US Air Force (Retired), Citizens Commission on Benghazi
  • John A. Shaw, Citizens Commission on Benghazi
  • Clare Lopez, Vice President, Center for Security Policy
  • Joseph E. Schmitz, Former Inspector General of the Department of Defense
  • Tera Dahl, Executive Director, Council on Global Security
  • Brigitte Gabriel, Founder & CEO, ACT for America
  • Anita MonCrief, Advisory Board Member , Black Conservatives Fund 
  • Elaine Donnelly, President, Center for Military Readiness
  • Allen B. West, Lieutenant Colonel, US Army (Retired)
  • Fred Fleitz, Former CIA analyst and Senior Fellow, Center for Security Policy
  • Roger Noriega, former US Assistant Secretary of State and Ambassador to the OAS
  • Henry F. Cooper, Ambassador and former Chief U.S. Negotiator at the Defense and Space Talks and former Director of the Strategic Defense Initiative
  • Paul E Vallely, Major General, US Army (Retired), Chairman, Stand Up America
  • Roger Aronoff, Citizens Commission on Benghazi
  • William G. “Jerry” Boykin, Lt. General, US Army Special Forces Command (Retired)
  • James A. “Ace” Lyons, Admiral, US Navy (Retired), President/CEO, LION Associates, LLC
  • Dr. Ron Crews, CH, Colonel, US Army (Retired), Executive Director, Chaplain Alliance for Religious Liberty
  • C. Preston Noell III, President, Tradition, Family, Property, Inc.
  • Kenneth R. Timmerman, Author, Dark Forces:  The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi
  • David N. Bossie, President, Citizens United
  • Ginni Thomas, President, Liberty Consulting, LLC
  • John Fonte, Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute

The list of people who have signed this letter is an indication of the concern about the seeming cover-up of the events in Benghazi. It is time for the truth to come out.

 

A Chilling Thought

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On Friday, John Fund posted a very interesting article at the National Review Online. The article deals with the behavior of the National Park Rangers during the shutdown. On Wednesday the House Oversight Committee began an investigation into that behavior.

The article reports a very obvious question asked by Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina:

Gowdy wanted to know why Jarvis had allowed “pot-smoking” Occupy Wall Street protesters to camp overnight illegally in Washington’s McPherson Square park for 100 days, yet put up barricades to keep veterans out of war memorials on the first day of the shutdown. By not issuing a single citation to the Occupy campers, Gowdy argued, the Park Service was treating them better than the nation’s military veterans. “Can you cite me the regulation that required you to erect barricades from accessing a monument that they built?” he demanded.

…Representative Darrell Issa was equally stern with Jarvis, noting that, since the Park Police weren’t furloughed during the shutdown, “an open-air monument was guarded by the same number of people to prevent Americans from getting in as would allow them to safely go in and out.”

The article goes on to list some of the more bizarre closings during the government shutdown. Please follow the link above to read the list.

The article concludes:

But now that the shutdown is over, it’s important for Chairman Issa and others to figure out how it was manipulated politically. Because if the Park Service can become a pawn in the Obama administration’s political wars, does anyone doubt that the integrity of other even more vital agencies wouldn’t be at risk in any future budget showdown?

The fact that the signs closing the parks appeared so rapidly (have you ever tried to get the government to do anything quickly?) and the way the Park Rangers behaved convinces me that this was a planned event by the Obama Administration. Frankly I think the shutdown was used to manipulate the American people, and we fell for it. Hopefully many of us will begin to ask why the Park Rangers followed the orders to make the shutdown uncomfortable for average Americans and how the signs appeared so quickly. I think we were played as fools.

 

 

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