News Coverage about
Benghazi, "Emailgate" and "Unmasking"

May 9: Fox News: Why was Director Comey canned?
President Trump’s seemingly abrupt decision Tuesday to fire FBI Director James Comey was made at the recommendation of top Justice Department officials who claimed that his controversial handling of the Hillary Clinton email case last year rendered him unfit for the position.  Comey had been the subject of a review by the very top of the Trump Justice Department. Newly confirmed Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein penned an extensive memo for Attorney General Jeff Sessions outlining concerns with Comey’s conduct during and after the Clinton email probe.

May 5: The Daily Caller: Dept. of State told to release latest batch of Hillary’s server emails
A federal judge ordered the Department of State to release new emails stored on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private server regarding the 2012 attack in Benghazi, a nonprofit government watchdog group announced Friday.  Two previously unreleased emails have a subject line “Quick Summary of POTUS Calls to Presidents of Libya and Egypt” and were sent two days after terrorists attacked the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, according to Judicial Watch.

April 5: Fox News: Unmasking had detailed info on everyday activities
The intelligence reports at the center of the Susan Rice unmasking controversy were detailed, and almost resembled a private investigator’s file, according to a Republican congressman familiar with the documents. "This is information about their everyday lives," Rep. Peter King of New York, a member of the House Intelligence committee said. "Sort of like in a divorce case where lawyers are hired, investigators are hired just to find out what the other person is doing from morning until night and then you try to piece it together later on.”

February 16: Fox News: Chaffetz seeks to charge Clinton aid in Hillary Emailgate
The Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, who has refused Democratic requests to investigate possible conflicts of interest involving President Donald Trump, is seeking criminal charges against a former State Department employee who helped set up Hillary Clinton's private email server.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday asking him to convene a grand jury or charge Bryan Pagliano, the computer specialist who helped establish Clinton's server while she was secretary of state.  Pagliano did not comply with two subpoenas ordering him to appear before the oversight panel. The GOP-led committee later voted to hold him in contempt of Congress.  Chaffetz said in a statement that allowing Pagliano's conduct "to go unaddressed would gravely harm Congress' ability to conduct oversight."

January 12: Fox News: Clinton’s use of a Private Server is back on Page One!
This week during the NFL playoff game the FBI posted on its website more than 300 emails that Clinton had sent to an unnamed colleague not in the government that had fallen into the hands of foreign powers. It turns out -- and the Sunday night release proves this -- that Blumenthal was his computer was hacked by intelligence agents from at least three foreign governments and that they obtained the emails Clinton had sent to him that contained state secrets. Sources believe that the hostile hackers were the Russians and the Chinese and the friendly hackers were the Israelis.  The revelations makes the case against Clinton far more serious than before because now harm can be shown.  Indeed, Trump AG nominee  Jeff Sessions, a harsh critic of Clinton's, told the Senate Judiciary Committee he would step aside from any further investigation of Clinton, thereby acknowledging that the investigation will probably be opened again.

January 12: Fox Business News: Clinton Email Criminal Investigation Reopened
The criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton regarding her use of a private email server while she was Secretary of State is back in the spotlight after the FBI recently released another batch of email documents.  “The FBI has demonstrated conclusively and beyond the doubt that states secrets that she sent to (former Clinton aide) Sid Blumenthal were accessed by hostile powers, Russia and China and friendly hackers, if there could be such a thing, the Israelis,” Judicial Analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano said.  According to Judge Napolitano, one of the metrics used by the Justice Department to decide on whether or not to indict someone is to ask if any harm has been done as a result of the actions by the accused.

December 17: The Daily Caller: Lynch responds to Clinton Campaign Attacks on FBI
Attorney General Loretta Lynch is defending the FBI against allegations that the bureau mishandled investigations of email hacks of Democrats and focused too much attention on Hillary Clinton’s private email server.  “I can tell you that this investigation was taken seriously from the beginning,” Lynch said in an interview with CNN that airs Sunday.  She was responding to complaints raised by Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta in an op-ed published by The Washington Post on Friday. Podesta, who had his Gmail account hacked during the campaign, argued that “something is deeply broken at the FBI.”

November 2: Fox News: [video] Possible Conflict of Interest at the Department of Justice
A Justice Department official with close ties to Hillary Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta sent him a private email on non-government email accounts giving him a  "heads up" last year to warn that lawmakers might question witnesses about the presidential candidate's private emails, messages released Wednesday by WikiLeaks show. 

November 2: Politco: DOJ official gave Clinton a Heads Up about Emailgate
A senior Department of Justice official gave Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman a "heads up" about new developments related to Clinton's email use as secretary of state, according to hacked emails published Wednesday by WikiLeaks.  In May of 2015, Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik emailed Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta to tell him about potential developments at an impending congressional hearing, as well as about a new development in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for the emails Clinton turned over to the State Department from her private account.

Kadzik's wrote on his personal email account "Heads up… There is a [House Judiciary Committee] oversight hearing today where the head of our Civil Division will testify. Likely to get questions on State Department emails. Another filing in the FOIA case went in last night or will go in this am that indicates it will be awhile (2016) before the State Department posts the emails.”  Podesta then forwarded the email to a cadre of top Clinton aides, adding: “Additional chances for mischief.”

October 30: Independent Journal Review:  Trump: Why Did AG Lynch threaten FBI Director Comey before letter sent to Congress?
At a campaign rally in Colorado, Trump said again that Bill Clinton discussed more than “golf and grandchildren” with the Attorney General in the 39 minutes he spent with her aboard a plane on the tarmac in Arizona.  After citing a startling statistic that 97% of the Department of Justice employees' political donations go to Hillary Clinton, Trump put forth the proposition that Bill Clinton was offering Lynch an extension of her appointment as Attorney General.  Some political observers have gone further, noting that such high stakes in the political election connected to protecting Hillary Clinton from federal prosecution over her email practices might require an extraordinary reward, such as a Supreme Court appointment.

Trump went on to hold this out as the reason that Attorney General Loretta Lynch attacked Director Comey about re-opening the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails.  “Now, the Attorney General is fighting the FBI, because the FBI finally did what was right,” Trump said. “And also, something that should have been done a long time ago.”

October 29:  Independent Journal Review: Attorney General Lynch Issued Dire Warning
to FBI Director Comey before he relaunched an Email Investigation:
Attorney General Loretta Lynch and senior officials at the U.S. Department of Justice reportedly made it “abundantly clear” to FBI Director James Comey that they didn’t want him to inform Congress of the agency’s relaunched investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email use.  Lynch objected to the disclosure and urged him to follow DOJ protocol to avoid actions that could influence the outcome of a presidential election, ABC News reported, citing sources with knowledge of the situation.  Comey didn’t listen.

The Hillary Clinton campaign was blindsided on Friday by the letter Comey sent to Congress, which revealed new emails had been uncovered that appear to be “pertinent” to their investigation. The new evidence was reportedly found during the FBI’s investigation into disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner’s sexting scandal. Officials seized electronic devices belonging to Weiner and his wife, longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin.

October 28: Real Clear Politics:  FBI reviewing investigation into Clinton emails
Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein comments on the FBI's shocking Friday afternoon announcement that they are reopening the investigation into Hilary Clinton's email server because new evidence has come to light.  Bernstein said “There's no question that the e-mails have always been the greatest threat to her candidacy for president, that her conduct in regard to the e-mails is really indefensible and if there was going to be more information that came out, it was the one thing, as I said on the air last night, actually that could really perhaps affect this election.

We don't know what this means yet except that it's a real bombshell. And it is unthinkable that the Director of the FBI would take this action lightly, that he would put this letter forth to the Congress of the United States saying there is more information out there about classified e-mails and call it to the attention of congress unless it was something requiring serious investigation. So that's where we are...

October 28: The Washington Examiner:  FBI sued over records of Bill Clinton/Loretta Lynch Tarmac Meeting in Arizona:
A conservative-leaning watchdog group sued the FBI Friday after the law enforcement agency ignored a Freedom of Information Act request for records related to the Hillary Clinton email investigation.  Judicial Watch filed a FOIA on July 7 for documents that included "all records related to the meeting between Attorney General Lynch and former President Bill Clinton on June 27, 2016."  Bill Clinton and Lynch met privately on a Phoenix tarmac in the final days of the email probe after they said their jets unexpectedly landed near each other.  While both parties claimed the meeting was purely social in nature, their visit sparked a fierce backlash among critics who accused Bill Clinton of attempting to tilt the outcome of the investigation in favor of his wife.

October 17: The Daily Caller: FBI Agents say Director Comey stood in the way of the Clinton Email investigation:
FBI agents say the bureau is alarmed over Director James Comey’s decision to not suggest that the Justice Department prosecute Hillary Clinton over her mishandling of classified information. According to an interview transcript agents are frustrated by Comey’s leadership.  “This is a textbook case where a grand jury should have been convened, but was not. That is appalling,” an FBI special agent who has worked public corruption and criminal cases said of the decision. “We talk about it in the office and don’t know how Comey can keep going.” 

The agent was also surprised that the bureau did not bother to search Clinton’s house during the investigation.  “We didn’t search their house. We always search the house. The search should not just have been for private electronics, which contained classified material, but even for printouts of such material,” he said.  “There should have been a complete search of their residence,” the agent pointed out. “That the FBI did not seize devices is unbelievable. The FBI even seizes devices that have been set on fire.”

October 6: The Daily Caller: Hacker Releases “tons of emails” from Clinton Department Insider
A hacker has released thousands of emails taken from the personal account of Capricia Penavic Marshall, a key Clinton world figure who worked under Hillary at the Department of State.  Marshall’s central importance to the Clinton’s political operations was realized earlier this year by Citizens United.

October 6: Fox News:  FBI files reveal missing email boxes in Clinton case, allegations of evidence tampering:
Buried in the 189 pages of heavily redacted FBI witness interviews from the Hillary Clinton email investigation are details of yet another mystery -- about two missing “bankers boxes” filled with the former secretary of state’s emails.  The interviews released earlier this month also reveal the serious allegation that senior State Department official Patrick Kennedy applied pressure to subordinates to change the classified email codes so they would be shielded from Congress and the public.

October 4: Politico:  Obama’s DOJ drops charges against alleged broker of Libyan Weapons:
The Obama Administration is moving to dismiss charges against an arms dealer who is accused of selling weapons that were destined for Libyan rebels.  Lawyers for the Justice Department on Monday filed a motion in federal court in Phoenix to drop the case against the arms dealer, an American named Marc Turi, whose lawyers also signed the motion.  The deal averts a trial that had threatened to cast additional scrutiny on Hillary Clinton’s private emails as secretary of State, and to expose reported CIA attempts to arm rebels fighting Libyan leader Moammar Qadhafi.

October 1: Associated Press:  Russia Warns US about Attacking Syrian Troops
Russia warned the United States Saturday against carrying out any attacks on Syrian government forces, saying it would have repercussions across the Middle East.   Russian news agencies quoted Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova as saying that a U.S. intervention against the Syrian army "will lead to terrible, tectonic consequences not only on the territory of this country but also in the region on the whole."  She said regime change in Syria would create a vacuum that would be "quickly filled" by "terrorists of all stripes."  U.S.-Russian tensions over Syria have escalated since the breakdown of a cease-fire last month, with each side blaming the other for its failure.

September 23: Politico: Obama communicated with Clinton on her unsecured server, FBI reveals
President Barack Obama used a pseudonym in email communications with Hillary Clinton and others, according to FBI records made public Friday.  The disclosure came as the FBI released its second batch of documents from its investigation into Clinton’s private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.  "Once informed that the sender's name is believed to be a pseudonym used by the president, Abedin exclaimed: 'How is this not classified?'" the report says. "Abedin then expressed her amazement at the president's use of a pseudonym and asked if she could have a copy of the email."

September 22: The Hill: Oversight Committee Holds Clinton IT aide in Contempt of Congress
The House Oversight Committee on Thursday morning voted on party lines to recommend that the House hold former State Department IT technician Bryan Pagliano in contempt of Congress.  Pagliano was responsible for setting up Clinton’s private email server during her tenure as secretary of State.  The former State Department employee declined to appear at an Oversight hearing on Clinton's server last week, in spite of a subpoena demanding his presence. The committee held a follow-up hearing on the same subject on Thursday morning, which Pagliano also declined to attend.

When Pagliano didn’t show, Republicans immediately adjourned the hearing and held a business meeting to vote on the contempt of Congress resolution. “Subpoenas are not optional,” Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) said Thursday. “Mr. Pagliano is a crucial fact witness in this committee’s investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server to conduct government business.” The resolution still needs to go to the House floor to be adopted.  

September 7:  CNN:  FBI Defends Release of Clinton Email Probe and Documents
FBI Director James Comey is defending the bureau's Friday afternoon release of documents from the Hillary Clinton email investigation, saying "we don't play games" and that the documents were put out when ready.  In a memo to employees Wednesday, Comey said the decision to not recommend charges against the now-Democratic nominee wasn't a close call.  In recent weeks, Comey has met with groups of former FBI agents as part of his routine visits to field offices around the country.   In at least one recent such meeting, according to people familiar with the meeting, former agents were sharply critical of the FBI's handling of the Clinton probe and particularly the decision to not recommend charges against Clinton.  

September 1: Judicial Watch: New Abedin emails reveal Clinton Foundation Executive Director
sought diplomatic passport from Clinton/Dept. of State:
Judicial Watch released 510 pages of new State Department documents, including a 2009 request by Clinton Foundation executive Doug Band for diplomatic passports for himself and an associate.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s aide Abedin responded to Band’s request positively, saying, “Ok will figure it out.”  The emails show Hillary Clinton forwarding classified information to Abedin’s unsecured, non-state.gov account. The emails also show Bill Clinton asked his wife to arrange a meeting for a major Clinton donor with State Department officials.  Special help was also provided by Abedin for seven-figure Clinton Foundation donor Chris Ruddy, of Newsmax.com. The Judicial Review release also showed that Mrs. Clinton exchanged classified information with Aberdin on a unsecure non-State Department email account. The documents included emails that had not previously provided by Clinton who had said as far as she knew,” all of her government emails were turned over to the State Department.

August 31: The New York Post: Clinton emailed classified information after she left the Department of State:Hillary Clinton continued sending classified information even after leaving the State Department, The Post has exclusively learned.  On May 28, 2013, months after stepping down as secretary of state, Clinton sent an email to a group of diplomats and top aides about the “123 Deal” with the United Arab Emirates.  But the email, which was obtained by the Republican National Committee through a Freedom of Information Act request, was heavily redacted upon its release by the State Department because it contains classified information.

The markings on the email state it will be declassified on May 28, 2033, and that information in the note is being redacted because it contains “information regarding foreign governors” and because it contains “Foreign relations or foreign activities of the United States, including confidential sources.”  The email from Clinton was sent from the email account associated with her private email server.

August 30: The Daily Caller: Judge: State Dept. must
release Hillary’s Security Training Records or be Deposed:
A federal judge ordered the Department of State Wednesday to produce for The Daily Caller News Foundation the security training records of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her aide Huma Abedin within two weeks, or face direct deposition of multiple government officials.  “I’m sure you can appreciate Mr. Lee, there is a certain time sensitivity on this issue,” U.S. District Court Judge Richard J. Leon told Department of Justice Attorney Jason Lee, representing the State Department. “We’re looking down the barrel of a presidential election from now in two months.”

Leon said TheDCNF is, “trying to get to the bottom of this, to what extent Secretary Clinton and probably her immediate staff received training. They’re trying to figure out was the training in writing or orally, (and) how was it done.”  “Let me put it to you this way: You need to discuss with your client whether it would be better to give them the answers to these questions or to have depositions to depose those at the State Department,” Leon said.

August 26: Facebook.Com: Mark "Oz" Geist Speaks about what happened: 13  Hours in Bengazi
During a speech to the Galveston County Republican Party "Oz" Geist (who was there during the attack on Benghazi in September 2012) said there were five guys guarding the State Department post in Benghazi when it was attacked. They were understaffed and under trained and they had a boss (Hillary Clinton) who continually blames others for her mistakes. He noted that the State Department diplomatic security personnel were not prepared for what they had to face. Throughout the entire engagement failed to fire a single shot.

Meanwhile, Geist said, the Department of State was trying to determine if a Marine rescue team should be clothed in military uniforms or civilian clothes. It took them so long that the rescue team never went wheels up! Geist said they were more concerned with how they would look and not with saving American lives.

In an interesting turn of events it was the militia that supported Muammar Gaddafi that came to the aid of the Americans during this crisis while it was the Obama Administration and Hillary Clinton who brought pressure to bear to bring the Gaddafi regime to an end.

August 19: Politico: Clinton must respond in writing to questions about her
use of a private email server – in person deposition denied:
A federal judge has rejected a request to force Hillary Clinton to submit to a sworn deposition in a suit related to her private email server, ruling instead that she must respond in writing to questions about the issue.
U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan said the conservative group Judicial Watch had not demonstrated that an in-person deposition of Clinton was necessary to attempt to clarify whether the former secretary of state set up the system in order to avoid complying with the Freedom of Information Act.

August 14: The New York Post:  Bill Clinton says the FBI is serving up a “load of bull”
Bill Clinton is accusing the FBI director of serving up “the biggest load of bull I’ve ever heard” — marking the first significant public comments from the husband of the Democratic nominee on the scandal that’s plagued his wife’s campaign for over a year.  Hillary Clinton has been under fire since it was discovered last year that she exclusively used her own server to conduct all her work related email on.

August 14: CNN: Congress to get FBI’s Clinton Interview Notes
Members of Congress will soon receive notes from Hillary Clinton's interview with the FBI over her private email server and they could be sent as early as Monday, according to sources.   The FBI does not have a complete transcript of the interview, FBI Director James Comey told Congress in long testimony earlier this summer. She was not under oath, he added. But members of Congress will have access to notes taken during the interview.  Several Republican lawmakers have requested the information after Comey's testimony.

August 12: Fox News: Case Not Closed!  DOJ Investigating Clinton Foundation Emails
A fresh report that federal prosecutors are probing the Clinton Foundation revived speculation Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton may not be past her email problems, but the Justice Department on Friday declined to confirm the account.  Despite the official decline, The Daily Caller reported that several investigations were being launched including one led by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara of the Civil Frauds Unit that will focus on Clinton Foundation in New York.  The FBI had investigated the Clinton Foundation’s relationship with the State Department during then-Secretary Hillary Clinton’s tenure, according to officials at the time.

August 10: CNN News: Clinton’s involvement with her foundation while
Secretary of State may have caused a blurring of the lines.
A top aide to Hillary Clinton at the State Department traveled to New York to interview job candidates for a top job at the Clinton Foundation, a CNN investigation has found.  The fact that the aide, Cheryl Mills, was taking part in such a high level task for the Clinton foundation while also working as chief of staff for the secretary of state raises new questions about the blurred lines that have dogged the Clintons in recent years.   E-mails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act this week raise new questions about the intermingling of Clinton Foundation business, its donors and employees under Hillary Clinton's control as a public servant.

August 8: NBC News: Two Benghazi Parents sue Hillary Clinton for Wrongful Death and Defamation
The parents of two Americans killed in the 2012 terrorist attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, filed a wrongful death lawsuit in federal court Monday against Hillary Clinton.  In the suit, Patricia Smith and Charles Woods, the parents of Sean Smith and Tyrone Woods, claim that Clinton's use of a private e-mail server contributed to the attacks. They also accuse her of defaming them in public statements. Smith was an information management officer and Woods was a security officer, both stationed in Benghazi.

"The Benghazi attack was directly and proximately caused, at a minimum by defendant Clinton's 'extreme carelessness' in handling confidential and classified information," such as the location of State Department employees in Libya, the lawsuit said.  While no such connection has ever been established, their lawsuit called it "highly probable" that Clinton sent and received information about the activities of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

August 5: The Daily Caller: CNN's Trapper Calls Out Clinton for Email Lies
CNN’s Jake Tapper called out Hillary Clinton for lying about emailing classified information, insisting, “You’re entitled to your own opinions, not to your own facts.”  In a video made by CNN and FactCheck.org, Tapper destroyed Clinton’s recent claim on “Fox News Sunday” that FBI Director James Comey’s testified that her statements about her private email server were true.  Tapper replayed Comey’s congressional hearing testimony with Rep. Trey Gowdy, where the FBI director repeatedly debunked many of Clinton’s claims. 

August 2: Townhall.com:  Father of Benghazi Victim: Either Hillary is a liar or has a bad head injury.
Charles Woods, the father of Tyrone Woods, one of the Benghazi soldiers who was killed defending his fellow Americans on the night of September 11, 2012, had something to say to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton on Tuesday regarding her interview on Fox News Sunday. During her conversation with Chris Wallace, Clinton suggested she had not lied to the Benghazi victims’ families and told them the terror attack was actually the spontaneous reaction to an offensive internet video. She held no “ill feeling” toward the family members because their memories must just be fuzzy, she insisted.

When Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer played the relevant exchange for Woods, who was hearing the audio for the first time, he responded indignantly.  “There are two options,” Mr. Woods said. “One, either she is lying, or she has a bad memory because of her age or head injury she’s suffered.”

August 2: National Review: Clinton’s Benghazi Debacle: Arm the rebels in Libya and Syria:
As U.S. armed forces attack ISIS in Libya, WikiLeaks is poised to remind us that ISIS is in Libya thanks to disastrous policies championed by Hillary Clinton as President Obama’s secretary of state. Also raised, yet again, is the specter of Mrs. Clinton’s lying to Congress and the American people — this time regarding a matter some of us have been trying for years to get answers about: What mission was so important the United States kept personnel in the jihadist hellhole of Benghazi in 2012? Specifically, did that mission involve arming the Syrian “rebels” — including al-Qaeda and forces that became ISIS — just as, at Mrs. Clinton’s urging, our government had armed Libyan “rebels” (again, jihadists) to catastrophic effect?

WikiLeaks is soon to publish highly sensitive government e-mails that demonstrate Hillary Clinton’s key participation in efforts to arm jihadists in Syria. Just as in Libya, where Mrs. Clinton championed the strategy of arming Islamist “rebels,” the Syrian “rebels” who ultimately received weapons included the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, and ISIS.

July 19: The Daily Caller: Benghazi Survivor Says
Several Special Operators will Leave the Military if Clinton is Elected:
The best and brightest of the U.S. military and special operations community will quit if Hillary Clinton gets elected president, according to Benghazi survivor and former CIA operative John “Tig” Tiegen.  Tiegen witnessed firsthand the results of Clinton’s policy when he and his comrades in the Benghazi CIA Global Response Service Team defended U.S. consulate and CIA officials from a massive assault by radical Libyan jihadis Sept. 11, 2013. He has said Clinton’s failure as secretary of state during the Benghazi attack has caused many of the nation’s most elite special operations forces to quit their jobs — a problem that will only get worse if Clinton is elected.  “There’s guys leaving now just because of that,” Tiegen said in an exclusive Facebook Live video interview Tuesday. “Cause they don’t know if [in the future] the call for help is going to be heard.”

July 13: Fox News: FBI confirms special secrecy agreements for agents in Clinton email probe
The FBI has confirmed to a senior Republican senator that agents were sworn to secrecy -- and subject to lie detector tests -- in the Hillary Clinton email probe, an extensive measure one former agent said could have a "chilling effect." The measures show the extent to which the bureau has gone to keep additional details of the politically sensitive case from going public. While Comey has provided some information ‎on why the FBI did not opt to pursue charges, Attorney General Loretta Lynch repeatedly ducked questions on specifics of the case at a House hearing Tuesday. 

July 11: The UK Daily Mail: Judge tells Hillary she has until Tuesday
to explain why she shouldn’t be required to testify in Federal law suit
Like a game of whack-a-mole, Hillary Clinton's secret email server scandal continues this week as the former secretary of state has just one more day to explain to a federal court why she shouldn't have to testify under oath about the system.    On Friday, the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch submitted a request for permission to depose Clinton, along with two other current and former government officials, as part of the ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit looking into aide Huma Abedin's special employment arrangement with the State Department.
'As the primary driving force behind and principal user of the clintonemail.com system, however, Secretary Clinton’s testimony is crucial to understanding how and why the system was created and operated,' the brief argued, calling Clinton a 'indispensable witness.'   The court gave Clinton, along with two other officials – Clarence Finney and John Bentel – until Tuesday to respond. 

July 11: Fox News: House Committee ask FBI to look into possible perjury over email server
House Committee asked the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia on Monday to investigate Hillary Clinton over her private email server while serving as secretary of state and determine whether she lied to Congress.  Reps. Jason Chaffetz, R-UT, chairman of the Oversight panel, and Bob Goodlatte, R-VA, head of the Judiciary Committee, said in a letter that "evidence collected by the FBI during its investigation of Secretary Clinton's use of a personal email system appears to directly contradict several aspects of her sworn testimony."    "In light of those contradictions, the department should investigate and determine whether to prosecute Secretary Clinton for violating statutes that prohibit perjury and false statements to Congress, or any other relevant statutes," the two congressmen wrote.

July 9: The Daily Caller:  Hillary Has A New Defense for Sending Classified Information:
In the wake of the FBI investigation which found 110 classified emails that were classified at the time of sending, Hillary Clinton said on Friday that at the time, she did not “believe” they were put under that category.  In an interview with on CNN’s “The Lead,” Wolf Blitzer asked Clinton if she would “acknowledge you were extremely careless” with her private server email setup while secretary of state. “Well, I think the director clarified that comment to some extent, pointing our that some of what had been thought to be classified apparently was not.  The State Department also made it clear,” Clinton said.

July 7: The Daily Signal: Some Key Takeaways from the House Hearing with FBI Director Comey:
This week the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held a hearing at which FBI Director Comey testified about the Hillary Clinton Emailgate scandal.  There are several things that can be taken away from that hearing.

• Comey said there is no basis the Clinton lied to the FBI. However, during its investigation the FBI concluded 110 emails contained classified information eight of which were Top Secret material.
• Chairman Chaffetz will ask the FBI to look into whether Hillary lied to Congress.  Under oath Clinton said there were no emails on her server that were marked classified.  However, Comey confirmed that this was not the case.
• Clinton should have known not to send classified information over a non-protected system.  Comey said “Certainly she should have known…  …that’s the definition of negligent.  I think she was extremely careless… …negligent.  That I could establish.”
• Clinton gave classified information to people without security clearances.  Comey said that Hillary’s personal server set-up exposed people without security clearances to classified information.  He estimated it could have been to as many as ten people, including Hillary’s lawyers.

July 7: HotAir.com:  Oversight Committee Questions
FBI Director about Clinton Investigation
There was the exchange between Congressman Trey Gowdy and FBI Director Comey during a Congressional hearing.  On Monday Comey recommended not to pursue charges against Hillary Clinton because he could not conclusively prove that her violations of the statute were intended as opposed to only mishandling of classified information.  The statute itself does not require proof of intent in order to bring legal action (18 U.S.C. 793(f) but says you’re guilty and punishable by fine or up to 10 years imprisonment if you have been grossly negligent inn mishandling classified materials.   

But don’t think Comey didn’t set a pernicious precedent either in letting Clinton off easy. Defense lawyers for other suspects accused of mishandling classified info are already licking their chops!  “I intend to use the Hillary defense,” said Sean M. Bigley, a lawyer whose firm handles dozens of cases a year involving national security clearances. “I really question how any agency can say someone is a security risk if the president of the United States did something similar.  … We’ve had people lose 20-year careers for doing less than what she did,” he concluded.

Mark F. Riley, a former military intelligence officer and now a defense attorney said he, too, would invoke the Clinton recommendation.  “I’m going to use it every chance I get, particularly in oral arguments. I’m going to bring it up over and over and over,” Riley said, adding that he thinks Clinton and her team engaged in “an egregious, egregious security violation.”

July 6: Rasmussen Reports: Most Disagree with FBI Director’s Decision on Clinton’s Violations:
Most voters disagree with FBI Director James Comey’s decision not to seek a criminal indictment of Hillary Clinton. The FBI concluded that Clinton potentially exposed top secret information to hostile countries when she used a private e-mail server as secretary of State, but Comey announced yesterday that the FBI has decided not to pursue a criminal indictment in this matter. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey – taken last night - finds that 37% of Likely U.S. Voters agree with the FBI’s decision. But 54% disagree and believe the FBI should have sought a criminal indictment of Clinton. Ten percent (10%) are undecided.   Sixty-four percent (64%) of Democrats agree with Comey’s decision.  Seventy-nine percent (79%) of Republicans, 63% of voters not affiliated with either major political party and 25% of Democrats disagree with the decision.

July 5: Federal Bureau of Investigations: Prepared Remarks by Director Comey
on Clinton’s Violations of Federal Law
There is evidence that Mrs. Clinton and her staff  were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.  For example, seven e-mail chains concern matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level when they were sent and received. These chains involved Secretary Clinton both sending e-mails about those matters and receiving e-mails from others about the same matters. There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation. In addition to this highly sensitive information, we also found information that was properly classified as Secret by the U.S. Intelligence Community at the time it was discussed on e-mail (that is, excluding the later “up-classified” e-mails).

None of these e-mails should have been on any kind of unclassified system, but their presence is especially concerning because all of these e-mails were housed on unclassified personal servers not even supported by full-time security staff, like those found at Departments and Agencies of the U.S. Government—or even with a commercial service like Gmail.

Separately, it is important to say something about the marking of classified information. Only a very small number of the e-mails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information. But even if information is not marked “classified” in an e-mail, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it.
While not the focus of our investigation, we also developed evidence that the security culture of the State Department in general, and with respect to use of unclassified e-mail systems in particular, was generally lacking in the kind of care for classified information found elsewhere in the government.

With respect to potential computer intrusion by hostile actors, we did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail domain, but, given the nature of the system and of the actors potentially involved, we assess that we would be unlikely to see such direct evidence. We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial e-mail accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account. We also assess that Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail domain was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent. She also used her personal e-mail extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related e-mails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries. Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account.

July 2: BreitbartNews.com: FBI Grills Hillary Clinton for Over Three Hours about Emailgate
Agents “Livid” about Bill Clinton/Lynch Meeting in Arizona
Hillary Clinton was interviewed by FBI agents for over three hours. Meanwhile this week Hillary’s husband, had a private meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch that brought serious scrutiny over the appearance of impropriety. The meeting occurred aboard a plane on a Phoenix airstrip and comes as the FBI, under the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating the former Secretary’s use of an unsecured email server during her time as head of the State Department.

Lynch claimed that the conversation didn’t include talk of the email server scandal.   The 30 minute meeting was uncovered when a source tipped off local news outlet ABC15.  Fox News’ Herridge reported that a “well placed source” in the FBI told the news outlet that FBI agents are “livid” about the meeting between the Bill Clinton and Lynch. The former President, husband of the former Secretary, “at the very least may be a a witness in this public corruption probe.”

July 2: The Washington Post: Clinton’s FBI interview signals the last stages of the Criminal Investigation over Emailgate:
With the meeting with Hillary Clinton not over, the investigation is still not over: Agents and prosecutors will now have to compare what the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee said Saturday to other evidence they have gathered, including from interviews with Clinton’s aides. They will also have to analyze how the facts of the case apply to various laws that might have been violated.

July 2: McClathchyDC News: Indicted or Not, Clinton could still lose politically:
No matter how the FBI’s investigation into the handling of sensitive information on Hillary Clinton’s personal computer server ends, it likely will hurt her presidential bid.  If she is indicted, she will face further questions about her lack of honesty and perhaps even calls for her to step aside. If she isn’t indicted critics will accuse the Obama administration of letting her escape charges merely because they want her to win the White House.  However it is concluded, events this week underscored anew that Clinton is likely to emerge scarred. A new controversy over the Obama administration’s handling of the case and Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s refusal to hand it over to a special prosecutor far removed from the White House served as a reminder that critics would always say that political favoritism toward Clinton tainted any decision to clear her.

July 1: Breitbart News: Attorney General Lynch to accept FBI recommendations but still involved, according to staff
Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Friday that she will take a step back from the decision whether to charge anyone in the Hillary Clinton private email server probe. But a Justice Department spokeswoman quickly clarified her remarks, telling Yahoo News that top political appointees will remain involved in the investigation and that the attorney general will be “the ultimate decider.”

June 29: Associated Press:  Clinton Aide: Hillary Didn’t Want Anybody to have Access to her emails
Longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin said in a legal proceeding that Clinton did not want the private emails that she mixed in with State Department emails on her private computer server to be accessible to "anybody," according to transcripts released Wednesday.  Abedin's comments provided new insight into the highly unusual decision by the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate to operate a private email server in her basement to conduct government business when she served as secretary of state. Abedin also said under oath that she was not aware whether Clinton personally deleted any emails during her tenure as secretary.

June 29: National Review:  Federal Judge expands access to  State Department  Emails
A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the State Department to produce the e-mail records of Hillary Clinton’s scheduler during her tenure as secretary of state, expanding an investigation being pursued by conservative nonprofit Citizens United into the overlap between Clinton’s official travel and her meetings with foreign Clinton Foundation donors. Citizens United is slated to receive all e-mails sent to and from Lona Valmoro, Clinton’s State Department scheduler, in the two-week periods before each of 14 international trips Clinton took during her four years in office. David Bossie, president of Citizens United, hopes to confirm suspicions that Clinton maintained an off-the-books schedule, meeting with Clinton Foundation donors on the taxpayer’s dime. “Citizens United wants to know how many overseas dinners Secretary Clinton attended with Clinton Foundation donors that didn’t make it on her schedule,” he says.

June 28: Politico: Final Benghazi Report Released
After more than two years, Republicans delivered a final Benghazi Committee report that ripped the Obama administration's handling of the 2012 terrorist attack — but Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign dismissed the findings as "discredited" conspiracy theories.  The 800 page report was released on Tuesday, and marks the culmination of an investigation that has haunted the 2016 Democratic front-runner on the campaign trail, even as Clinton’s campaign has consistently slammed the probe as a political vendetta. But for all the partisan battling over the probe, the panel's final report — in keeping with Chairman Trey Gowdy's prior statements — offered new details of the attack and the nation's response but didn't focus on Clinton in particular.

Instead, the report drilled down on new details about how Clinton’s State Department failed to protect the diplomatic outpost in Libya. The report also said that the CIA missed the looming threat despite warnings and wrote faulty intelligence reports after the attack. And GOP staff said their findings indicate that the Defense Department did not meet its response times to deploy military assets to Benghazi and follow-up to ensure Americans were rescued in a timely fashion.

The report includes new specifics about a U.S. teleconference convened by White House chief of staff Denis McDonough during the attack. According to the report, some participants on the videoconference were unsure about what each agency was doing to rescue Americans.
State Department officials on the call also brought up concerns about whether Marines who might have been deployed to Benghazi were wearing uniforms, the report found — something officials previously said could hurt diplomacy in the region. One commander told the committee he and his men over the course of three hours kept having to change from uniforms to civilian clothes.
The military never deployed to Benghazi.

June 28: Benghazi Committee: Final Report Released
Select Committee on Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy (SC) released the following statement after the committee’s Majority released a mark of its investigative report:

“Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods were heroes who gave their lives in service to our country. Their bravery and the courageous actions of so many others on the ground that night should be honored.  When the Select Committee was formed, I promised to conduct this investigation in a manner worthy of the American people’s respect, and worthy of the memory of those who died. That is exactly what my colleagues and I have done.

The committee’s proposed report is just over 800 pages long and is comprised of five primary sections and 12 appendices. It details relevant events in 2011 and 2012.

The following facts are among the many new revelations:

• Despite President Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s clear orders to deploy military assets, nothing was sent to Benghazi, and nothing was en route to Libya at the time the last two Americans were killed almost 8 hours after the attacks began.
• With Ambassador Stevens missing, the White House convened a roughly two-hour meeting at 7:30 PM, which resulted in action items focused on a YouTube video, and others containing the phrases “[i]f any deployment is made,” and “Libya must agree to any deployment,” and “[w]ill not deploy until order comes to go to either Tripoli or Benghazi.”
• A Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team (FAST) sat on a plane in Rota, Spain, for three hours, and changed in and out of their uniforms four times.
• The Libyan forces that evacuated Americans from the CIA Annex to the Benghazi airport was not affiliated with any of the militias the CIA or State Department had developed a relationship with during the prior 18 months. Instead, it was comprised of former Qadhafi loyalists who the U.S. had helped remove from power during the Libyan revolution.

June 23: Associated Press: Clinton failed to turn over key emails to State Department:
Former Secretary Hillary Clinton failed to turn over a copy of a key message involving problems caused by her use of a private homebrew email server, the State Department confirmed Thursday. The disclosure makes it unclear what other work-related emails may have been deleted by the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. During 20110 emails sent from Clinton's BlackBerry device and routed through her private clintonemail.com server in the basement of her New York home were being blocked by the State Department's spam filter. A suggested remedy was for Clinton to obtain a state.gov email account.  "Let's get separate address or device but I don't want any risk of the personal being accessible," Clinton responded to Abedin. 

The email was not among the tens of thousands of emails Clinton turned over to the agency in response to public records lawsuits seeking copies of her official correspondence. Abedin, who also used a private account on Clinton's server, provided a copy from her own inbox after the State Department asked her to return any work-related emails. That copy of the email was publicly cited last month in a blistering audit by the State Department's inspector general that concluded Clinton and her team ignored clear internal guidance that her email setup violated federal standards and could have left sensitive material vulnerable to hackers.

June 22: Associated Press:  Emails: State Department scrambled on trouble on Clinton’s Server
State Department staffers went into a full court press for weeks in 2010 over serious technical problems that affected emails from then-Secretary Hillary Clinton's home email server.  Emails, reviewed by The Associated Press, show that State Department technical staff disabled software on their systems intended to block phishing emails that could deliver dangerous viruses. They were trying urgently to resolve delivery problems with emails sent from Clinton's private server.   The emails were released under court order Wednesday to Judicial Watch.

June 6: Politico: FBI offers second secret filing in Clinton email suit
The FBI is offering a federal judge a second secret glimpse into the investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server.  The Justice Department asked a federal judge Monday to accept "additional details" under seal about how the FBI conducted its search for records a Vice News journalist requested under the Freedom of Information Act from the law enforcement agency about the probe it is conducting into Clinton's email set-up and how classified information came to reside in the Democratic presidential candidate's account.

June 1: Politico:  Clinton IT assistant will plead the 5th at deposition
A former information technology adviser to Hillary Clinton plans to exercise his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination at a deposition next week and wants to prevent any video recording being made of the session.  Lawyers for former State Department tech specialist Bryan Pagliano said in a court filing Wednesday that there's no valid reason to make an audio or video recording of the session since Pagliano doesn't plan to answer any of the questions he's asked by the conservative group Judicial Watch, which is pursuing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit related to Clinton's private email server. The group is scheduled to take Pagliano's deposition on Monday.

Judicial Watch indicated Wednesday that it will resist the proposal to ban video recording.  "Judge Sullivan already put in place a mechanism that addresses these concerns," Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in an interview. "There are always credibility issues that are raised by any assertion of the Fifth Amendment. This video, we believe will be helpful to Judge Sullivan in assessing the witness' demeanor when asserting the Fifth Amendment and in response to other questions."  Pagliano he reportedly spoke with FBI investigators looking into the Clinton email set-up after receiving some type of immunity from the government.

May 25: NewsMax: Hillary Hit by State Dept. IG over Emailgate
A State Department audit has faulted Hillary Clinton and previous secretaries of state for poorly managing email and other computer information and slowly responding to new cyber-security risks.   The report by the agency's inspector general cites "longstanding, systemic weaknesses" related to communications. These started in the Secretary of State's office before Clinton's appointment to the post, but her failures were singled out as more serious.  The review came after revelations Clinton exclusively used a private email account and server while in office. Clinton is now the likely Democratic presidential nominee.

“Secretary Clinton should have preserved any Federal records she created and received on her personal account by printing and filing those records with the related files in the Office of the Secretary," the report states.  "At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with the Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act."

May 25: Politico: Hillary expresses worries about exposure of personal emails at the State Department
Hillary Clinton expressed concern in November 2010 about the risk of her personal emails becoming accessible after one of her top aides said they needed to discuss putting her on the State Department’s email system.  The revelation of the exchange between Clinton and Huma Abedin was included in a report from the State Department’s inspector general that was released to lawmakers on Wednesday.

The report concluded that Clinton violated the agency’s email rules when she chose to exclusively use a private email server during her four years at State Department and did not promptly turn over records after she departed the agency.  The document also included some details of an exchange between Clinton and Abedin, who both chose not to cooperate with the IG’s investigation.

May 7: ABC News:   Senior Hillary Staffer: State Department is Appearing to missing some emails
The State Department said today it can’t find any of Bryan Pagliano’s emails from the time he served as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's senior information technology staffer during her tenure there.   Pagliano would have been required to turn over any official communications from his work account before he left the government. State Department officials say he had an official email account, but that they can't find any of those records and continue to search for them.

“The Department has searched for Mr. Pagliano’s email pst file and has not located one that covers the time period of Secretary Clinton’s tenure,” State Department spokesman Elizabeth Trudeau said today, referencing a file format that holds email. Trudeau later clarified that the Department of State has recovered a small number of Pagliano’s emails, suggesting they were gleaned from other email accounts.  This announcement comes as FOIA requests are also asking for copies of Clinton’s texts and Blackberry communications.  So far the Department of State has not release any documents that have been responsive to either of these requests. 

May 5: Judicial Watch: JW Lawsuit Uncovers More Clinton Email Withheld from the State Department
Judicial Watch today released 241 pages of new State Department emails that appear to contradict statements by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that, “as far as she knew,” all of her government emails were turned over to the State Department and that she did not use her clintonemail.com system until March 18, 2009.  Clinton emails dating from February 2009 also call into question the validity of her statements.  Many of the documents go back as far as January of that year and were not turned over to the Department of State.

Hillary Clinton has repeatedly stated that the 55,000 pages of documents she turned over to the State Department in December 2014 included all of her work-related emails.  In response to a court order in other Judicial Watch litigation, she declared under penalty of perjury, that she had “directed that all my emails on clintonemail.com in my custody that were or are potentially federal records be provided to the Department of State, and on information and belief, this has been done.”  This new email find is also at odds with her official campaign statement. 

May 5: CNN: FBI Starts to interview Clinton Aides on Emailgate
Some of Hillary Clinton's closest aides, including her longtime adviser Huma Abedin, have provided interviews to federal investigators, as the FBI probe into the security of her private email server nears completion, U.S. officials briefed on the investigation tell CNN. The investigation is still ongoing, but so far investigators haven't found evidence to prove that Clinton willfully violated the law the U.S. officials say.  In recent weeks, multiple aides have been interviewed -- some more than once, the officials said. A date for an FBI interview of Clinton has not been set, these officials said, but is expected in the coming weeks. Abedin has cooperated with the probe, the officials said.  The probe remains focused on the security of the server and the handling of classified information and hasn't expanded to other matters, the officials said.

May 4: Fox News: Romanian Hacker: I breached the Clinton Server; It was Easy!
The infamous Romanian hacker known as “Guccifer” claimed he easily – and repeatedly – breached former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s personal email server in early 2013.  "For me, it was easy ... easy for me, for everybody," Marcel Lehel Lazar, who goes by the moniker "Guccifer." Guccifer’s potential role in the Clinton email investigation was first reported last month.  The hacker subsequently claimed he was able to access the server – and provided extensive details about how he did it and what he found – over the course of a half-hour jailhouse interview and a series of recorded phone calls.

May 4: The Daily Caller: Federal Judge: Hillary Deposition May Be Necessary
A federal judge on Wednesday granted limited discovery to the watchdog group Judicial Watch in one of its lawsuits against the State Department and says that a deposition of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “may be necessary.”   U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan formally approved conditions that the State Department and Judicial Watch agreed to last month.  The conservative group is suing the State Department for records related to a special job held by Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedin, while she worked at the State Department.  In his ruling, Sullivan noted that “discovery is an extraordinary procedure” in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. But he said that “discovery should be permitted…when a plaintiff raises a sufficient question as to the agency’s good faith in processing documents in response to a FOIA request.”

April 17: The New York Post: Clinton Aide to be grilled over Emailgate:
The State Department has agreed to a conservative legal group’s request to question several current and former government officials about the creation of Hillary Clinton’s private email system.  The agreement filed late Friday with the U.S. District Court in Washington comes after a judge consented to allow the group Judicial Watch “limited discovery” to probe why Clinton relied on an email server in her New York home during her tenure as secretary of state.  Questions about the email system have bedeviled Clinton during her run for the Democratic presidential nomination.   The FBI is investigating whether sensitive information that flowed through Clinton’s email server was mishandled. The inspectors general at the State Department and U.S. intelligence agencies are separately investigating whether rules or laws were broken.

April 16: Fox News: FBI’s “Reputation” on the line in Clinton Emailgate probe:
Former FBI agents who worked the notorious 1970s sting operation known as ABSCAM have written FBI Director James Comey to warn that nothing less than the bureau's "reputation" is on the line as the investigation into Hillary Clinton's email practices enters a critical phase.  The agents, in a March 16 letter, offered their support for Comey and the agents working the email case. But the letter cautioned the outcome would have long-lasting implications.
"Decisions must be made on facts alone. Much is at stake here -- people's trust in the Bureau for years to come, as well as the Bureau's reputation among our allies, partners, and friends as the greatest law enforcement agency in the world,” wrote John F. Good, president of the Long Island Chapter of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI.  Good, 79, said the Clinton email case boils down to whether the U.S. is a nation of laws, where all citizens are equal under the law, or there is a different set of rules for the powerful. He said the ABSCAM agents thought it was important to show support for the bureau’s work in the email probe since they know what it feels like to face intense public scrutiny. 

April 10: Real Clear Politics:  Obama: Clinton Didn’t “Intentionally” put America in Jeopardy!
President Obama when quizzed about the investigation by the FBI Justice Department into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private server and non-government e-mail address said in an interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace that Clinton did not jeopardize America's secrets. Obama also guaranteed politics will not influence the outcome of the investigation. Of course, this is the same President who said if you like your plan you can keep your plan, if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor!  Obama contended she did not jeopardize America's national security, however was "careless" in terms of managing emails that she has owned. Obama said the scandal needs to be put in "perspective" as Clinton "served her country" and did an outstanding job.

April 1: The Daily Caller: Long Time Clinton Aide “mortified” by what may
be in her emails to the Former Secretary of State:
Huma Abedin said in an interview this week that she has yet to read the emails she exchanged with her longtime boss, Hillary Clinton, but that she is “mortified” by what may be in them.  “Terrifying,” is how Abedin described the existence of the records in the public domain during an interview on the “Call Your Girlfriend” podcast.  “I confess I have not read anything that has become public,” said Abedin, who currently serves as vice chair of Clinton’s presidential campaign.

March 27: The L.A. Times: Clinton Emailgate probe enters a new phase
as FBI interview of Clinton Looms on the Horizon:
Federal prosecutors investigating the possible mishandling of classified materials on Hillary Clinton’s private email server have begun the process of setting up formal interviews with some of her longtime and closest aides, according to two people familiar with the probe, an indication that the inquiry is moving into its final phases.
Those interviews and the final review of the case, however, could still take many weeks, all but guaranteeing that the investigation will continue to dog Clinton’s presidential campaign through most, if not all, of the remaining presidential primaries.

No dates have been set for questioning the advisors, but a federal prosecutor in recent weeks has called their lawyers to alert them that he would soon be doing so, the sources said. Prosecutors also are expected to seek an interview with Clinton herself, though the timing remains unclear

March 18: The Observer: Hillary Has an NSA Problem
The FBI has been investigating Clinton for months—but an even more secretive Federal agency has its own important beef with her.  If the FBI recommends prosecution and the Department of Justice fails to do so, there will certainly be leaks and the true information will come out. But regardless it will not solve the issue the National Security Agency has with her.

As early as 2009, then Secretary of State Clinton wanted to have a secure blackberry made for her so that she could read highly classified information on it.  But doing so would require the approval of the NSA. Recent emails disclose they declined her request.  When Team Clinton pressed the issue the Information Assurance Directive at the NSA “politely told her to shut up!”   They told her to use her secure computer in her office.  It seems Hillary didn’t cotton to that direction and sought ways to circumvent the rules, which some contend she thought only applied to other people, not her!

March 10: Breitbart: Benghazi Victim’s Mother: “Special Place in Hell for people like Hillary”
Patricia Smith, whose son Sean was killed in the 2012 terrorist attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, responded to Democratic presidential candidate former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s statement about her being “absolutely wrong” by saying there’s “a special place in hell” for people like Clinton “and I hope she enjoys it there” on Thursday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “Intelligence Report with Trish Regan.”

Smith said, “She lied to me. She told me it was a fault of the video. … And she knew full well it wasn’t at that time. And then she says, she was going to check, and if it’s any different, she would call me back. She would let me know. She has never once spoken to me, or her office. The only thing I ever got out of them is that I am not a member of the immediate family, and I don’t need to know.”

She later added, “I want Hillary to talk to me personally, and tell me why there was no security there, when they were asked for it. I know this, because I spoke to my son. That day, he says he was really scared, because he saw the 17 people — 17 November, whatever it was, that they were walking around taking pictures. And he was afraid. He says it didn’t look very good. And he was afraid. And that he asked for security, and he was turned down.”

March 8: The Hill:  Senators want to give Clinton Aide Immunity Deal for Testimony:
A pair of leading Republican senators are asking a former State Department official who reached an immunity deal with the Justice Department last week to answer their questions about Hillary Clinton’s private email server.   In a letter sent last week but released on Tuesday morning, Senators Grassley (R-IA) and Johnson (-WI) told the aide, Bryan Pagliano, that he should have no reason not to appear.

“Because the Department of Justice has granted you immunity from prosecution in this situation, there is no longer reasonable cause for you to believe that discussing these matters with the relevant oversight committees could result in your prosecution,” wrote Grassley and Johnson, who lead the Judiciary and Homeland Security committees, respectively.  Pagliano is believed to have been in charge of setting up Clinton’s email server at her New York home while she was secretary of State. He also worked on Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.

March 2: The New York Times: FBI may question Hillary
Clinton faces legal hurdles from her use of a private computer server as secretary of state that could jar her campaign’s momentum in the months ahead.  Foremost among a half-dozen inquiries and legal proceedings into whether classified information was sent through Mrs. Clinton’s server is an investigation by the FBI, whose agents, according to one law enforcement official, could seek to question Mrs. Clinton’s closest aides and possibly the candidate herself within weeks. 

It is commonplace for the FBI to try to interview key figures before closing an investigation, and doing so is not an indication the bureau thinks a person broke the law. Although defense lawyers often discourage their clients from giving such interviews, Democrats fear the refusal of Mrs. Clinton or her top aides to cooperate would be ready ammunition for Donald J. Trump, the Republican front-runner. A federal law enforcement official said that barring any unforeseen changes, the F.B.I. investigation could conclude by early May. Then the Justice Department will decide whether to file criminal charges and, if so, against whom.

March 1: The Washington Post: Immunity to Staffer who set up Clinton Email Server
The Justice Department has granted immunity to the former State Department staffer who worked on Hillary Clinton’s private email server as part of a criminal investigation into the possible mishandling of classified information, according to a senior law enforcement official.  The official said the FBI had secured the cooperation of Bryan Pagliano, who worked on Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign before setting up the server in her New York home in 2009.

As the FBI looks to wrap up its investigation in the coming months, agents will likely want to interview Clinton and her senior aides about the decision to use a private server, how it was set up, and whether any of the participants knew they were sending classified information in emails, current and former officials said.  The inquiry comes against a sensitive political backdrop in which Clinton is the favorite to secure the Democratic nomination for the presidency.  So far, there is no indication that prosecutors have convened a grand jury in the email investigation to subpoena testimony or documents, which would require the participation of a U.S. attorney’s office.

February 27: Fox News: Marine who said Clinton Tried to Cover Up Benghazi; Removed from Campaign Rally
A man who claimed to be a Marine who had served for eight years with two tours in Iraq was booed by the crowd and removed Friday by police officers from a Clinton campaign rally in South Carolina. The man questioned former President Bill Clinton about his wife’s role in the Benghazi terror attacks.

Hillary Clinton was secretary of state at the time and families of the victims say Clinton told them in the immediate aftermath of the attacks that they were inspired by an online, anti-Islamic video. Clinton’s emails show she knew within hours of the attacks that they were terror related and not connected to the video

February 19: The Daily Signal: Six Supreme Court Rulings that could be overturned
If President Barack Obama or a future Democratic successor were to replace late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia with a liberal, a host of prior high court decisions that favored conservatives could be revisited, and possibly be overruled completely.  The reach of cases that could get another look by a liberal majority Supreme Court touch on bedrock issues of American life, such as race, religion, voting rights, campaign finance, and the Second Amendment.  While it is normal practice for the Supreme Court to rule again on law it already settled, legal experts say the outcome of such an effort if a liberal justice replaced Scalia would be especially dramatic. Indeed, a move from Scalia, a staunch conservative, to a liberal would be the largest ideological shift in the court since 1991, when Thurgood Marshall retired and was replaced by Justice Clarence Thomas.   The Supreme Court can decide that they got it wrong in the past and change prior decisions.  Each term this happens to some extent to another.

February 17: The Daily Caller: Dems Passed 1960 Resolution to Prevent
Supreme Court Appointments Ahead of Elections:
Dems Passed A 1960 Resolution To Prevent Supreme Court Appointment Ahead Of Election  In the wake of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, President Barack Obama said he plans on nominating a successor despite Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell ‘s vow not to fill the seat until the election is over.  While Democrats in the upper chamber – including Sens. Chuck Schumer (NY) and Russ Feingold (WI) both of which called for blocking former President George W. Bush’s nominations – have slammed the GOP for its decision not to consider a nominee until after a new president is elected, Democrats, however, have not always held that stance. The Democrat-controlled Senate passed a resolution in 1960 preventing a recess appointment, much to the dismay of Republicans. 

As first reported by The Washington Post – S.RES. 334, also known as Expressing the Sense of the Senate That The President Should Not Make Recess Appointments to the Supreme Court, Except to Prevent or End a Breakdown in the Administration of the Court’s Business – passed the Senate in a  48-33 vote in an attempt to prevent former President Dwight Eisenhower from filling a seat last-minute.

February 12: Yahoo News: ISIS shoots down  MIG 23 over Libya
A MiG-23 fighter of Libya's internationally recognized government was shot down Friday as it carried out air strikes on opposition positions in the coastal city of Benghazi, the military said.  Sources say the plane was "shot down in Qaryunes, northwest Benghazi, as it bombed positions of the (Mujahedeen) Shura Council", a coalition of Islamist militias close to Al-Qaeda.   The military source said the pilot survived having parachuted to safety, but his whereabouts were not immediately clear.  It was the second military air crash this week.  On Monday, another MiG-23 operated by forces loyal to Libya's recognized government crashed near the eastern city of Derna after attacking ISIS positions.

February 5: Fox News: Benghazi Committee Democrats Gave
$33K+ in bonuses while blasting the cost of said probe!
Democrats on the House committee probing the 2012 Benghazi terror attacks awarded tens of thousands of dollars in bonuses to their staff, while at the same time repeatedly attacking Republicans over the rising cost of the investigation.  According to publicly available reports, a total of $33,600 was given to six Democratic staffers at the end of 2014 and 2015.  While the bonuses make up only a fraction of the panel's total expenses to date, critics suggested they undermine the minority members' complaints about the budget.

Democrats have complained the committee’s investigation, established in May 2014, has gone on longer than the 9/11 Commission's review of the 2001 terror attacks and have accused Republicans of using the committee as a political weapon to attack Democratic 2016 front-runner Hillary Clinton -- who was secretary of state at the time of the Benghazi attacks.

January 5: The Daily Caller:  Benghazi Soldiers: We believe the families, not Hillary
Three members of the security team who responded to the attack on the Benghazi annex on Sept. 11, 2012 say that they believe the families of the four Americans killed that day when they say that then-Sec. of State Hillary Clinton blamed an anti-Muslim video for the attacks during private conversations.  Clinton has denied claims made by the relatives of State Department information officer Sean Smith, and CIA operatives Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods that Clinton blamed the film, “Innocence of Muslims,” during a Sept. 14, 2012 memorial service for the victims.  Clinton’s response to the Benghazi attacks — as well as her Libya policies ahead of the onslaught — figures to be a major political roadblock for the Democrat’s presidential campaign. Those policies will receive renewed attention later this month, with the release of Michael Bay’s “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi.”

December 25: Fox News: Feds Release heavily redacted Benghazi  emails on Christmas Eve
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Thursday released 16 pages of sensitive documents related to the 2012 Benghazi terror attack.  The documents, released ahead of the Christmas holiday when they would get the least news coverage, include mostly blacked-out emails and some press clippings about events in Libya after the attack on the U.S. embassy, which left four Americans dead. The event has become a central part of Republican criticism of Hillary Clinton's time as Secretary of State as she runs for president.

A few of the heavily redacted emails discuss the drafting of an assessment of the threat level before the attack occurred. Congress had requested the assessment in the months after the attack.  The emails hadn't been requested by any particular group, instead released as part of a "proactive disclosure" under the Freedom of Information Act that governs which public documents may be made available to the public.

December 10: The Daily Caller: Benghazi’s “Smoking Gun” Email Unmasks Clinton
Touted by Fox News as a “possible smoking gun,” the email from Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s chief of staff shows that special operations teams within a few hours flight from Benghazi were preparing to deploy as early as 7 PM Washington time on the night of the attacks, well within the time needed to get to Benghazi before the deadly mortar strike that killed U.S. Navy Seals Glen Doherty and Ty Woods.  Panetta aide Jeremy Bash emailed Mrs. Clinton’s top aides at 7:09 PM, to let them know that quick reaction forces, then stationed in Europe, were “spinning up as we speak” to deploy to Benghazi.

The Commander’s In Extremis Force (CIF) – a 50 man team of Special Ops troops with their own airlift capability and specially trained to deal with situations like the attack in Banghazi – were in Croatia on a training mission and “spinning up” to respond.  According to the emails, all they needed was a go-ahead from the Department of State, which was under Hillary Clinton’s leadership at the time. This key email flies in the face of the Clinton narrative and proves that U.S. forces were ready, willing and able to extract U.S. personnel from Benghazi if only Hillary had given the approval.

November 30: The Hill: Feds Release Largest Number of Clinton Emails
The State Department released the largest batch yet of Hillary Clinton’s emails yet on Monday, part of a gradual process to put all of the messages that she claimed were work-related out for the public to see.  7,800 pages of Clinton’s emails were included in the latest data dump, including one email that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence had originally flagged as potentially containing classified information before deciding it did not contain intelligence agency information

November 30: Fox News: Nearly 1,000 of Clinton’s emails were classified:
The State Department’s latest release of Hillary Clinton documents brings the total number of Clinton emails known to contain classified material to nearly 1,000.  The department on Monday released its largest batch of emails yet.  The latest batch contains 328 emails deemed to have classified information. According to the State Department, that brings the total number with classified information to 999.  The emails in question were deemed classified before their release by the department – and the former secretary of state has said all along she never sent emails with material marked classified at the time.  But the large number of emails containing now-classified material further underscores how much sensitive information was crossing her private server, a situation her critics have described as a security risk.  “It underscores the degree to which Hillary Clinton jeopardized our national security and has tried to mislead the American people," RNC Chair Priebus said in a statement

November 30: The Hill: Clinton: “What Difference Does it Make?”
Hillary Clinton and her top aides were dismissive of criticism about her 2013 appearance in a Senate committee hearing regarding the terror attack on Benghazi, Libya, in a new email released on Monday evening. Her statement before the committee  were --  “Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided that they’d they go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?”  Emails released by the State Department on Monday show a virtually unanimous chorus of support for Clinton following that hearing, with many aides passing along glowing reviews of her performance.

However, there was at least one exception.  “I don't think the emotion in the hearing works to your advantage -- looks more like they rattled you on something no one outside the crazy right blamed you for anyway,” Mark Penn, Clinton’s former top political strategist, wrote to Hillary the day after the hearing.  “I think you either let it lie and say I think I've said everything that needs to be said on this or if asked why so emotional you might explain that you were just frustrated with the apparent high level of partisanship on this issue — we should be pulling together here and not losing our focus on the fight against terrorism which has always been a bipartisan issue and focusing on the big questions that confront us,” he added.

November 5: CNSNews.com: New Emails: Benghazi Cover Story Continues to Unravel:
A new lot of emails released by the State Department on Halloween were so newsworthy that not even the holiday could drown it out.  It turns out, three days after the Benghazi attack, on Sept. 14, 2012, the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli specifically warned the State Department in an email not to promote the idea that an anti-Muslim YouTube video was the cause of the attack.  The embassy issued this warning for two reasons: one, it was not true. And two, by calling continued attention to the video, anti-American sentiment in Libya was inflamed, where the video had not been a factor to any significant extent.

October 30: The Daily Mail: One out of 16 of Hillary’s emails were classified
The State Department released 4,432 emails on Friday that once lived on the secret server in Hillary Clinton's upstate New York home. State Department Spokesman John Kirby said Friday's installment contains between 200 to 300 messages that were deemed 'classified' by intelligence analysts. Those messages were censored in part or completely. A preliminary count shows that 272 of the messages released Friday include the words 'declassify' and 'reason' – an indication that they were given a classification designation by an intelligency agency. A federal judge has ordered the State Department to make the entire remaining collection  of 55,000 public by the last weekday in January – which comes just three days before the Iowa Caucuses. 

October 30: The New York Times:  White House Moves to Keep Obama-Clinton emails hidden:
The White House will try to block the release of a handful of emails between President Obama and former Secretary of State Clinton, citing longstanding precedent invoked by presidents of both parties to keep presidential communications confidential.  The State Department discovered the emails between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton as part of its effort to release the former secretary’s emails, several thousand more of which were scheduled to be made public on Friday. Mr. Obama’s correspondence was forwarded for review to the White House, which has decided against release.

October 22: The Daily Caller: Hillary told Chelsea Terrorist responsible the night
of the Benghazi attack then later told others it was because of a video:
Hillary Clinton sent an email to her daughter, Chelsea, on Sept. 11, 2012 in which she asserted that an al-Qaida-like group was responsible for the terrorist attacks in Benghazi, it was revealed on Thursday during the former secretary of state’s testimony to the House Select Committee on Benghazi.  The email, which was revealed by Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, indicates that Clinton knew early on that the attacks which left four Americans dead was carried out by terrorists. But as Jordan pointed out, Clinton and others in the Obama administration had already begun crafting the narrative that the attack was spontaneous and that the attackers were motivated by a YouTube video many Muslims found offensive.  “Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an Al Queda-like [sic] group,” Clinton wrote.  Meanwhile she also told us publicly “Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted to the Internet.”

October 22: Fox News: Clinton seeks to move on beyond Benghazi, but can she?
The former secretary of state -- no doubt looking to avoid missteps that could reverberate on the trail -- was visibly measured Thursday as she defended her role before, during and after the attacks. And she repeatedly cited past investigations, suggesting there’s little more to uncover.  Whether Clinton gets her wish remains to be seen.  Ultimately, analysts suggested the hearing might not move the dial much either way – Republican critics continued to voice frustration Thursday at her responses, while congressional Democrats spent the better part of the day defending her.  In the short term there were probably no minds changed, which may have been all Clinton could hope for.

October 19: Fox News:  Steven’s Cable shows Ambassador sought security staffing before Benghazi attack
Two months before the fatal 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, then-Ambassador Chris Stevens requested 13 security personnel to help him safely travel around Libya, according to a cable reviewed by Fox News -- but he was turned down.  In the July 9, 2012 cable, Stevens reported that, "Overall security conditions continue to be unpredictable, with large numbers of armed groups and individuals not under control of the central government, and frequent clashes in Tripoli and other major population centers." The cable said 13 security personnel would be the "minimum" needed for "transportation security and incident response capability." 

October 2: The Hill: Benghazi panel
Democrats claimed this week that the House’s special committee investigating the 2012 violence in Benghazi, Libya, was the longest inquiry of its kind, but fact-checkers on Friday proved them wrong.  In fact, there have been at least four special congressional committees charged with investigating various incidents that have run longer than the Benghazi panel.    Among those four committees running longer than the Benghazi panel are a 1970s panel charged with investigating the assassinations of former President Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. and an 1860s probe into conduct during the Civil War. The other two committees are a 1950s panel investigating criminal behavior in labor-management relations and a World War II-era special Senate committee created to look at defense contracts.   

September 27: The Hill: Clinton bemoans the “drip, drip, drip” of email-gate news
Hillary Clinton acknowledged in a Sunday interview that she’s been politically damaged by the “drip, drip, drip” of the controversy surrounding her use of a personal email account and server as secretary of State.  Clinton said, “What I have tried to do in explaining this is provide more transparency and more information than anyone who I am aware of who has ever served in the government, and I’m happy to do that because I want these questions to be answered.”  While Democrats have been frustrated by the drawn-out controversy over the emails, and Clinton’s inability to get out in front on the issue, the former secretary of State insisted she’s done all she can to put the matter to rest.

September 27: Politico:  Clinton: Email scandal is just “Another Conspiracy Theory”
A seemingly frustrated Hillary Clinton strove on Sunday to link the latest flap over her personal email server with the string of scandals and attacks Republicans raised against her in the 1990s.  “During the ’90s, I was subjected to the same kind of barrage,” the former first lady said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” noting that New York voters elected her a senator despite the attacks. 

“When I ran for the Senate, they overlooked all of that,” the former secretary of state and front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination continued. “I was elected senator after going through years of back and forth.”  After a series of questions from host Chuck Todd about her emails, including a new charge that a recently released email exchange with former CIA director and retired Gen. David Petraeus occurred earlier than she acknowledged using her personal account, an exasperated-sounding Clinton asked Todd whether his next question would be about “another conspiracy theory.”

September 24: The Daily Caller: Congress Getting Upset with DOJ “hiding” of Clinton Emails
Congress is fed up with the Department of Justice withholding information related to the Hillary Clinton email investigation.  Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley blasted the DOJ for leaking more information to the media than they’ll provide to him in response to formal congressional inquiries. 

Grassley wants more information from the DOJ so he can consider the possibility of offering immunity to Clinton aide Bryan Pagliano, who managed Clinton’s personal server that contained classified emails, in exchange for his testimony.  Grassley sent a request to Attorney General Lynch requesting the information on September 14th but DOJ replied Tuesday refusing to acknowledge any investigation. 

September 22: Bloomberg.com: FBI Recovers Clinton’s Deleted Emails
The FBI has recovered personal and work-related e-mails from the private computer server used by Hillary Clinton during her time as secretary of state, according to a person familiar with the investigation.  The FBI’s success at salvaging personal e-mails that Clinton said had been deleted raises the possibility that the Democratic presidential candidate’s correspondence eventually could become public. The disclosure of such e-mails would likely fan the controversy over Clinton’s use of a private e-mail system for official business.

The FBI is investigating how and why classified information ended up on Clinton’s server. The probe probably will take at least several more months.  A review by Clinton and her aides determined that about half of the 60,000 e-mails she exchanged during her four-year tenure as secretary of state were of a personal nature, the presidential candidate has said.  The exact number of personal e-mails recovered by the FBI could not be learned.

September 12: The Washington Post: Company Managing Clinton Server: No Indication it was wiped:
The company that managed Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server said it has “no knowledge of the server being ‘wiped,’” the strongest indication to date that tens of thousands of e-mails that Clinton has said were deleted could be recovered.  Clinton and her advisers have said for months that she deleted her personal correspondence from her time as secretary of state, creating the impression that 31,000 e-mails were gone forever. 

There is a distinction between e-mails being deleted and a server being wiped. If e-mails are deleted or moved from a server, they appear to no longer exist on the device but that is not always the case.  Often times only the indexing (or table of contents) that allows the easy location of the data that has been erased. Experts say, depending on the condition of the server, underlying data can remain on the device and the e-mails can often be restored.  To make the information go away permanently, a server must be wiped — a process that includes overwriting the underlying data with gibberish, possibly several times.  That process, according to Platte River Networks, the Denver-based firm that has managed the system since 2013, apparently did not happen.

September 9: The Daily Caller: State Department had no idea the email czar is a Hillary Clinton Donor:
The State Department admitted on Wednesday that it did not know that a career diplomat hired as the agency’s new email and transparency czar donated the maximum allowed under federal law to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.  Regardless of that potential conflict of interest, agency spokesman John Kirby also acknowledged that the new hire, Janice Jacobs, will likely be involved in processing Clinton’s emails.  Hours after Jacobs’ hiring was announced on Tuesday, it was revealed that she contributed $2,700 to Clinton’s campaign in June.

September 9: Associated press: Government turns over fewer Clinton Emails than cited
The State Department has delivered only seven of nearly 70 pages of documents that a federal judge identified as potentially responsive to an Associated Press request for documents relating to Hillary Clinton's hiring of longtime aide Huma Abedin as a special government contract staffer.  The department's response contained only five email documents, two of them partially censored.  Meanwhile, government lawyers asked another federal judge to delay releasing thousands of pages of documents, sought by news media, legal, and political organizations, from Clinton's tenure as secretary of state until January 2016.

The State Department's request to delay its release of emails and other Clinton-related documents raised the prospect that significant information about her tenure as secretary of state might not surface until after early Democratic Party presidential nomination contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.  Impatient with years of previous delays from the State Department over requests by the AP for emails and documents from Clinton and several of her top aides, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon set a strict schedule for release of the material last month. It included an order to deliver to the AP all uncensored portions of an estimated 68 pages of documents related to Abedin by Tuesday. The AP sued the State Department last March because of delays stretching back to 2013 in the news agency's efforts to obtain documents about Clinton's diplomatic stint under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.

August 31: Breitbart News: Clinton’s Private Email Server Housed on Same Network as the Clinton Foundation’s
Records reveal that Hillary Clinton’s private clintonemail.com server shared an IP address with her husband Bill Clinton’s email server, presidentclinton.com, and both servers were housed in New York City, not in the basement of the Clintons’ Chappaqua, New York home.  Web archives show that the Presidentclinton.com Web address was being operated by the Clinton Foundation as of 2009, when Hillary Clinton registered her own clintonemail.com server. 

Numerous Clinton Foundation employees used the presidentclinton.com server for their own email addresses, which means that they were using email accounts that, if hacked, would have given any hacker complete access to Hillary’s State Department emails, as well.  The bombshell revelation raises new concerns about the possible illegality of Hillary Clinton’s private email use. The former Secretary of State is under federal investigation for potentially violating the Espionage Act by allowing people without a security clearance to access classified information. The fact that Hillary was sharing an email network with a private foundation means that people without a security clearance almost certainly had physical access to her server while she was working at the State Department.

August 25: Fox News:  State Department release of Clinton emails;
possible violating 2009 Obama Presidential Order
One of the emails that triggered the FBI probe into Hillary Clinton’s server contained classified intelligence from three different agencies – which could mean the State Department violated a Presidential executive order by authorizing its release.   In 2009 order, EO 13526, laid out the rules for "classifying, safeguarding and declassifying national security information." It states that the authority to declassify rests with the intelligence agency that originated the information.  "Information shall be declassified or downgraded by … the official who authorized the original classification ... [or] the originator's current successor," the order says.

One of the two emails that sparked the FBI probe was an April 2011 email from Clinton confidant Huma Abedin that contained intelligence from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which oversees aerial imagery, including satellites.  Despite this fact and despite the executive order, the State Department publicly released the email and its intelligence -- which was not theirs to declassify -- onto its website in May as part of the initial release of documents on the 2012 Benghazi attack.

August 25: The Hill: Senator Grassley presses Kerry for details on Clinton Emails
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) wants Secretary of State John Kerry to hand over the details of how Hillary Clinton's attorney, David Kendall, was given a security clearance to handle her emails.   "The transmission of classified material to an individual unauthorized to possess it is a serious national security risk," Grassley wrote in the letter to Kerry, released on Tuesday, raising concerns about Kendall's security clearance. "Moreover, if a person unauthorized to maintain custody of classified materials does in fact maintain custody, it raises legitimate questions as to whether the information was properly secured from foreign governments and other entities."

Kendall, in response to a letter Grassley sent earlier this month, said that he received a Top Secret clearance from the State Department in November 2014, while his law partner Katherine Turner received the same clearance in December.   "We obtained them in order to be able to review documents at the Department of State, to assist former Secretary Clinton in preparing to testify before the House Select Committee on Benghazi," Kendall said. "Our obtaining these clearances was unrelated to the 30,490 emails provided to the State Department on December 5, 2014; none of these emails were classified." 

Pointing to Kendall's letter Grassley suggested that neither Kendall nor Turner had a high enough level of clearance, adding that their clearance wasn't "at a sufficient level to be a custodian of TS [top secret]/SCI [sensitive compartmented information] material. Thus, it appears Secretary Clinton sent TS/SCI material to unauthorized persons." 

August 16: The Washington Times: Clinton’s Classified Emails Jump to 60
While media coverage has focused on a half-dozen of Clinton’s personal emails containing sensitive intelligence, the total number of her private emails identified by an ongoing State Department review as having contained classified data has ballooned to 60, officials told The Washington Times.  That figure is current through the end of July and is likely to grow as officials wade through a total of 30,000 work-related emails that passed through her personal email server, officials said. The process is expected to take months.

The 60 emails are among those that have been reviewed and cleared for release under the Freedom of Information Act as part of a open-records lawsuit. Some of the emails have multiple redactions for classified information.  Among the first 60 flagged emails, nearly all contained classified secrets at the lowest level of “confidential” and one contained information at the intermediate level of “secret,” officials told the Times.

August 14: The Washington Post:  Clinton’s Team Gets Nervous over Emails
Late last month, Hillary Rodham Clinton stood before a line of television cameras at a rural Iowa campaign stop to deny reports that she had sent sensitive information over her private e-mail system.  “I’m confident that I never sent or received any information that was classified at the time it was sent and received,” Clinton said, dismissing claims to the contrary by federal intelligence officials. The next week law enforcement officials became interested, and the campaign’s apparent lack of concern began to turn into a sense of anxiety.  “They’re worried about it,” said a longtime Clinton adviser and confidant who agreed to discuss the mood of the campaign team only on the condition of anonymity. “They don’t know where it goes. That’s the problem.”

August 14: My Way News: AP Reports Top Secret Clinton Emails included information on the use of Drones.
The two emails on Hillary Rodham Clinton's private server that an auditor deemed "top secret" include a discussion of a news article detailing a U.S. drone operation and a separate conversation that could point back to highly classified material in an improper manner or merely reflect information collected independently, U.S. officials who have reviewed the correspondence told The Associated Press.  The sourcing of the information could have significant political implications as the 2016 presidential campaign heats up. Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, agreed this week to turn over to the FBI the private server she used as secretary of state, and Republicans in Congress have seized on the involvement of federal law enforcement as a sign that she was either negligent with the nation's secrets or worse.

On Monday, the inspector general for the 17 spy agencies that make up what is known as the intelligence community told Congress that two of 40 emails in a random sample of the 30,000 emails Clinton gave the State Department for review contained information deemed "Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information," one of the government's highest levels of classification.

August 12: Real Clear Politics: Gowdy on Hillary’s Server: “She Almost Got Away With It, But She Didn’t”
Chairman Gowdy: Every explanation Secretary Clinton has provided about a week later was proven to be demonstrably false. This is just the latest one of those assertions that there was no classified info. I saw the clip this morning. She was very definitive – she neither sent or received classified information. Well, that is patently false.  That I’m primarily concerned with is whether or not I’m going to have access to records that i need to do the job that the House asked me to do...

If she (Clinton) were interested in cooperation she wouldn't have done any of the things she's done to date. This was not about cooperation, and frankly, it's not about convenience, it's about control. she wanted to control access to the public record, and she almost got away with it but she didn't.

August 10: The Daily Caller:
Napolitano: If Hillary is Telling the Truth, Then She No Longer Has the Email Server
Judge Andrew Napolitano stated, “if she [Clinton] told the truth and the statement she signed on Friday, ‘I turned over all copies of the e-mails’ was accurate then, she no longer has the server.”  Napolitano appeared on Fox News’ “The Kelly File” Monday, where he said, “if she [Clinton] still has the server, then her statement violates the law because it is untruthful. Because the server has copies of the e-mails on it and she didn’t turn over all copies of the email.”  Clinton has signed a certification under penalty of perjury that she turned over federal records.

August 6: Real Clear Politics: Fiorina: I will Debate Hillary on Benghazi Server
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews asked GOP candidate Carly Fiorina “How do you debate someone you just called a liar (Hillary Clinton)?  Do you really think that's a way to engage in a debate? To call your opponent a liar? I'm astounded by that judgment. Fiorina responded that she was very specific. She lied about Benghazi, her email and her person email server.   Matthews: “Let me put a fine point on that. How did she lie, as you put it, about Benghazi? Where was her lie?”  Fiorina: “Okay. It is very clear from all the data, …from the e-mails that she, that the president of the United States, that the Secretary of State, and that the military understood this was a purposeful terrorist attack on the anniversary of 9/11 and they understood it while it was going on.   So tell me then why would you talk about the next day from the State Department, why would you talk about a video? Why would you stand over the bodies of the fallen and say it again? Why not come out and say, this was a purposeful terrorist attack on our embassy. Four brave Americans were killed and we are going to seek retribution.

July 29:  The Hill: Hillary to Appear before House Benghazi Committee in October:
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has agreed to testify at a public hearing on October 22 before the House committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi attack, the panel announced late Wednesday.  The confirmation comes after a back and forth effort between Clinton and the panel over whether she would attend, and sets the stage for a surefire media spectacle involving the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination being grilled by likely antagonistic Republicans lawmakers. 

“Members of the committee will question the former secretary about Libya, Benghazi and her email arrangement consistent with the scope and jurisdiction of the committee,” panel spokesman Jamal Ware said in a statement.  Lawmakers have been particularly irate at the revelations that Clinton used a personal email account housed on a private server throughout her time in office, and may have used it to send unsecured classified emails.  Federal officials have recently been called in to investigate the practice, which has only heightened the scrutiny on Clinton. 

July 22: The Washington Times: Kerry Aid Compelled to Testify on Benghazi
Secretary of State John Kerry’s right-hand man has been called to Congress to testify about the slow pace of information being released to the congressional committee probing the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack, the probe’s chairman announced Wednesday. Jon Finer, Kerry’s chief of staff, will appear before the committee July 29 unless the department quickly steps up its production of documents, Chairman Gowdy announced. Gowdy said he’s fed up with excuses from the department for a slow response to requests for information, and that Finer, whom Kerry designated as his answers-man on Benghazi, needs to clear things up.

“Our committee has tried asking personally. Our committee has tried letter requests. Our committee has tried public hearings with other agency employees. Our committee has tried subpoena  as. While the tactics tried have varied, the results have not,” Gowdy said. “Our committee is not in possession of all documents needed to do the work assigned to us.”   He and the State Department have been feuding over former Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails, which the committee has demanded, but some of which have apparently been withheld.

July 10: The Hill: Benghazi Chair Miffed over
State’s Turning Over Press Clippings in Response to Document Requests
The chairman of the House panel investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, on Friday ridiculed the State Department’s responses to requests for documents.  Chairman Gowdy (R-SC) told CNN Friday, “[Do] you know what we got last week? We got 3,600 pages, half of which were press clippings, including articles about Richard Gere!  So if that is their idea of complying with congressional investigations, then we are going to be at this a long time.”

In response to a subpoena, the State Department last week handed over 3,600 pages of fresh correspondence to the select committee.  The document trove also included emails from Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations at the time of the deadly 2012 assault; Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff; and former Clinton aide Jake Sullivan. The documents were in response to the continuing investigation into the deadly Benghazi assault, which killed four Americans when Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, was Secretary of State.

July 10: The Daily Caller: Clinton Supporter: “This Interview is Over!”
Former Clinton White House special counsel Lanny Davis hung up on Newsmax TV host Steve Malzberg Friday after the host grilled him over Hillary Clinton’s email scandal.  The Newsmax TV host opened up the interview by bringing up the fact that Clinton claimed that she never received a subpoena over her emails, even though Rep. Trey Gowdy revealed on Wednesday that Clinton did indeed receive one in March.  Davis went on the defensive immediately, telling Malzberg that Clinton was referring to not getting one prior to her giving her emails to the State Department. As Malzberg continued to press the matter Davis became more heated. He finally hung up on the host.

July 7: Real Clear Politics: More on Blumenthal, Clinton, and Benghazi
The way things are going, the House Select Committee on Benghazi will never release the testimony of Sidney Blumenthal, who, let us make no bones about it, is solemnly accused of being a friend of Hillary Clinton's. Of that he is no doubt guilty, caught red-handed by his leaked emails to her, her responses to him, a vast public record, his utterances in public and private, his employment by the Clinton Foundation, his work in the Clinton White House and other such matters. But in one of the incriminating emails, Blumenthal urged Clinton to "help Clio now" and become more public about her role in the overthrow of Moammar Gaddafi, late of Libya (and of this world).

The committee in its wisdom came to appreciate that regarding Libya, Blumenthal not only had no business interests there, but had never even been in the country. The emails concerning Libya that he had passed on to Clinton had come originally from Tyler Drumheller, the CIA's one-time top spy and someone who just might have had something interesting to say. It seemed reasonable to Blumenthal to relay them to Clinton and it seemed reasonable for her to relay them to her staff for vetting. In fact, it seems downright admirable, because the last thing you want is a government official who operates in a bubble.

July 7: The Washington Post: Committee to hear from Clinton’s Inner Circle Prior to Hearing from Hillary herself:
Republicans leading the charge to investigate Benghazi are closing in on Hillary Clinton’s inner circle.  Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) disclosed Monday that he plans to interview three of Clinton’s top advisers: Huma Abedin, a longtime Clinton aide; Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s former chief of staff; and Jake Sullivan, a former director of policy planning at the State Department. Gowdy, who leads the House Select Committee on Benghazi, said there are others on the list but he will not release their names “given the nature of their work.”  These hearings are seen as a precursor to hearing from Hillary Clinton herself and asking about her involvement in protecting State Department personnel overseas and her response to the Benghazi attack.

June 23: The Daily Signal: More Hillary Clinton Benghazi Emails Revealed:
There’s new evidence that the investigative record has long been incomplete on the administration’s actions surrounding the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attacks on the U.S. compounds in Benghazi, Libya.  Only now has the House Select Committee investigating Benghazi finally obtain additional, related emails exchanged through former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private server.  Longtime Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal turned over his email exchanges with Clinton as part of a committee document request prior to his deposition last week.

Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy [R-SC] said, “These emails should have been part of the public record when Secretary Clinton left office and at a bare minimum included when the State Department released Clinton’s self-selected records on Libya.”  It’s unclear as to whether Clinton failed to provide the emails at issue to the State Department, or whether the State Department withheld them from the committee.  Part of the reason for the controversy related to Sidney Blumenthal is his role in possibly advising Secretary Clinton via her private server after the White House had reportedly barred him from working for the Department of State. At the time, Obama officials were said to blame Blumenthal for negative stories about Barack Obama when he faced Clinton in the Democratic primary.

June 17: The Hill: Congressman Gowdy ID’s author of Benghazi Memos
Select Benghazi Committee Chair Trey Gowdy (R-SC) has identified the author of the memos on Libya and the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi that Hillary Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal passed on to her while she was secretary of State.  He identified the author of the memos as Tyler Drumheller, a former CIA official, who was mentioned in some media reports following Blumenthal’s roughly nine-hour deposition. Gowdy said of Blumenthal that he was simply forwarding “unvetted, uncorroborated, unsubstantiated intelligence” to Hillary Clinton; intelligence that a person named Tyler Drumheller was sending him. “He [Blumenthal] was merely a conduit between somebody who may have had a financial interest in Libya and our nation's top diplomat,” Gowdy added.  The chairman said the committee “might” call on the author of the memos to testify, arguing that, while Clinton might have known the source of the messages, she might not have been aware of how he or she compiled their information.

June 17: The Daily Caller: House Speaker throws low ball to Hilary Clinton over withheld Benghazi emails
After a House Benghazi Select Committee discovered either Hillary Clinton or the State Department withheld Benghazi emails, House Speaker John Boehner used the occasion to throw Bill Clinton’s infidelity in her face.   “When it comes to Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi-related emails, it depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘all’ is,” Boehner tweeted Wednesday.   The line’s a reference to Bill’s infamous attempt to argue his way out of perjury before a grand jury after having oral sex with Monica Lewinsky and then lying about it. “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” he said, arguing he wasn’t lying when he said he “is” not in an improper relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

June 11: Yahoo News: House Committee approves bill punishing the
Department of  State over Benghazi Response
Over White House objections, a House panel approved a bill Thursday that withholds hundreds of millions of dollars from the State Department until it produces more documents to lawmakers investigating the deadly 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya.    The $47.8 billion bill for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 also restricts funds to set up a diplomatic presence in Cuba — a setback to the Obama administration's effort to thaw relations with the communist state after a half century. The Republican-led Appropriations Committee approved the bill by voice vote.

The provisions are just the latest salvo as newly-empowered Republicans try to use their power over the federal purse to challenge President Barack Obama on the environment, health care, regulation of the Internet, and abortion — just for starters. As the same time a battle is ongoing between the White House, its Democratic allies and Republicans controlling Congress that's about to come to a head next week with a Senate filibuster of a half trillion-plus Pentagon funding bill approved by a Senate panel on Thursday.

May 24: The Hill: Benghazi Investigation Picking Up Steam:
The GOP-controlled House Select Committee on Benghazi is picking up the pace.  Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) said the uptick was result of mounting frustration over what they view as foot-dragging on the part of the Obama administration to the panel’s various document and information requests related the 2012 attacks that killed a U.S. ambassador there and three other Americans, and their aftermath.    This week the panel subpoenaed Sidney Blumenthal, an informal adviser to Hillary Clinton when she helmed the State Department, and who has since agreed to appear before the select committee by the requested June 3 deadline.

May 22: CNN News: Clinton Email Dump Doesn’t Stop Benghazi Questions!
The emails to Clinton don't contain a smoking gun, at least not yet.  But that's hardly surprising since Hillary  herself chose which emails to turn over to the State Department.  But the first batch released from the now-notorious personal account that she used as secretary of state does make clear that this is one headache that will linger for the front-running Democrat's White House campaign.  Also interesting is that at least one of the emails released contained redacted language continuing the debate whether she used her personal server – which did not have the standard State Department security – for sensitive or classified messages, something she has denied doing.

Clinton says she would just like this to be over, but that is unlikely to happen, and in some ways, the initial release of 300 emails -- from a total of 30,000 that Clinton gave the State Department to be made public in the coming months -- repeats a pattern familiar from the string of controversies and scandals that have dogged Bill and Hillary Clinton over the years.  In addition, there is no accounting for the email Mrs. Clinton deleted from her personal server without turning them over to the Department of State for review.

May 22: Yahoo News:  Clinton Received Sensitive Information on her Private Email Server
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton received information on her private email account about the deadly attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi that was later classified "secret" at the request of the FBI, according to documents released Friday, underscoring lingering questions about how responsibly she handled sensitive information on a home server.  The nearly 900 pages of her correspondence released by the State Department also contained several messages that were deemed sensitive but unclassified, detailed her daily schedule and contained information — censored in the documents as released — about the CIA that the government is barred from publicly disclosing.

Taken together, the correspondence provides examples of material considered to be sensitive that Clinton received on the account run out of her home. Clinton's decision while secretary of state to opt out of a State Department email account has become a political problem for her, as the Republican-led House committee investigating the Benghazi attacks has used the disclosures of her email usage to paint her as secretive and above standard scrutiny.

Apr. 30: House Select Committee on Benghazi: Committee Receives Documents Requested Two Years Ago
Select Committee on Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-SC) today announced the committee has received more than 4000 pages of documents and notes from the State Department Benghazi Accountability Review Board. The collection of documents marks the first time that proceedings from a State Department ARB have been turned over to Congress, according to State.  “The Benghazi Committee continues to build the most comprehensive and complete record on what happened before, during and after the Benghazi terrorist attacks,” said Gowdy.  “Contrary to those who said all had been asked and answered, the Benghazi Committee has shown there is more still for Congress to consider. The committee will provide the final, definitive accounting of what happened with regards to Benghazi, reaching conclusions based solely on facts. Getting this production from State’s Benghazi ARB is an important part of ensuring the committee has access to all the facts.”

April 18: The Daily Signal: Paul: Benghazi Fiasco Disqualifies Hillary Clinton from being President
What motivated Sen. Rand Paul to run for president? The Kentucky Republican said he’s “tired of throwing things at the television.”  Paul said he wants to find solutions to the problems facing the nation rather than simply complaining about them. He added that the loss of four lives in the attacks on the American consulate in Benghazi “should ever preclude her [Hillary Clinton] from holding higher office.”

April 18: The Tribune Live/The Washington Post: GOP Presidential candidates go after Hillary Clinton 
Sen. Rand Paul, (R-KY), said Clinton's handling of the 2012 attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, were a “dereliction” of her duty that should “preclude her” from serving as president. He said Clinton and Obama overstepped with airstrikes in that country in 2011: “Why the hell did we ever go into Libya in the first place?” he asked.   Continuing, Paul ribbed Clinton saying that she will need two campaign planes — “one for her and her entourage and one for her baggage.”  (We assume he was referring to the political “baggage” like the Benghazi she will need to contend with.)

April 8: Breitbart News: Libya Uncovers “New Elements” in Killing of Ambassador Stevens
Libya’s internationally recognized parliament said Tuesday it has uncovered “new elements” behind the 2012 assassination of the US ambassador when the American consulate was stormed in eastern city Benghazi. “I have been tasked today with leading a team of inquiry,” Tareq Saqar al-Jeruchi, deputy head of the parliament’s security and defense committee, told AFP. He said the team had “new elements on the real perpetrators of the attack” and would work closely with the FBI and Congressional commissions of inquiry, although he did not elaborate on the identities of the assailants.  A Libyan parliamentary delegation is to travel to the United States for consultations with members of Congress, Jeruchi said.

March 28: Fox News: Head of House Benghazi Probe Says Clinton Wiped her Email Server Clean:
Hillary Clinton wiped her email server "clean," permanently deleting all emails from it, the leader of the House committee investigating the 2012 terror attacks in Benghazi said Friday.  Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., said the former secretary of state has failed to produce a single new document in recent weeks and has refused to relinquish her server to a third party for an independent review, as Gowdy has requested.

"While it is not clear precisely when Secretary Clinton decided to permanently delete all emails from her server, it appears she made the decision after October 28, 2014, when the Department of State for the first time asked the secretary to return her public record to the Department," Gowdy said in a statement. “Not only was the secretary the sole arbiter of what was a public record, she also summarily decided to delete all emails from her server ensuring no one could check behind her analysis in the public interest.”

March 28: The Hill:  RNC: “Even Nixon Didn’t Destroy the Tapes!”
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus blasted Hillary Clinton on Saturday for wiping her server and permanently deleting all emails.  "Even Nixon didn't destroy the tapes," Priebus said in a statement.
Clinton's lawyer informed the House Select Committee investigating Benghazi on Friday that Clinton no longer had copies of any emails from her four-year tenure as secretary of State, ending in 2013.   Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), the chairman of the committee, said in a statement Friday that "Clinton unilaterally decided to wipe her server clean and permanently delete all emails from her personal server."

March 23: The New York Times: Inside Hillary Clinton’s In Box:
Mrs. Clinton’s aides used their private email accounts to communicate with her at times. Not only was Mrs. Clinton corresponding from a private email account, at times four of her closest advisers — chief of staff, Cheryl Mills; senior adviser, Philippe Reines; personal aide, Huma Abedin; and deputy chief of staff, Jake Sullivan — were doing so as well. That raises questions about whether the exchanges would have been captured on public record searches at the State Department.   

The attack on Benghazi occurred during the final year of Mrs. Clinton's tenure as secretary of state, and threatened to damage her image and that of the State Department. The emails that have been released so far, show her inner circle was tracking how the episode was being viewed in the news media and on Capitol Hill, and the questions raised about the department's response.

March 21: Associated Press: Gowdy’s Benghazi Committee Formally Requests Clinton’s Email Server
The chairman of a House committee investigating the deadly 2012 attacks in Benghazi formally requested Friday that Hillary Rodham Clinton turn over her email server for an independent review.  Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) sent a letter requesting that Clinton, a likely Democratic presidential candidate, turn over to the State Department inspector general or other third party the server she used for official business while serving as secretary of state. The aim would be to have a third party determine what records should be made public.  "Though Secretary Clinton alone is responsible for causing this issue, she alone does not get to determine its outcome," Gowdy said in a statement. His request to turn over the server is "in the interest of transparency for the American people," Gowdy said.  [See the related column by the Three Musketeers, coming on Monday, March 23rd]

March 16: Forbes: Hillary Clinton’s Defense of Personal Email Server Controversy Doesn’t Add Up
Last week Clinton held a press conference where she addressed the email server controversy and responded to questions from the media, and some of the points she made don’t really make sense.  Clinton told the audience, “I opted for convenience to use my personal email account, which was allowed. I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two.” But the truth is it’s actually not easier to set up and manage your own personal server.  You probably don’t know how to do it and Mrs. Clinton doesn’t either.

Mrs. Clinton’s defense is that it’s easier to carry one mobile device instead of two, the assumption being that she would need to carry two cell phones (one for work and the other for personal calls).  But wait a minute, smart phones can handle more than one email account on the same phone.  That would mean that Hillary could have had a Department of State and a personal email account on the same smart phone.

Clinton knew of the requirement for secure communications and that her emails were to be archived for safe keeping. Her explanation?  The vast majority of my work emails went to government employees at their government addresses, which meant they were captured and preserved immediately on the system at the State Department.” But the question is what is a “vast majority?” And why not just turn over the entire server to the Department of State..  That way we know we have all the emails, or do we?  Mrs. Clinton says she deleted 30,000 personal emails. How do we know some of those weren’t embarrassing and work related?  After all, she controls the server and the information on it.  Whose to know if she deleted key messages.

March 16: The Daily Mail: Hillary’s “email-gate” now linked to Whistle Blower’s description
of boiler-room operation set up to Hide Documents after Benghazi!
The latest twist in the alleged cover-up of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton's private emails involves a former senior diplomat who said State Department officials conspired to prevent investigators from seeing documents related to the 2012 Benghazi, Libya terror attack.   Some of those documents may have been emails that went through the now-infamous private email server Clinton kept at her Chappaqua, New York home.  If they still exist, they could shed light on Clinton's actions following the deadly Benghazi raid by militants acting with Ansar al-Shariah, an Islamist terror faction linked to al-Qaeda.

Raymond Maxwell, a former deputy assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, last year said that a room in the basement of the State Department was converted to a makeshift document review center on a weekend, supervised by Clinton confidantes including some linked to then-chief of staff Cheryl Mills.  Maxwell claimed he was scapegoated for objecting to the secret boiler-room operation, which he said was organized in order to keep damning documents from the prying eyes of an internal Accountability Review Board.  On a weekend in a basement room, Maxwell recalled to  journalist Sharyl Attkisson, employees were instructed to sift through boxes of documents and separate out anything that might make Clinton or her close associates look bad in the wake of the terrorist murders of four Americans including the ambassador to Libya.   'I was not invited to that after-hours endeavor, but I heard about it and decided to check it out on a Sunday afternoon,' Maxwell said.  Inside, says Maxwell, employees – including an employee who reported to him – were busily covering up information that suggested higher-ups were responsible for the lax security at the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya.

March 13: The Daily Caller: Krauthammer: “It’s not over” either Hillary committed a felony or perjury:
In an appearance on Fox News’ “Special Report” Charles Krauthammer said the issues facing Hillary Clinton about her emails is “not over” and has “long legs.” Citing the impending lawsuit against the State Department by the Associated Press and investigations by the House, Krauthammer says the problems facing the former secretary of state won’t be going away any time soon.  He added that Clinton either committed a felony or perjury, depending on whether she signed government documents or not, echoing a point made by fellow panelist Judge Andrew Napolitano.

March 12: Business Insider:
Hillary Email Deal Gets Bigger that just email
Hillary Clinton is being bombarded on all sides after her exclusive use of a personal email address while she was secretary of state became public last week. Her belated explanations have not sufficed, and experts on all sides are wondering whether the former first lady and likely 2016 presidential candidate may have jeopardized US interests by using a vulnerable form of communication and deleting many of her emails.  But don't expect all that to stop Hillary, who is treating the flap like many of the events that have defined her political career.

"The Clintons play by their own set of rules. And in this case, the former Secretary of State explained, those rules bless her decision to erase some 30,000 emails from the family server despite knowing that the emails had become a subject of intense interest to congressional investigators," David Von Drehle wrote in Time.  After Clinton had finished taking questions at her press conference, her staff disclosed that no one actually read through those 30,000-odd documents before she 'chose not to keep' them."

Time notes that "the twin drivers of the Clinton soap opera" over the past 22 years "have been their penchant for secrecy and their menagerie of rich associates."   And given that the family is once again on the cusp of living in the White House, "the Clintons have little reason to change their MO now."

March 12: The Daily Caller | Associated Press: Hackers reveal Hillary’s Private Server was very insecure
Fox News chief Washington correspondent James Rosen has once again joined up with a team of hackers to dig deeper into Hillary Clinton’s use of private emails, this time demonstrating that there were multiple security lapses when maintaining her private server.  One of the anonymous hackers, who has “long experience in the U.S. intelligence community,” had previously revealed that Clinton had registered multiple email accounts. The team used legally obtained information about the server to create a virtual replica, and from there, used software to test the entire system for vulnerabilities.

The hackers began by confirming Fox News reports that Clinton’s server was located in Manhattan, and was even able to narrow it down to an exact intersection. The extreme ease with which they located the server convinced them that it was likely “highly ‘vulnerable’ to unauthorized intrusion.” Another problem was that clintonemail.com was run on outdated versions of Microsoft software and, they contend, it would be child’s play for a hacker to take advantage of security vulnerabilities in that software.  “This is a big deal and just the thing real-world hackers look for in a target and will exploit to the max,” one source said.  “Several of these vulnerabilities have been known since 2010 and yet [Clinton] is running official State [communications] through it.”

[Related Story] At a State Department briefing, Associated Press reporter Matthew Lee grilled State’s spokeswoman Jen Psaki asking why Russian hackers had more access to State Department records than the American public and Congress.

March 11: The Washington Times: Clinton could face criminal charges and lengthy legal challenges:
The Obama Administration will soon find itself in court having to explain to federal judges why it never told anyone former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a secret email address, potentially spoiling dozens of open records requests. And Clinton, herself, could face up to three years in prison per message if she is found to have broken her word and handled classified information on the secret account, one open records expert told The Washington Times.  The legal challenges have already begun, with The Associated Press filing a federal lawsuit saying the State Department has foiled five years’ worth of requests for Clinton’s emails, but never told them or the court that she kept her own server — meaning that her emails weren’t being searched.

Mrs. Clinton’s office remained silent a day after the former first lady and potential 2016 presidential candidate held a press conference admitting she kept a private email server out of “convenience,” belatedly went through and found public records among her emails and then deleted nearly 32,000 emails she and her lawyers deemed private.

The moves have raised a number of questions about her potential legal jeopardy amid arcane and somewhat outdated open records rules.  “Officials are not allowed to do this, but if they do, they’ll get away with it,” said Christopher Honer, a researcher who has regularly battled the Administration over open records laws. “It is a matter of agency self-enforcement. If the agency head is doing this, good luck with self-enforcement.”

March 11: International Business Times:
Clinton press conference did not staunch the bleeding
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attempted to put the latest controversy behind her by addressing the media Tuesday regarding her use of her private email account to conduct State Department business. But her “convenience” explanation -- namely, that she thought it would be easier to use one device for both her private and public email communications using the same account -- wasn’t sufficient, according to political observers. “She did not staunch the bleeding,” George Arzt, who runs a New York City communications firm and served as press secretary for late New York City Mayor Ed Koch, said. “This is a story that will continue to run because there’s so many holes in Hillary’s defense yesterday and it doesn’t match up with previous statements.”

Clinton’s explanation left many questions unanswered, including why she couldn’t use her phone to access a private and a State Department email address and why she said she didn’t want to use more than one device despite a previous interview where she claimed to have an iPad Mini, an iPad, an iPhone and a BlackBerry (YouTube Video). She also said she would not be turning over the private email server connected to her account, arguing that the server “contains personal communications from my husband and me.” That statement ran contrary to reports that former President Bill Clinton only sent two emails in his life, both when he was commander in chief.

The scrutiny on Clinton is intense considering she is currently the likely Democratic nominee for president in 2016, even though she has yet to officially announce a campaign.

March 8: The Hill: Clinton could face Criminal Charges over emails
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) on Sunday suggested that Hillary Clinton could face criminal charges if she knowingly withholds emails from congressional investigators. Appearing on CNN's "State of the Union," Issa noted that "voluntary cooperation does not guarantee that it's a crime not to deliver all" requested emails.  "A subpoena, which Trey Gowdy issued, is so that in fact it will be a crime if she knowingly withholds documents pursuant to subpoena," he said.

Clinton last week called on the State Department to release the 55,000 pages of her emails that she self-selected and turned over. State has turned over about 900 pages to the committee.  Issa argued that Clinton "wasn't forthcoming two and a half years ago.  She, in fact, hid the very existence of this until she was caught."

Congressman Schiff (D-CA) who sits on the House Benghazi Committee countered "They issued a subpoena for records we already have. We've read them. There's nothing in them.  In my view, this was not provided in response to the The New York Times article or anything else. This was provided last year when a request went out to the state department and all former secretaries.” 

March 8: Yahoo News: “Huge Gaps” reported in Clinton email record
Huge gaps exist in the emails former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has provided to a congressional committee investigating the 2012 attack on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, the panel's chairman said on Sunday.  Republican Representative Trey Gowdy said his committee lacked documentation from Clinton's trip to Libya after the attack despite a popular photo image of her using a handheld device during a flight to that country.  "We have no emails from that day. In fact we have no emails from that trip," said Gowdy "There are huge gaps."

Widely considered the frontrunner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, Clinton used a private email account for all official business as President Barack Obama's secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. The private email disclosure, published in The New York Times last week, raised Republican concerns about Clinton's commitment to transparency.   She has since asked the State Department to release her emails but a State Department official said the review would take some time. 

March 4: The Washington Post | Fox News:
House Committee subpoenas Clinton’s email from personal email account and Internet providers:
The Select Committee investigating the attack on Benghazi has issued a subpoena for all the Clinton personal emails related to her knowledge of what happened related to the Benghazi attack.  It also issued an order telling Internet Service Providers to save and protect any of these emails they have.  Making difficult the retrieval of these documents is the fact that a week prior to Clinton’s confirmation as Secretary of State, she set up a personal email server in her home that was, and is, not under the control of the Department of State. During her four years in office she used almost exclusively this personal server and a personal email account linked to it.  This means that no government entity has control over what was, and is, on that server.  It also raises the question that if she wanted to delete critical or sensitive emails who would ever know?

Clinton has not described her motivation for using a private email account for official State Department business. Operating her own server would have afforded Clinton additional legal opportunities to block government or private subpoenas in criminal, administrative or civil cases because her lawyers could object in court before being forced to turn over any emails. And since the Secret Service was guarding Clinton's home, an email server there would have been well protected from theft or a physical hacking.

March 3: The Hill: Benghazi Committee Chair: Clinton personal email account is “troubling”
A key House Republican is calling Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account as secretary of State “troubling,” and suggests it could prompt lawmakers to ask her to testify multiple times before a panel investigating the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya.  Rep. Trey Gowdy, the chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, said the panel learned late last summer that Clinton used a personal email address exclusively while serving at the nation’s top diplomat.  “You do not need a law degree to understand how troubling this is,” he said at a press conference attended by five other Republicans on his panel.  He called the fact that Clinton did not use a government email “nothing short of incredible.”

He vowed the panel would take “a number of detailed actions” to follow up on the disclosure, including contacting Clinton’s attorneys and her email providers.  “In the past I had thought that we would have a singular invitation to discuss the before during and after Benghazi,” Gowdy said.  But “this revelation … may well lay the groundwork for additional conversations with the secretary, in some setting or another,” added Gowdy.

February 26: National Review: 
Clinton’s Aides Knew within Minutes the Benghazi Attack was from Terrorist, Emails disclose:
From the very first moments of the terrorist attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her top aides were advised that the compound was under a terrorist attack. In fact, less than two hours into the attack, they were told that the al-Qaeda affiliate in Libya, Ansar al-Sharia, had claimed responsibility. These revelations and others are disclosed by a trove of e-mails and other documents pried from the State Department by Judicial Watch in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The FOIA litigation focuses on Mrs. Clinton’s involvement in the government actions before, during, and after the Benghazi attack, in which Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, was murdered by terrorists. Also killed in the attack were State Department information management officer Sean Smith, and two former Navy SEALs, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, who were contract security employees and who had fought heroically, saving numerous American lives. At least ten other Americans were wounded, some quite seriously.

February 7: Yahoo News: Benghazi panel plans to interview Susan Rice and others:
A House panel investigating the deadly 2012 attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, plans to interview at least 20 officials including National Security Adviser Susan Rice, former Pentagon chief Leon Panetta and ex-CIA head David Petraeus, the committee said Friday.  The list of interviewees - a veritable "who's who" of U.S. foreign policy and national security officials - emerged as Democrats complained about the "unlimited" budget of the Select Committee on Benghazi and its open-ended schedule, as it covers similar ground to earlier investigations.  Democrats say the committee's efforts are politically motivated while Republicans say that the Department of State under the headship of Hillary Clinton, failed to protect U.S. diplomatic personnel, including the Ambassador.

February 2: The Washington Times:
Secret Tapes of Hillary Clinton’s Role in War in Lybia to be reviewed by Benghazi Committee:
The chairman of a special House committee created to investigate the 2012 Benghazi tragedy on Monday instructed his staff to review secretly recorded tapes and intelligence reports that detail Hillary Clinton’s role in advocating and executing the war in Libya, opening the door for a possible expansion of his probe.  Rep. Trey Gowdy’s decision to seek a review of the materials, first highlighted in a series of Washington Times stories last week, carries consequences for the 2016 election in which Clinton is expected to seek the presidency. It could also move the committee to examine the strained relationship between the State Department and Pentagon, which sharply disagreed over the 2011 war in Libya and the response to the terrorist attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi a year later.

The Times reported last week that U.S. intelligence did not support Clinton’s story of an impending genocide in Libya that she used to sell the war against Moammar Gadhafi’s regime. The newspaper also unveiled secretly recorded tapes from Libya that showed that the Pentagon and Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich so distrusted her stewardship of the war that they opened their own diplomatic channels with the Gadhafi regime.

January 27: The Hill:   Clinton Willing to testify on Benghazi:
Hillary Clinton is willing to testify before the House Select Committee that is investigating the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, according to the panel’s top Democrat.  Congressman Cummings (D-MD) on Tuesday said he has spoken to Clinton about the possibility of testifying at the request of Chairman Gowdy (R-SC), and she “did not hesitate for one second.  She said ... I’ll do it, period,” Cummings said.

January 27: The Daily Caller: 
State Benghazi witness takes withering questions for criticism of conservatives
A State Department witness was confronted during a Capitol Hill hearing on Tuesday about his past comments questioning the motives of conservatives for investigating the 2012 terrorist attacks against Americans in Benghazi.  During a hearing of the Benghazi Select Committee, Congressman Roskam (R-IL) repeatedly questioned Joel M. Rubin, the deputy assistant secretary for House affairs, about past op-eds he authored suggesting that Republicans were only investigating the attacks for partisan reasons.  “You don’t think that this a frivolous, partisan investigation, do you?” Roskam asked Rubin Tuesday. Roskam was referring to op-eds written by Rubin in 2012 where he argued Republicans were using the attacks for “political advantage.” (Rubin was in the private sector at the time, and wasn’t appointed to his current State Department position until last year).  Last year, lawmakers in the House passed a bill to establish the new committee to investigate the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya that left four Americans dead, including Chris Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya.

January 22: The Daily Signal:
Federal Agencies Continue to Stonewall Benghazi Investigation:
Some federal agencies continue to stonewall when it comes to the ongoing investigation into the Benghazi terrorist attacks, according to insiders familiar with the process. They say the House Benghazi Select Committee isn’t getting access to all relevant documents and witnesses.  That will be the topic of the committee’s first public hearing of 2015 called for Tuesday next week.  Most of the committee’s work since a (slightly) bipartisan vote created it May 8, 2014, has quietly focused on the massive task of gathering information.

The committee has provided relevant federal agencies a list of several dozen witnesses it wishes to interview. But Republican staff members are encountering some of the same roadblocks that other committees met as they investigated pieces of the events surrounding the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya. Four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, died in the assaults.  One congressional official noted that some federal agencies, such as the Justice Department, appear to be working to comply with committee requests, engaging in productive negotiations over requested materials and access to witnesses. However, the official says that there are still outstanding issues with the Justice Department.  Other agencies, including the State Department and some in the intelligence community, have not been as cooperative.

December 11: Fox News: Majority of Americans want the Administration staff to testify on Benghazi
A Fox News poll shows a majority of American voters wants Congress to keep investigating Benghazi -- and they want to hear from White House staffers, who they suspect of a cover-up.  By a 58-38 percent margin, voters think Congress should continue digging into the administration’s handling of the debacle. And 6 in 10 (60 percent) say the Obama administration is covering up on Benghazi . That’s more than twice the number that believes the White House is being “open and transparent” (28 percent). The poll finds 70 percent of voters think President Obama should direct all White House staff involved in the response to the Benghazi attacks to testify under oath before the House select committee investigating the matter.  That includes a 56-percent majority of Democrats. 

On Wednesday, Rep. Trey Gowdy, chair of the House select committee investigating Benghazi, told Fox News’s Greta van Susteren he thinks it is important for the committee to hear from Ben Rhodes, a White House political appointee who authored an email that perpetrated a false narrative on Benghazi.

December 11: The Hill: Susan Rice must be called to testify on Benghazi
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), the chairman of the House Select Committee Benghazi, wants Susan Rice to testify, setting up a high-profile confrontation.  "Susan Rice has to be called," Gowdy said. "She's never been called before a committee of Congress to explain what role she played in the drafting or the giving of the White House talking points." Rice, the national security adviser, has faced criticism for her Sunday show appearances after the attacks during which she blamed them on a spontaneous demonstration stemming from an anti-Islamic video. 

December 3: Fox News: Benghazi Survivors Fuming Over House Intelligence Committee Report
A recent report by a GOP-led committee that was seen as going easy on the Obama administration's Benghazi response is drawing stinging complaints from a number of Republicans on the panel, as well as survivors of the attack. Some GOP members on the House Intelligence Committee grumble that the final product "might as well have been written by the minority," while other House Republicans say they are frustrated with the committee's decision to release a report with so many "holes." Several lawmakers point their fingers at the committee's chairman, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) Some members who disagreed with the findings said they stopped going to meetings because of concerns with his handling of the report, and didn't even take part in the final version. The findings also drew complaints from survivors, who testified behind closed doors, and caused deep divisions on the committee itself ahead of the report's release. Critical lawmakers wished to remain anonymous due to fear of blowback from Republican leadership. 

November 23: Fox News:  Senator Graham: House Intelligence Benghazi Report is “Garbage”
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham on Sunday criticized a recently released House Republican report that concludes no intelligence lapses in connection with the fatal Benghazi attacks, saying congressional investigators did a “lousy job.”  “I think the report is full of crap,” Graham, a Republican, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”  Meanwhile a report in “The Federalist” claims that most in the mainstream media took their stories from the two-page executive summary without taking the time to read the 300-page report.

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report – which The Federalist” claims has a history of far too often accepting and approving what the Intelligence community tells it -- released the report that concluded the CIA and the military acted properly in responding to the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.  The report also found no wrongdoing by Administration officials, no delay in sending a CIA rescue team, no missed opportunity for a military rescue and no evidence the CIA was covertly shipping arms from Libya to Syria. 

“This report puts all the blame on the State Department and absolves the intelligence community,” said Graham who is among the most outspoken Capitol Hill lawmakers about the administration’s handling of Benghazi.  He suggested the findings are flawed because the information was supplied by former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell and other members of the intelligence community who have already misled Congress. 

October 21: The Daily Signal: Benghazi Terrorist Pleads Not Guilty:
The “not guilty” plea entered Monday by Benghazi suspect Ahmed Abu Khatallah in U.S. federal court in Washington D.C. hardly comes as a surprise.  The suspect is now facing an additional 17 charges added to the original indictment filed by the government on July 26, which accused him of support for a terrorist group and conspiring murder of Americans. If convicted of the new charges, Khatallah could face the death penalty for the brutal deaths of the four Americans killed in on the night of Sept. 11, 2012.

The indictment is interesting both for what it contains and what it does not contain.  For instance it contains no mention of the YouTube video which according to the Obama White House, was responsible for a demonstration that supposedly turned violent. This version of the events, concocted mainly in the National Security Council, was recognized immediately within the U.S. government, including by then- Secretary of Defense Panetta, as nowhere close to the truth and has helped create mistrust of the government’s veracity.  The superseding indictment filed last week tells a very different story of a terrorist leader wanting to expel the U.S. from Benghazi, suspecting an intelligence gathering operation.

October 17: The New York Times: Holder Decision on Benghazi Case Reverberates:
Hours after learning that the United States ambassador to Libya and three others had been killed in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012, senior American officials held a secure videoconference call to discuss how to proceed in investigating the attack.  The prosecutor on the call for the Justice Department was Zainab N. Ahmad, one of the department’s most respected national security lawyers. In less than a decade in the United States attorney’s office in Brooklyn, Ms. Ahmad had successfully overseen several high-profile prosecutions, working alongside the New York-based FBI agents who were going to take the lead in investigating Benghazi.  But as Ms. Ahmad began to build the case with the agents, other prosecutors in the Justice Department began quietly lobbying Attorney General Holder to take it over.  Within 24 hours after the attack in Libya — and 21 months before the apprehension of a suspect, Ahmed Abu Khattala — Mr. Holder assigned the case to a Washington, DC based office. The move was a surprise because nearly all major national security cases since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks had been steered to the U.S. Attorney’ offices in New York and Brooklyn, which have the most seasoned prosecutors in the country, and Northern Virginia, which is known for its government-leaning judges and jury pools.

September 16: Fox News: “Incredibly Serious” Cover-up claims spotlight ahead of Benghazi Hearing
Allegations that Hillary Clinton allies may have tried to shield the former secretary of State in the wake of the Benghazi terror attack are coming to the forefront ahead of the first public hearing of the special congressional committee probing the attack and its aftermath.  Speaking with Fox News, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), chairman of the select committee, on Tuesday made clear he eventually plans to call former acting CIA director Mike Morell to testify – alleging the former boss “intentionally scrubbed” the so-called talking points that were the basis for the administration’s flawed public narrative about the attack.

Gowdy made clear he would question Morell on why he allegedly removed information damaging to Clinton’s State Department. (Morell now works for Clinton’s former spokesman, Philippe Reines.)  Gowdy also responded to new and separate allegations from a former State Department official that Clinton confidants hid politically damaging files from the supposedly independent board probing the attack. Gowdy called the allegations “incredibly serious,” but stressed that they are only allegations at this stage.

September 16: The Washington Post: A Report on “13 Hours” – What really happened on the ground:
The authors of “13 hours” [Zuckoff and the security operators] have expressed a desire to stay out of Benghazi politics and stick with on-the-ground facts. They succeed, both in the book and on a Fox News special with Bret Baier. That said, the book’s revelations leave little doubt as to where the actual Benghazi scandal lies: In the utter inability of Washington to muster even the slightest figment of a defense force in Benghazi, Libya, on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, and despite numerous warnings about instability and hostility in the region. 

September 14: Fox News: Benghazi panel begins hearings with questions of U.S. diplomats’ safety
The select Benghazi Committee holds its first open hearing Wednesday, employing broad congressional powers to try to answer lingering questions ranging from what led to the fatal 2012 terror strikes on a U.S. outpost in Libya to what is being done to better protect U.S. diplomats worldwide. The hearing by the Republican-led House committee will focus on the extent to which the State Department has implemented post–attack recommendations made by the Accountability Review Board.  The department created the five-member, independent board just weeks after the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks in which four Americans -- Ambassador Chris Stevens, information specialist Sean Smith and Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty -- were killed.“There are still facts to learn about Benghazi and information that needs to be explained in greater detail to the American people,” Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), the committee chairman and a former federal prosecutor, said earlier this month. “And this committee will do just that.”

September 11: Fox News: What I’ve Learned since 9/11/12 when my Nephew was killed:
Since the loss of my nephew Sean Smith in the Sept. 11, 2012, attack at the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, I have learned many, many lessons. Here are five of them:

1. American citizens should never be afraid to confront their representatives and ask for justice;
2. Whether "Fast and Furious," Extortion 17 or Benghazi, the Obama administration has failed to keep its word;
3. The face of terrorism continues;
4. Our enemies can never be defeated as long as we continue to be politically correct; and
5. We need to pay attention to who we give military and humanitarian aid to

September 10: Fox News: New documents appear to show a local guard shortage
in Benghazi before the attacks:
Local security guards at the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya where four Americans died in a 2012 terrorist attack previously had abandoned their posts due to a "fear factor," according to State Department emails obtained by Judicial Watch.  The 130 pages of new documents obtained by the conservative watchdog group show an explosion at the compound three months before the attacks “created a fear factor” for the local security guards working the night shift.  Some guards abandoned their posts “out of fear of their safety,” according to emails between the security firm Blue Mountain Group and the State Department.  The emails also show that other guards were simply unreliable and were released.

The documents appear to raise further concerns about whether the Obama administration -- under the headship of Hillary Clinton-- could have done more to protect U.S. personnel at the compound, including the four killed in the Sept. 11, 2012, attack. They were Ambassador Chris Stevens, information specialist Sean Smith and former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods.  According to the documents three months before the attacks, Blue Mountain Libya warned State Department specialist Neal Kern that the number of local guards leaving their posts had created security concerns at the compound.  “Due to the amount of local guard force members leaving out of fear of their safety and the long process to security check individuals, it makes it very difficult to quickly react to a large drop in staff in quick succession … especially when additional staff are requested,” the report states.

September 6: Fox News: Top CIA officer in Benghazi delayed response to terror attack
by U.S. Security Team Members:
A U.S. security team in Benghazi was held back from immediately responding to the attack on the American diplomatic mission on orders of the top CIA officer there, three of those involved told Fox News’ Bret Baier.  Their account gives a dramatic new turn to what the Administration and its allies would like to dismiss as an “old story.”  Speaking out publicly for the first time, the three gave their first-hand account of what happened that night.    Based on the new book  "13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi" the report attempts to sets aside the political spin while presenting a vivid, compelling narrative of events from the perspective of the men who wore the “boots on the ground.”    The report indicates the security team was delayed up to 45 minutes before they disobeyed orders and went to the aide of the Ambassador Stevens and the diplomatic staff at the consulate.  Subsequent reports indicate this was not the first time the CIA station chief delayed security forces from helping diplomatic personnel.

August 31: Reuters: Libyan armed faction takes over U.S. Embassy annex in Tripoli:
Members of a Libyan militia have taken over an abandoned annex of the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli but have not broken into the main compound where the United States evacuated all of its staff last month, U.S. officials said on Sunday.  A YouTube video showed the breach of the diplomatic facility by what was believed to be a militia group mostly from the northwestern city of Misrata. Dozens of men, some armed.  Libya has been rocked by the worst factional violence since the 2011 fall of Muammar Gaddafi. 

A takeover of the larger embassy compound could deliver another symbolic blow to Washington over its policy toward Libya, which Western governments fear is teetering toward becoming a failed state three years after a NATO-backed war ended Gaddafi’s rule.  The United States withdrew all embassy personnel from Tripoli on July 26, driving diplomats across the border into Tunisia, amid escalating clashes between rival factions.

August 27: Breitbart.com: Rand Paul: Hillary’s “War Hawk” policies led to the Benghazi Attack and the Rise of ISIS
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) certainly has a knack for boldness. On Sunday's Meet the Press, he dubbed U.S. military engagement in Libya “Hillary’s war” and stated the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) is not a result of President Obama's inaction in the Middle East but the unintended consequence of the U.S. military engagement in Libya.  The comments predictably caused heads in the GOP's foreign policy establishment to explode. The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin called the rhetorical gambit “ludicrous” and said Paul holds the same views as his father, the libertarian former-Rep. Ron Paul. In an email to me, John Yoo, the former top Justice Department official in the Bush administration, said Paul is the Republicans' “own version of George McGovern.”

July 29: Fox News: Head of Benghazi probe – No witness is off limits including Hillary Clinton
The Republican head of the Benghazi Select Committee warned Tuesday that no witnesses would be off limits in its upcoming probe and that he would consider going to court, if necessary, to compel testimony.  "I can't skip over a witness that I think we ought to talk to simply because there is an assertion of either privilege or immunity," Chairman Trey Gowdy [R-SC] said.  Gowdy said the investigation will be driven by facts, characterizing as strongly bipartisan his work with the committee's ranking Democrat, Elijah Cummings of Maryland, to review documents and identify witnesses.  He also said he anticipates the first public hearing will be held in September and will focus on the State Department investigation into the 2012 attack and whether its recommendations have been implemented.

July 22: Fox News: Militia Moved in Next Door to the US Consulate in Benghazi, Subsequent Requests for Additional Security Rejected:
Sources say members of Ansar al-Sharia moved to the house just outside the east wall of the compound within three weeks of American personnel renting the facility, and later used the location to help plan and take part in the attack on the American Consulate on Sept. 11, 2012.  Despite concerns about the dangerous neighbors, “nothing was done.”

The neighbors prompted multiple security requests -- including repeated requests up until the day of the attack -- for more weapons and personnel.  “We warned D.C. about the guys who moved in next door, but nobody knew what to do and nothing was done,” a U.S. intelligence source said.  According to one intelligence source, American security personnel specifically asked for an M240 machine gun to mount on the roof at the consulate for added protection, but were turned down repeatedly.  A State Department source also confirmed to Fox News that “they asked for a belt-fed mounted machine gun, but were specifically denied by the State Department because they said it would upset the locals.”

July 15: CNN News:  Second Benghazi suspect turns up dead in Libya:
A man once detained by Libyan officials and interviewed by the FBI over suspected links to the deadly 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, has turned up dead.  Faraj al-Shibli, whose name is also spelled Chalabi, was last seen in the custody of a local militia in Marj two days ago, a Libyan source said. His body was found Monday in the eastern Libyan town.  He's the second Benghazi suspect to surface in recent weeks. U.S. forces arrested suspected attack mastermind Ahmed Abu Khattalah last month.

July 10: Fox News: New Testimony shows there is more evidence that the Benghazi Attacks were premeditated
Transcripts of congressional testimony released by the House Armed Services committee are the latest in a growing body of evidence that the 2012 Benghazi attacks were premeditated.  Gen. Carter Ham, who at the time led the military's Africa command, known as AFRICOM, told Congress in April the terrorists who attacked the CIA annex, during the third wave of the terrorist assault, had professional training.  "Given the precision of the attack, it was a well-trained mortar crew," Ham said, adding the mortar strike showed "a degree of sophistication and military training that is relatively unusual and certainly, I think, indicates that this was not a pickup team."

According to the transcripts released Wednesday, Ham also testified that the eight-hour gap between the consulate attack at 9:40 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2012 and the mortar strike a mile away on the CIA base in the early morning hours of Sept. 12 was significant, suggesting different perpetrators were involved.  "I think it's reasonable," Ham testified, "that a team came from outside of Benghazi."

July 8: Fox News: House Select Committee on  Benghazi could cost up to $3.3 Million
The select committee investigating the deadly 2012 attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya could cost taxpayers as much as $3.3 million this year, according to a committee document released by the House Democratic leader’s office Monday.  According to the document, which was first reported on by USA Today, the seven Republicans on the 12-member committee would receive just under $2.2 million, while the five Democrats would be budgeted just over $1.1 million. In addition to the members, 30 congressional staffers are expected to work on the committee. 

June 18: Fox News: Nabbing Ahmed Abu Khattala: It only took 32 minutes to accomplish
The mission to nab Benghazi terror suspect Ahmed Abu Khattala was months in the making. Once a Delta Force team at last launched into Libya on Sunday to carry out the plan, it was over in 32 minutes.  Officials still face questions over why it took so long for the U.S. to go after Khattala.  After all, U.S. teams had been following the suspect and knew his whereabouts since about five or six weeks after the Sept. 11, 2012 attack, when he started giving interviews. 

Khattala is now being held aboard a U.S. Naval ship -- the USS New York -- as it makes its way to the United States.  Senior U.S. officials told Fox News that the suspect is talking and giving his American interrogators a "history lesson" on his militant Ansar al-Sharia group.  Officials hope to have as much time with him as possible before having to read his Miranda rights and hand him off to a lawyer. The decision on when that should happen rests with President Obama.  At the moment, officials describe the Navy vessel carrying him as being on a "slow" trip back to the United States. [Interestingly enough, part of this ship is made from steel salvaged from the former World Trade Center in New York City – brought down by a terrorist attack.] 

June 17: The Hill: Benghazi suspect will not go to GITMO
The surprise capture of a suspected ringleader behind the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks in Benghazi, Libya, refueled a Washington debate Tuesday over whether those accused of terrorism should be sent to Guantánamo Bay as enemy combatants.  The White House ruled out sending Ahmed Abu Khattala to the U.S. detention center in Cuba after several Republican lawmakers demanded that he be detained, interrogated and tried there.  The administration plans to bring Khattala to the U.S. and try him in federal court. He was charged with the Benghazi crime last year and is the first person arrested in connection with the attacks that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.President Obama has sought unsuccessfully to close the Gitmo prison since his first day in office. 

June 11: Fox News: US spy agencies heard Benghazi attackers using State Dept. cell phones to call terrorist leaders:
The terrorists who attacked the U.S. consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 used cell phones, seized from State Department personnel during the attacks, and U.S. spy agencies overheard them contacting more senior terrorist leaders to report on the success of the operation, multiple sources confirmed to Fox News.  The disclosure is important because it adds to the body of evidence establishing that senior U.S. officials in the Obama administration knew early on that Benghazi was a terrorist attack, and not a spontaneous protest over an anti-Islam video that had gone awry, as the administration claimed for several weeks after the attacks.  Eric Stahl, who recently retired as a major in the U.S. Air Force, said on Fox News Special Report that members of a CIA-trained Global Response Staff who raced to the scene of the attacks were “confused” by the administration’s repeated implication of the video as a trigger for the attacks.

Major Stahl was never interviewed by the Accountability Review Board, the investigative panel convened, pursuant to statute, by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as the official body reviewing all the circumstances surrounding the attacks and their aftermath. Many lawmakers and independent experts have criticized the thoroughness of the ARB, which also never interviewed Clinton.

June 10: The Washington Post: ABC News’ Diane Sawyer destroys Hillary Clinton on Benghazi
A standard defense for Hillary Rodham Clinton when facing questions about Benghazi, Libya, has been to cite her commissioning of a report from the State Department’s Accountability Review Board (ARB), which took a deep look at the attacks that claimed the lives of four U.S. personnel on Sept. 11, 2012.

In an interview on ABC News, anchor Diane Sawyer threw the ARB right back in the face of the former secretary of state. The two tangled over the preparedness of the U.S. diplomatic installation in Benghazi for a terrorist attack. In defending her work on this front, Clinton stressed that she had delegated the particulars of security to the experts in the field.   Sensing an opening, Sawyer cited the document that Clinton herself has so often cited: “This is the ARB: the mission was far short of standards; weak perimeter; incomplete fence; video surveillance needed repair. They said it’s a systemic failure.”   The anchor continued pressing, asking Clinton whether the people might be seeking from her a “sentence that begins from you ‘I should have…’?” Clinton sort of ducked that one. The accountability-heavy moment came when Sawyer’s slow and steady line of questioning on Benghazi security prompted Clinton to utter this self-contradictory and sure-to-be-repeated statement: “I take responsibility, but I was not making security decisions.”

May 11: Fox News: Gowdy vows to keep politics out of the House Benghazi probe:
Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy, the newly appointed Benghazi Select Committee chairman, vowed Sunday to keep politics and political fundraising out of his group’s fact-finding mission.  “The facts are neither Republican nor Democrat,” the South Carolina lawmaker told “Fox News Sunday.” Gowdy, a former prosecutor, also dismissed the notion that he wants Democrats to boycott joining the committee. “How does it benefit me when from Day One if they’re excluded?” he asked. “I want this to transcend politics.”

The GOP-controlled House voted Thursday to form a so-called congressional “select” committee, which gives members such special powers as the authority to subpoena documents and to centralize the investigations into the 2012 terrorist attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans were killed.  Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA) told Fox his party will “absolutely” participate in the committee’s investigation “if it's a fair-and-balanced process.”  “We've always said we're ready to participate,” he continued. “We have a responsibility.”

May 7: The Hill: Senate Republicans want in on Benghazi Special Committee Inquiry:
Senate Republicans want to broaden the new Benghazi special committee to include members of the upper chamber.  Their call for a bipartisan, bicameral panel similar to the 9/11 Commission puts pressure on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-N), who is resisting the idea.  Republican lawmakers on Tuesday spoke out after House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) outlined her conditions for establishing a select committee in the lower chamber to probe Benghazi. She said Democrats would participate only if the panel were “equally divided” between Democrats and Republicans.

A spokesman for Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) immediately rejected Pelosi’s demand, but Senate Republicans said they would agree to an evenly divided special committee that included senators as well as House members. “It would make sense if it were bicameral,” said Sen. Saxby Chambliss (GA), a senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence panels.  “I would like to see that, with the ability to get information out of the State Department. That’s where the fault lies all the way to the top,” he told The Hill.  

May 5: The Daily Caller: South Carolina Congressman Gowdy to Lead Benghazi Panel:
South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy has been officially tapped by the House Republican leadership to serve as chairman of the new Benghazi select committee hearings, Speaker of the House John Boehner announced Monday.  Gowdy, a former district attorney and federal prosecutor, was elected to Congress as a Republican in 2010 and has been an active voice on the Benghazi attacks of 2012.  “His background as a federal prosecutor and his zeal for the truth make him the ideal person to lead this panel,” Boehner said of Gowdy. “I know he shares my commitment to get to the bottom of this tragedy and will not tolerate any stonewalling from the Obama administration.”

May 5: The Daily Caller: Liberals  Beg Pelosi to Not appoint Democrats to Benghazi Committee:
Speaker of the House John Boehner has ordered the establishment of a new special committee to investigate the 2012 attacks on Americans in Benghazi — but some liberals don’t want any Democrats to take part in the hearings.  “Member of Congress told me she will urge Nancy Pelosi to appoint NO Democrats to Special Benghazi Committee,” liberal talk radio host Bill Press wrote on Twitter on Monday. “She’s right!” 

May 3: Fox News: Did X-White House Aide’s Benghazi Comments Conflict with Former CIA Director’s Testimony:
Ex-White House official Tommy Vietor’s recent comments to Fox News may conflict with statements former CIA acting director Michael Morell told Congress about the deadly Benghazi attacks that killed four Americans.  During an interview on “Special Report“ Thursday, Vietor admitted to having input into editing the talking points memo, which was used by U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice to claim that the Sept. 11, 2012 attack was the result of a protest over an anti-Islamic video.  Vietor’s version of events seems to differ from the one Morell told lawmakers during a House hearing in January 2013.

May 2: Fox News: Boehner announces special committee to investigate Benghazi; Kerry subpoenaed to appear:
House Republicans moved on two fronts Friday to dig for answers on Benghazi, with Speaker John Boehner announcing a special committee to investigate and a key panel subpoenaing Secretary of State John Kerry to testify.  In a significant shift, Boehner announced that the House will vote on establishing a select committee to investigate, on the heels of newly released emails that raised additional questions about the White House's response.  Top Republicans claimed those emails should have been released to Congress months ago, and Boehner signaled those concerns prompted him to rethink the need for a select committee. "Americans learned this week that the Obama Administration is so intent on obstructing the truth about Benghazi that it is even willing to defy subpoenas issued by the standing committees of the People's House. These revelations compel the House to take every possible action to ensure the American people have the truth about the terrorist attack on our consulate that killed four of our countrymen," he said in a statement.   In light of these new developments, the House will vote to establish a new select committee to investigate the attack, provide the necessary accountability, and ensure justice is finally served." 

But Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid blasted the decision as an election-year stunt. "There have already been multiple investigations into this issue and an independent Accountability Review Board is mandated under current law," Reid said in a statement. "For Republicans to waste the American people's time and money staging a partisan political circus instead of focusing on the middle class is simply a bad decision." 

May 2: Fox News: Where was Obama? Question resurfaces of President’s whereabouts during Benghazi Attack
Republican senators on Friday put pressure on President Obama to confirm his whereabouts during the night of the Benghazi attack, after an ex-White House spokesman revived the debate by telling Fox News he was not in the Situation Room.   The detail about the president's location the night of the attack is just one of many revelations that have, in a matter of days, kicked up the controversy to a level not seen since last year. On Friday afternoon, three GOP senators wrote a letter to Obama asking about his whereabouts and spokesman Tommy Vietor's comments to Fox News. 

"Last night, the former Communications Director for the National Security Council, Tommy Vietor, stated that on the afternoon and night of September 11, 2012 -- while the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya was under attack -- that you never visited the White House Situation Room to monitor events," they wrote.   Claiming that Americans still do not have an "accounting of your activities during the attack," the senators asked him to confirm Vietor's account. The letter was signed by Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz.; Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; and Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H. 

Apr. 30:  Fox News: White House on Defense over new Benghazi emails, claims controversial ‘prep calls’ not about the attack:
The White House found itself on defense Wednesday following the release of emails tying a top aide to former U.N. ambassador Susan Rice's controversial Sunday show statements after the Benghazi terror attack.   During those interviews, Rice erroneously blamed the attack on protests over an anti-Islam film. New emails indicate a White House adviser helped prep her for those appearances and pushed the "video" explanation -- and now, the White House is facing credibility questions after having downplayed their role in Rice's "talking points." 

During a heated briefing with reporters Wednesday afternoon, Press Secretary Jay Carney repeatedly tried to claim that the so-called "prep call" with Rice -- as it was described in one email -- was not about Benghazi. The prep session, he said, was just about the demonstrations elsewhere in the Muslim world that week.   "It is not about Benghazi -- it is about the protests around the Muslim world," Carney claimed. 

The White House has said all along that Rice relied on the best available intelligence, from the intelligence community, when she discussed the Benghazi attack.   But the documents obtained and released by the watchdog group Judicial Watch, as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, included a Sept. 14, 2012, email from White House aide Ben Rhodes, an assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for strategic communications.   The Rhodes email, with the subject line: "RE: PREP Call with Susan: Saturday at 4:00 pm ET," was sent to a dozen members of the administration's inner circle, including key members of the White House communications team such as Carney.  In the email, Rhodes specifically draws attention to the anti-Islam Internet video, without distinguishing whether the Benghazi attack was different from protests elsewhere. 

The email lists the following two goals, among others:  
[1] "To underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy." And [2]  "To reinforce the President and Administration's strength and steadiness in dealing with difficult challenges."   Republican critics, who have long claimed the administration's narrative was politically motivated, pointed to that email as a "smoking gun." 

Apr. 29: The Washington Post: Benghazi scandal tied to the White House and
Apr. 29: USA Today: Senator says Emails show how Benghazi story took shape
Republicans say e-mails released Tuesday on the attack in Benghazi, Libya, include "the smoking gun" that shows a White House official urged that the assault on the U.S. consulate be blamed on a protest that never happened.  The e-mails include one in which White House official Ben Rhodes lists "goals" for then-U.N. ambassador Susan Rice to meet in explaining the attack and protests occurring across the Middle East that week to the American public.  [See the April 30th Fox News story above]

Rhodes is assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for strategic communication and speechwriting.  During appearances on five Sunday news programs, Rice did blame the attack on Sept. 11, 2012, on a protest against an anti-Islam video produced by an American. So did Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, and President Obama would not say whether it was a terrorist attack until several days later.  The CIA station chief in Libya reported from the beginning that the attack was an al-Qaeda-linked operation and that there was no protest.

Republicans say the protest story emanated from a White House bent on protecting the president from charges that he was wrong to claim during his campaign in 2012 that al-Qaeda was on its heels.  Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC called the e-mails "a smoking gun" that points to White House efforts "to shape the story" of what happened in Benghazi.

Apr. 17: Fox News: Poll Says Voters think Obama is Covering Up on Benghazi; Want Hill to Continue Investigation
Most voters think the White House is trying to cover-up what happened in Benghazi and want Congress to continue to investigate the administration’s handling of the attack on the U.S. consulate there that killed four Americans.  That’s according to a Fox News poll released Thursday.  Sixty percent of voters want lawmakers to keep investigating what happened in Benghazi. That’s down from 65 percent who felt that way in November, and a high of 73 percent in early June 2013

Apr. 13: The Washington Times: Hillary Clinton all but erased from tragic story of the attack in Banghazi:
A huge wave of public testimony, reports and documents on what happened in Benghazi now floods Washington, and little of it focuses on the role of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton before, on, or after Sept. 11, 2012.  Over the past 18 months, there have been at least seven public congressional hearings and three fact-finding reports on the terrorist attack. If not invisible, Mrs. Clinton is certainly portrayed as being only in the background during Benghazi, unaware of key events.  In the early post-Benghazi days on Capitol Hill, Republicans tried to pry “what did she know and when did she know it” information out of witnesses. But in later hearings, her name came up rarely — if at all.

On key questions, there is a dead end. For example, the nation’s two most senior military officials said they never spoke with Mrs. Clinton during the eight-hour crisis in Benghazi, Libya. The State Department refused to cooperate for a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence investigation, Republicans say, and her name is not in the final report. Mrs. Clinton testified that she was never informed about how susceptible the Benghazi diplomatic mission was to attack or about requests for more security officers. On the infamous Benghazi talking points, that process was carried out below her level, she said.

“Benghazi happened on her watch, so she will always have a connection to the attack,” P.J. Crowley, who was Mrs. Clinton’s top spokesman at State in her first year said. “There have been some efforts to make it about her, which I suspect will continue despite the lack of evidence.”

Apr. 2: The Daily Beast: CIA Strikes Back on Benghazi
The CIA’s deputy director during the Benghazi attack responded to Republican allegations Wednesday that he lied to Congress.   In a rare open hearing, Michael Morell, the deputy CIA director during the assault in Benghazi on Wednesday, fired back at reports he cherry picked intelligence for government-wide talking points in the aftermath of the attacks.  Morell has come under fire for allegedly lying to Congress and editing the Benghazi talking points, despite multiple streams of intelligence that were to the contrary to their substance.  Morell said that he and the CIA never intended to mislead Congress or to “provide political benefit to anyone.” But Morell’s account differed from the testimony of the CIA’s station chief during the Benghazi attack who told lawmakers his assessment for the entire week of the attack was that the Benghazi incident was a terrorist attack and not a mob that had gotten out of control – the same conclusion the Senate Intelligence Committee came to.

House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Rogers (R-MI), said Morell told senior officials inside the Obama administration a day before Rice appeared on the Sunday talk shows “that the chief of station reported that there was no protest.” Morell acknowledged that he had read the cable from the station chief in Libya in his testimony. But he also said his assessment was at odds with the evaluation of CIA analysts who had prepared the classified analysis that informed initial drafts of the talking points read by Rice.

Greg Hicks, who was the deputy to Ambassador Stevens, testified last year that he told then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that there was no demonstration on the night of the attack. Rep. Michele Bachmann, a Republican member of the House intelligence committee, challenged Morell. She said there were multiple streams of intelligence--including signal intercepts and reports from human sources in Benghazi that confirmed that Benghazi was a terrorist attack before Rice's appearance on the Sunday shows. One U.S. intelligence official who has worked on the intelligence on Benghazi told The Daily Beast this week that there nearly all of the human sources for the CIA in Benghazi also confirmed it was a terrorist attack along with considerable amounts of signal intercepts picked up by the NSA that evening.

Mar. 28: Fox News: New Questions about ex-CIA Director’s Benghazi claims ahead of testimony.
New allegations are raising additional questions about former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell's involvement in crafting the administration's flawed narrative on the Benghazi attack, ahead of his scheduled testimony next week on Capitol Hill.  Morell is set to testify publicly for the first time on Wednesday about his role in crafting the controversial Benghazi "talking points," which initially blamed a protest for the deadly attack.   Morell is being called to testify and explain potentially conflicting testimony he gave Congress about the talking points and the administration's role. House Intel Chair Mike Rogers  told reporters this week that the rare, open session should "allow Mr. Morell to answer the questions that we know many people have about what he knew and when he knew it." 

But another detail is raising questions. There are first-hand reports the Morell apparently dismissed reports from those on the ground in Benghazi, and the CIA Chief of station there, that the attack was a planned terrorist event.  Fox News is also being told that even before the video teleconference (VTC) with Morell, that the chief of station understood based on communications with CIA headquarters in Washington that the burden was on him to prove there was no demonstration.   "That's incomprehensible to me, it doesn't make any sense at all. It's completely contrary to any procedure or any experience I have," CIA veteran Charles S. Faddis told Fox News. Based on two decades of experience, Faddis emphasized that the chief of station's word is gospel, that cables are the agency's lifeblood, and that the VTC may also be a red flag. 

Mar. 24: Fox News: A revolving door? Ties between consultancy & Gov’t. raise questions about Benghazi probe:
Meet Beacon Global Strategies.  The online bios for its founders and managing directors suggest no group knows more about the Benghazi terrorist attack and the Obama administration's response. Yet the consulting firm has deep ties to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others involved in the controversy – ties so intertwined with the administration and Capitol Hill that they raise questions about an upcoming hearing where former CIA Acting Director Mike Morell is slated to testify.  "It is like a revolving door on steroids," Bill Allison, whose Sunlight Foundation is a nonprofit that supports government transparency, told Fox News. 

Morell joined the Beacon firm after retiring from the CIA last year. In doing so, he joined an organization already stacked with ex-government officials. Among them is Philippe Reines, whom the New York Times magazine recently described as Clinton's "principal gatekeeper." According to Beacon’s website, Reines traveled to more than 110 countries with the then-Secretary of State as part of her senior team.
In November 2012, Morell testified before the House Intelligence Committee in a closed session about the Benghazi talking points.  Morell now is expected to testify for a third time in early April before the same panel after Republican allegations he misled the Senate Intelligence Committee over the talking points. The next hearing is expected to be public.

Mar. 13: Fox News: CIA sat on Benghazi investigation, U.S. personnel fuming:
American personnel on the ground in Benghazi the night of the 2012 terror attack are outraged after learning that the CIA's inspector general never conducted an investigation into what happened -- despite two CIA workers being killed in the attack and despite at least two complaints being filed by CIA employees.  Many in the agency were told, or were under the impression, that an investigation was in the works, but that is not the case.

One person close to the issue told Fox News: "They should be doing an investigation to see what the chief of base in Benghazi and station chief in Tripoli did that night. If they did, they'd find out there were some major mistakes."  This source claimed an investigation would likely uncover a lot of details the public does not know.  At least two complaints were filed by CIA employees concerned about the attack, which began at the U.S. compound and eventually spread to the CIA annex one mile away. There is no question that CIA personnel saved a lot of lives; those on the ground that night continue to herald the heroism of the individuals who responded to try and help Stevens and others under attack.  Yet questions remain about the overall decision-making, possible destruction of evidence and warnings of an impending attack.

Mar. 11: The Foundry: Attkisson Leaves CBS News Citing Liberal Bias and Lack of Support for Investigative Journalism:
Sharyl Attkisson, an award-winning CBS News investigative reporter who doggedly pursued the Benghazi and Fast and Furious scandals, resigned from the network yesterday. Attkisson was reportedly frustrated by CBS News’ liberal bias and a lack of support for Investigative Journalism.  Attkisson, who worked at CBS News for two decades, is writing a book tentatively titled, “Stonewalled: One Reporter’s Fight for Truth in Obama’s Washington.”  It was Attkisson’s pursuit of the truth about Obama Administration scandals that “led network executives to doubt the impartiality of her reporting,” according to Politico’s Dylan Byers.   He added, “While some championed her relentless dedication to investigations — ranging from defective Firestone Tires to the Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal — others saw evidence of a political agenda, particularly against President Obama.”

Mar. 11: The Daily Caller: The Administration’s ongoing Benghazi “Spin”
As Fox News Chief Intelligence Correspondent Catherine Herridge recently revealed, evidence of politicization in official accounts of one of the worst terrorist attacks on American citizens in recent years continues to grow. Indeed, according to her reporting, several military officers interviewed by Fox contested claims made by intelligence officials which downplayed the sophistication evident in the mortar attack on the CIA annex in Benghazi.

Yet if the mainstream media’s past behaviors are any indication of how it will cover Benghazi-related revelations like these moving forward, you can safely bet the administration will continue to get a pass from many top news organizations for its dissimulation of the facts. Not to mention a pass for placing political concerns above the safety of Americans who died in Benghazi in September 2012.

Feb. 27: Fox News: Intel Committee Chair poised to recall ex-CIA Chief Morell over Benghazi Testimony, Weighing Same for Petraeus:
Republican allegations that former CIA Acting Director Mike Morell misled Congress over the White House's role in crafting the flawed Benghazi “talking points” took a dramatic turn Thursday, with the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee telling Fox News it's likely Morell will be recalled to testify. Investigators also are reviewing the testimony of former CIA Director David Petraeus, Morell’s old boss, to assess whether he should be recalled as well.  "We are having some transcript reviews. We've been continually doing that through the committee,” Chairman Rogers, R-MI, told Fox News. “We're looking at Director Petraeus' transcripts and reviews -- looking at what information we have now available. Sometimes that second interview can be equally important and it is likely we will have Director Morell up to testify before the committee.”

The debate continues to focus on why the talking points did not reflect the best available intelligence, and what influence the administration brought to bear on the flawed public narrative of the attack in the days immediately following Sept. 11, 2012 – that narrative initially claimed the attacks sprung out of protests over an anti-Islam film.  Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee have said Morell insisted the talking points were sent to the White House for informational purposes, and not for their input -- but e-mails, later released by the administration, showed otherwise.

Feb. 24: The Washington Times: Rice has no regrets over Benghazi leaving McCain almost speechless!
If you tell a lie long enough, maybe somebody will believe it! National Security Adviser Susan Rice insisted Sunday she used “the best information we had at the time” when she described the deadly 2012 Benghazi attack but Senator John McCain isn’t buying it!  The Arizona Republican said he was “almost speechless” after learning of Ms. Rice’s’s comments on NBC’s “Meet the Press” which marked her first interview on a Sunday talk show since her first disastrous appearances to discuss Benghazi.

“I’m almost speechless, because it’s patently obvious, first of all, that Susan Rice had no reason to be on the program, she had no involvement in it [Benghazi],” said McCain on CBS’s program “Face the Nation.”   “Second of all, she read talking points that we are now beginning to believe came from the White House which were absolutely false,” McCain contended. “We now know that the CIA station chief on the ground sent a message immediately saying, ‘Not-slash-not spontaneous demonstration,’ and of course the information was totally misleading, totally false.”

Feb. 21: Fox News: Poll: 66% say Congress should continue to investigate Benghazi
The latest Fox News poll finds that most Americans think Congress should continue to investigate the Obama administration’s handling of the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.  Sixty-six percent of voters want Congress to keep investigating the White House’s handling of Benghazi.  That includes 50 percent of Democrats, 68 percent of independents and 83 percent of Republicans.  About a third opposes lawmakers continuing to investigate the attack (31 percent).

Feb. 21: The Washington Post: Issa’s suspicions that Hillary Clinton told Panetta to stand down on Benghazi:
“We need to have an answer of when the secretary of defense had assets that he could have begun spinning up. Why there was not one order given to turn on one Department of Defense asset? I have my suspicions, which is Secretary Clinton told Leon [Panetta] to stand down, and we all heard about the stand-down order for two military personnel. That order is undeniable. They were told not to get on — get off the airplane and kind of stand by — and they’re going to characterize it wasn’t stand down. But when we’re done with Benghazi, the real question is, was there a stand-down order to Leon Panetta or did he just not do his job? Was there a stand-down order from the president who said he told them to use their resources and they didn’t use them?  Those questions have to be answered.”

Feb. 9: The Daily Caller: Benghazi Father’s message for the son left behind:
The father of Ty Woods – killed is the Benghazi attack -- contended that eventually the truth will come out about happened in Benghazi.   Invited to the State of the Union as the guest of Oklahoma Republican Rep. Jim Bridenstine, Woods is a father seeking closure and the truth about what happened to his son.

Feb. 5: The Hill: Boehner unveils Benghazi Website:
House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) on Wednesday unveiled a website detailing the GOP's Benghazi probe amid mounting pressure from conservatives that he's not doing enough.  A large majority of Boehner's Caucus has endorsed a push by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) to create a select committee with broad investigatory powers to investigate the Obama administration's shortcomings in the death of four Americans on Sept. 11, 2012. Boehner has resisted the push, arguing that his committees are well equipped to get answers.

“Shortly after the attack, Republicans asked the Obama administration to explain its actions, as well as the fact that publicly-available information consistently contradicted its characterization of events,” Boehner's office said in announcing the website.  “After being stonewalled, House committees began a serious, exhaustive, and deliberate investigation into what led up to this tragic event, what transpired, and why the White House refused – and still refuses – to tell the whole truth.”  Boehner's office said the website offers access to “hundreds of pages of documents and transcripts the White House doesn’t want you to read.”

Feb. 3: The Daily Caller: Bipartisan Fox News Panel Universally Agrees Obama was lying about Benghazi:
A bipartisan Fox News panel universally agreed that President Obama was lying about the Benghazi attacks during his Sunday interview with Bill O’Reilly, with conservative commentator George Will accusing the president of spinning “rhetorical cotton candy” around the issue.  Will was joined by conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer and liberal columnist Kirsten Powers to discuss the interview, focusing particularly on the portion where O’Reilly grills the president over the deadly attacks on an American compound in Benghazi, Libya.

Even as a Democrat, Kirsten Powers felt compelled to agree. “I don’t understand why the administration can’t just tell the truth about this,” she said. “And that they keep saying things that, as George just pointed out, we know aren’t true. And we know aren’t true from sort of unbiased sources. You know, the Senate intelligence report is not Fox News.  Why didn’t he answer Bill’s question?” she continued. “You know, Bill just kept asking him, ‘What were you told?’ And he never really would answer the question, and then he turns around and says, ‘Well we were just focused on getting people safe.’ Well of course you were, but weren’t you also a little curious if it was a terrorist attack? So none of this really adds up…”

Jan. 27: Politico:  Cruz to Clinton: Talk is Cheap!
Sen. Ted Cruz on Monday issued a sharp retort to comments made by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the Benghazi embassy attack in 2012: “The pattern with Hillary and the pattern with President Obama is virtually the same,” Cruz (R-TX) told Gretchen Carlson on Fox News. “Hillary Clinton today apparently says she regrets that four brave Americans lost their lives; that we lost the first ambassador in active duty since 1979. But at the same time, she doesn’t want to do anything to fix it.”

“Talk is cheap. She needs to stand up and demand action,” he added.  Cruz’s sharp words follow remarks by Clinton on her tenure at the State Department in which she bemoaned the Benghazi attacks that killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya.  “My biggest, you know, regret is what happened in Benghazi. It was a terrible tragedy, losing four Americans two diplomats and now it’s public, so I can say two CIA operatives,” Clinton told an audience at the National Automobile Dealers Association conference in New Orleans.

Jan. 22: WMD News: Obama threatens Fox News reporter’s career over Benghazi
Fox News anchor Greta Van Susteren charges that the Obama administration tried to press her to shut down a colleague’s reporting on the jihadist attack in Benghazi, Libya, that cost the lives of a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. Van Susteren asserted recently that the administration made an extensive effort to conceal what happened in Benghazi. She cited U.S. officials’ refusal to include the Fox News Channel in several Benghazi briefings along with a warning that her colleague’s career would be ruined if she persisted in her reporting on the attack.  The Fox News host recalled a “disturbing phone call from a good friend in the Obama administration” shortly after the Sept. 11, 2012, attack, which the administration initially blamed on a protest of an anti-Islam video.

“In this call, my friend told me that my colleague Jennifer Griffin, who was aggressively reporting on Benghazi, was wrong and that, as a favor to me, my friend in the administration was telling me so that I could tell Jennifer so that she did not ruin her career,” Van Susteren wrote.  Van Susteren said that in her 20-plus years in the business, she had never received a call to try to shut down a colleague.

Jan. 22: WND News: Department of State’s own guards attached the U.S. consulate in Benghazi
The recently released 88-page Senate report on the Benghazi attack reveals that the Islamic militia hired to protect the fated U.S. special mission had “vandalized” and “attacked” the mission in the months prior to Sept. 11, 2012.  The new detail raises the question of why the State Department, headed at the time by Hillary Clinton, would continue to employ the 17th of February Martyrs Brigade, an al-Qaida-linked organization, to provide external security to the U.S. facility.

The 17th of February Martyrs Brigade connection was not mentioned in the State Department-sanctioned Accountability Review Board, or ARB, investigating the attack.  The Senate report also reveals for the first time that the refused to “provide cover” for the U.S. security team that was trapped inside the compound.  The ARB paints a picture of them largely aiding in the evacuation of the U.S. personnel at the mission.

Jan. 14: Fox News:The Benghazi Transcripts:
Top DOD Officials briefed Obama on Attack “not video or protest”[Just one more lie by the American leader]
Minutes after the American consulate in Benghazi came under assault on Sept. 11, 2012, the nation's top civilian and uniformed defense officials -- headed for a previously scheduled Oval Office session with President Obama -- were informed that the event was a "terrorist attack," declassified documents show. The new evidence raises the question of why the top military men, one of whom was a member of the president's Cabinet, allowed him and other senior Obama administration officials to press a false narrative of the Benghazi attacks for two weeks afterward and why the President himself fostered the misconception (lie?) that the attack was in response to a video.

Gen. Carter Ham, who at the time was head of AFRICOM, the Defense Department combatant command with jurisdiction over Libya, told the House in classified testimony last year that it was he who broke the news about the unfolding situation in Benghazi to then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  The tense briefing -- in which it was already known that U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens had been targeted and had gone missing -- occurred just before the two senior officials departed the Pentagon for their session with the commander in chief.   According to declassified testimony obtained by Fox News, Ham -- who was working out of his Pentagon office on the afternoon of Sept. 11 -- said he learned about the assault on the consulate compound within 15 minutes of its commencement, at 9:42 p.m. Libya time, through a call he received from the AFRICOM Command Center. 

"My first call was to General Dempsey, General Dempsey's office, to say, 'Hey, I am headed down the hall. I need to see him right away,'" Ham told lawmakers on the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation on June 26 of last year. "I told him what I knew. We immediately walked upstairs to meet with Secretary Panetta."  The testimony, given under "Top Secret" clearance and only declassified this month, presents a rare glimpse into how information during a crisis travels at the top echelons of America's national security apparatus, all the way up to the president. 

Jan. 13: Fox News: The Benghazi transcripts show the U.S. military woefully unprepared for response to the attack:
Hundreds of pages of declassified transcripts from the U.S. military's top commanders present a picture of a woefully ill-postured military force whose assets were not in a position to quickly respond to the Benghazi terror attack -- or other hot spots across Africa and the Middle East.   The 450 pages of newly declassified transcripts detail testimony from secret, closed hearings last year before Congress. They provide fresh insight into the military's decision-making that night from the very commanders who staged the rescue efforts, including the top commander in Africa at the time Gen. Carter Ham.

Among other details, they reveal gaps in the military's positioning of assets around the world.   For example, no attack aircraft were placed on high alert on Sept. 11, and the closest F-16 fighter planes to any of the trouble spots in North Africa were in Aviano, Italy.  None were armed, and the closest air refuellers were positioned 10 hours away at a base in Great Britain.   No Defense Department AC-130 gunships were within a 10-hour flight to Libya, according to committee members who heard commanders' testimony over the past 15 months. And the commander's in-extremis force, which included a unit of 23 special operators who are used at the commander's discretion, were training in Croatia that day. They did not make it to a staging base in Sigonella, Italy, for another 19 hours after the attack began, according to committee members. 

Jan. 8: Fox News: Former Gitmo detainee likely involved with the Benghazi Attack:
The State Department is on the cusp of publicly designating a former Guantanamo detainee, Sufian bin Qumu, and his group, Ansar Al-Sharia, as "foreign terrorist entities "over his alleged role in the Benghazi terror attack, Fox News has learned. The designation, which restricts travel and allows the U.S. government to freeze financial assets, is expected to include three branches of Ansar Al-Sharia in Libya. The group’s name means “supporters of Islamic law.”

On Wednesday, the State Department tried to minimize the group’s connections to the Al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan, often referred to as the “core.”  “There's no indication at this point that core Al Qaeda was involved or planned these attacks,” spokeswoman Jen Psaki said. “And these are not official affiliates of Al Qaeda.”  The expected terrorist designation of bin Qumu and his group, first reported by the Washington Post, comes 16 months after Fox's Bret Baier first identified the Libyan as a suspect . The Post report also comes three months after Fox’s chief intelligence correspondent, Catherine Herridge, reported bin Qumu was in Benghazi on the day of the Sep. 11, 2012 attack and a former Usama bin Laden bodyguard and a courier were implicated in the assault that killed four Americans.

Jan. 6: Fox News: Families of Benghazi press for a House Select Committee to Investigate attack:
Three family members of victims of the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack demanded Monday that House Speaker John Boehner create a select committee to investigate the assault that killed four Americans  during the attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya on Sept. 11, 2012.  In a letter hand-delivered to Boehner, Smith’s mother, Pat Smith, and uncle, Michael Ingmire, as well as Woods’ father, Charles Woods, pressed Boehner to form a select committee to investigate the Benghazi scandal.  “Your reluctance to lead and resistance to create a Select Committee on Benghazi must end,” the letter read. “More than 75 percent of all House Republicans – with the conspicuous absence of those in leadership or committee chairmen – have co-sponsored Rep. Wolf’s Select Committee bill. Few bills in this Congress demonstrate such overwhelming support from Republicans."

So far, Boehner has had five separate House committees investigate the matter.  An independent select committee would have subpoena power and the authority to read classified documents. Boehner has said publicly he opposed the creation of a select committee and didn’t see the need for one.  There was no immediate reaction from his office to Monday's letter.