Not that anyone ever believed she did, but it's hilarious that Trey Gowdy's House Select Committee on Benghazi was able to demonstrate so easily - just by questioning Hillary crony Sid Blumenthal - that there were at least 15 e-mails on Hillary's private server that were quite work-related and most certainly not printed out and given to the State Department as Hillary claimed.
It's like shooting fish in a barrel at this point to keep making the case that Hillary is dishonest. That fact is really not in dispute and hasn't been for a long time. But I think this points to a far less appreciated point about Hillary: She's dumb. I've always thought so, but I say it in this case because it would have been so obvious to anyone with even a passing knowledge of how e-mail works that you couldn't just print the e-mails you wanted to print, claim there was nothing more than mattered, then wipe your server and call it done. The fact that she thought this scheme would hide the e-mails she didn't want exposed suggests an arrogance not in any way justified by her actual level of intelligence.
And Gowdy, who's much smarter than she is, was able to expose the lie so obviously that her former employees at the State Department had no choice but to own up:
When the existence of the private server was revealed, Clinton said she had discarded “personal” e-mails and gave the rest to the State Department. The department then culled about 300 e-mails related to Benghazi in response to a committee subpoena. Many were from Blumenthal, a former Clinton White House aide and a close friend, who forwarded what he said were inside intelligence reports from sources with access to the Libyan government between 2011 and 2013. The documents, which were publicly released last month, shed no new light on the Benghazi attack.
The committee then subpoenaed Blumenthal, who appeared for a closed-door deposition last week. He also supplied the committee with additional Libya-related e-mails that Gowdy said at the time might not have been among those culled by the State Department.
In response to a committee query, Gowdy said in a statement Thursday, “the State Department has informed the Select Committee that Secretary Clinton has failed to turn over all her Benghazi and Libya related records. This confirms doubts about the completeness of Clinton’s self-selected public record.
"This has implications far beyond Libya, Benghazi and our committee’s work,” he said, and “conclusively shows her email arrangement with herself, which was then vetted by her own lawyers, has resulted in an incomplete public record.”
An official at State, speaking on the condition of anonymity under ground rules imposed by the department, said there were “a limited number of instances — 15 — in which we could not locate all or part of the content of a document from [Blumenthal’s] production within the tens of thousands of e-mails she gave us. . . . The substance of those 15 e-mails is not relevant to the 2012 attacks in Benghazi.”
As an aside, am I understanding correctly - per the bolded passage above - that the State Department's rules say employees can talk out of turn to the media as long as they do so anonymously?
Anyway, we're seeing here that in concocting this whole private e-mail scheme, Hillary wasn't even smart enough to remember that people with whom she exchanges e-mails also have copies of the e-mails on their servers - and those people can be subpoenaed. Now I know she trusts Blumenthal implicitly, which is pretty funny considering how dishonest both of them are. Maybe she labors under the illusion that there's some sort of honor among thieves, but Blumenthal of all people surely knows that Hillary would throw him over in a second if it served her interests to do so. He'd be a fool not to keep a record of everything just in case he ever needs it.
So this is the woman you Democrats want to nominate for president. Not only does she go to great lengths in concocting schemes to deceive the public, the press, Congress - pretty much everyone - but the schemes she concocts are amateurish and easily exposed. And then when that happens, she pretty much shoots from the hip with her explanations - she only carried one phone for convenience, except that there are videos of her saying she carried two; a lot of her e-mails were with Bill, except that Bill doesn't use e-mail, etc. - making it easy for anyone interested in exposing her dishonesty to do so.
Much of the case for Hillary is that, sure, she's dishonest and self-serving, but she's so smart! No. She's not. She's dumb. And every time she tries to pull crap like this, it's exposed quickly and easily. Make her president and the entire executive branch runs in this manner. Tell me another one about why we all need to be ready for Hillary.
