Hillary Clinton Received Now-Classified Info On Her Private Server

After listening to years of media carping about how Benghazi is “old news,” a closed case of interest only to partisan obsessives, it’s amazing how many revelations have exploded from just the last few days of Hillary Clinton email news. It’s even more amazing when you consider we’re only seeing the emails Clinton didn’t bother to illegally destroy, in defiance of subpoenas. The material she forgot to sanitize is devastating. We can only imagine what was in the emails she wiped out.

The latest Clinton email dump immediately wiped out a statement from the former Secretary of State that no rational person ever believed: her insistence that she never viewed classified material on her private off-the-books, highly insecure personal server. That was always a rhetorical dodge, since Clinton risked national security by bringing material that was highly sensitive without being formally classified outside of the more secure State Department system she was supposed to be using.

But even at that, her statements about not receiving classified information are looking shaky:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Clinton received now-classified Benghazi info on private email server, documents show.

— AP Politics (@AP_Politics) May 22, 2015

The only game left to play is whether she viewed documents that became classified after she read them. It’s not exactly comforting to know she was compromising the security of material that intelligence experts would later designate “classified” upon review. It’s also a rather fine hair to split, when you’re talking about national security and a deadly terrorist attack that killed a U.S. ambassador, sparking a wave of outright lies from Clinton and Barack Obama to preserve his endangered 2012 re-election campaign.

There’s no longer any real doubt that’s exactly what happened. Smoking guns absolutely litter the material Hillary Clinton kept hidden from Congress and the American people for so long. Imagine if the documents Clinton has been hiding were made available long ago, when the story was red-hot, or even during the 2012 campaign.

She’s working overtime to drag this out and conceal the truth even now. Those emails she finally handed over were printed out on paper, for no good reason whatsoever, and had to be manually typed and scanned back into computer systems by government employees, a time-consuming process financed by taxpayers. Dumping her emails off at the State Department in boxes is Clinton’s way of dragging the scandal out, playing for time and hoping the news cycle will roll on, while she absurdly postures as a champion of transparency.

We’re learned this week that the 100 percent false “spontaneous video protest” cover-up for Benghazi was provided to Clinton by her henchman Sidney Blumenthal, a character so dodgy that President Obama explicitly ordered Clinton to keep him away from the State Department. She used her black-box email server to bring him into the loop anyway, circulating Blumenthal-provided rumors about “demonstrators” angry about the Innocence of Muslims YouTube video sacking the consulate.

Presumably we’re not supposed to ask what sort of information Blumenthal was made privy to in return, whether any of it was sensitive or classified, and what kind of security his mail account maintains. (We could ask “Guccifer,” the Romanian hacker who raided Blumenthal’s email in 2013, about that.)

But then the Blumenthal connection gets really weird, because the very next day, he sent Hillary Clinton a “never mind” memo admitting his original “video protest” take was wrong, and the attack was actually a terrorist strike by al-Qaeda’s Libyan affiliate, Ansar al-Sharia, planned fully a month in advance. This assessment jibes with a Defense Intelligence Agency report from the day after the attack. Among other things, the terrorists wanted payback for a drone strike that had recently killed an al-Qaeda leader, and they thought the anniversary of 9/11 would be a good time to strike.

There is no longer any doubt whatsoever that President Obama and his Secretary of State knew full well their “video protest” narrative was completely false, even as they continued to peddle it for weeks. They knew it was false when they sent then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to push the story in a series of notorious Sunday-show appearances.

Why was Susan Rice stuck with that job, instead of the Secretary of State? Because Susan Rice wasn’t planning to run for President in 2016. Clinton’s slowly-emerging email stash includes some correspondence with her aides on that point, asking them to ensure she didn’t personally make the sort of unequivocally false statements Rice was tasked with making.

There has rarely been a more clearly documented example of malfeasance in the history of the United States… and we have these documents not because of Administration “transparency” or Hillary Clinton’s alleged desire to keep Americans informed, but because groups like Judicial Watch sued the living hell out of the Administration, causing federal judges to order the release of documents years after the fact. We’re seeing Clinton’s emails because she was forced to hand them over to the House Select Committee on Benghazi – an investigative body derided as redundant, unnecessary, and unlikely to find anything interesting by Democrats since its inception.

The latest batch of documents pried loose from the Administration by federal judicial orders also shed some light on what Ambassador Christopher Stevens was doing in Benghazi.  As has long been rumored, the Administration knew the port of Benghazi was being used to ship weapons – including guns, rocket launchers, and missiles – from Libya to Syrian rebels, including the group President Obama famously dismissed as the “junior varsity league” of al-Qaeda at the time, ISIS. For the moment, the official story remains that U.S. intelligence knew about the gun-running, but was not actively sponsoring it.

(As Fox News points out, another memo we’re just seeing for the first time makes it clear the intelligence community had a far graver assessment of the ISIS threat, and Obama knew it. He made that idiotic “junior varsity” comment because he was trying to justify his Iraq pullout and spin the threat of ISIS away. He’s never really stopped trying to do that, even as they’re conquering cities and enveloping Baghdad.)

By the way, some of these newly-unearthed Clinton emails on Benghazi used the email address Clinton and her lawyer lied to Congress about, “hrod17.” That’s one last layer of secrecy and deception from our lovable champion of “transparency.”

It must be stressed repeatedly – as the mainstream media will be extremely reluctant to do – that absolutely none of this information was provided voluntarily by Hillary Clinton or the Obama Administration. Every last drop of it was cudgeled out of them with Freedom of Information Act lawsuits and congressional investigations, over a span of years.

Clinton’s current talking points about how she’s “happy” to see these emails revealed, and wants the process “expedited,” are hilarious in light of the extreme measures she’s taken to keep them secret for so long. If she had not kept them secret, they would have been bombshells that could have done incalculable damage to President Obama or her own 2016 presidential ambitions. Clinton’s paranoia and need for buy time for political damage control are the reason she defied federal law, Administration policy, and the demands of national security to set up that private email server, not any ridiculous nonsense about her unwillingness to carry two cell phones.