State Dept. FOIA website keeps crashing – Try Here – We’ll keep trying to locate alternatives:  Update – Here They Are 

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*Context Note* ALL of these emails were previously shared with the House Select Committee on Benghazi (Trey Gowdy – chair) several months ago.
When Hillary Clinton first admitted to the exclusive use of a private email system, during her tenure at Secretary of State, one of her main points of emphasis was that none of the emails she received (or sent) -from the non-secure network- were classified.

However, today the State Department has released a few (approx. 300) of those emails and many are redacted, some due to classified content. (more…)

Audacity, thy name is….

(Via The Hill) A federal judge has rejected the State Department’s proposal to not release thousands of pages of emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton until next year, instead calling for them to be released on a rolling basis.

[…]  Jeffrey Light, the lawyer for Vice News, which filed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for the emails, said the judge had given the Obama administration one week to provide a schedule for the public release of all the emails, including those pertaining to Benghazi, Reuters reported.
The State Department had proposed releasing the emails sometime before Jan. 15, 2016, in court documents filed Monday night.
Those emails, which were submitted to the State Department in paper form, will be viewable in redacted form on the department’s website, according to John F. Hackett, who handles FOIA requests for State. (more…)

The New York Times has a new article outlining the relationship between Hillary Clinton, the State Department, the Clinton Foundation, and her pal Sidney Blumenthal. However, they somewhat bury the lede regarding the impression that Blumenthal was leveraging Hillary for a group of business partners (he led) who wanting to invest in Libya.
New York Times […] as Hillary Rodham Clinton embarks on her second presidential bid, Mr. Blumenthal’s service to the Clintons is once again under the spotlight. Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, a Republican who is leading the congressional committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, plans to subpoena Mr. Blumenthal, 66, for a private transcribed interview.

Mr. Gowdy’s chief interest, according to people briefed on the inquiry, is a series of memos that Mr. Blumenthal — who was not an employee of the State Department — wrote to Mrs. Clinton about events unfolding in Libya before and after the death of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
According to emails obtained by The New York Times, Mrs. Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time, took Mr. Blumenthal’s advice seriously, forwarding his memos to senior diplomatic officials in Libya and Washington and at times asking them to respond. Mrs. Clinton continued to pass around his memos even after other senior diplomats concluded that Mr. Blumenthal’s assessments were often unreliable. (more…)

First, a review of the “Apology”:

It goes much deeper than just “donations to the Clinton Foundation”.  Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer writes in a USA Today Op-Ed:

[…]  I agreed to be interviewed, expecting a robust examination of my new book, Clinton Cash, and my reporting on the Clintons’ accumulation of massive personal wealth, cronyism and the lack of transparency surrounding the Clintons’ foundation.
I expected probing questions, similar to the ones I’ve received from Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC, Chris Wallace on Fox News and Frank Sesno on CNN.
What I did not expect — what no one expected — was the sort of “hidden hand journalism” that has contributed to America’s news media’s crisis of credibility in particular, and Americans’ distrust of the news media more broadly. (more…)

Former interim CIA Head Mike Morell was part of team Hillary both before and after her tenure as Secretary of State so this admission carries a little more sting…. 

(Via Politico) Former Deputy CIA Director Michael Morell said that he believes some foreign intelligence agencies possess the contents of Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
“I think that foreign intelligence services, the good ones, have everything on any unclassified network that the government uses,” Morell said Friday in an interview on the Hugh Hewitt Show.
“I don’t think that was a very good judgment,” he added of Clinton’s decision to use the private server for official State Department business. “I don’t know who gave her that advice, but it was not good advice.” (more…)

On April 26th we wrote:

Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer appeared on This Week and faced a very skeptical George Stephanopoulos, who argued that his accusations that Hillary Clinton exchanged favorable treatment from the U.S. State Department for multimillion dollar donations to the Clinton Foundation were unsubstantiated.
However, what ABC doesn’t tell YOU is that Stephanopoulos has a SEVERE conflict of interest about this story as it relates to its 2005 origin and his former Boss Bill Clinton. (link)

After being busted by WFB: “Stephanopoulos, a former aide to President Bill Clinton, confirmed the donation to POLITICO’s Dylan Byers after the Free Beacon contacted ABC News for comment“, today tries to apologize for his lack of disclosure…
(Via Politico) ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos has given $50,000 to the Clinton Foundation in recent years, charitable contributions that he did not publicly disclose while reporting on the Clintons or their nonprofit organization, the On Media blog has learned.
In both 2013 and 2014, Stephanopoulos made a $25,000 donation to the 501 nonprofit founded by former President Bill Clinton, the foundation’s records show. Stephanopoulos never disclosed this information to viewers, even when interviewing author Peter Schweizer last month about his book “Clinton Cash,” which alleges that donations to the foundation may have influenced some of Hillary Clinton’s actions as secretary of state. (more…)

If, like many of us, you are deep in the weeds in your understanding of the issues around Benghazi, the 2010 Arab Spring (Tunis, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen), or the CIA operation “Zero Footprint” in Libya and the follow-up operation in Syria, you will enjoy this interview with former Panetta/Petraeus replacement Mike Morell.
Or, if you have a cursory understanding of events, this interview might spur you toward further research.  “The Benghazi Brief” – Regardless of your current level of understanding behind events of the past 7+ years, this interview is well constructed.
Bret Baier has done his homework, and in a refreshing and surprising manner you can see how Baier is able to cut through the distracting ‘talking points’ (no pun intended), and draw out the reality of what lies behind Morell and his foundational motives.