Northwest Indiana Discussion

Say Arc, when are you ever going to "quit" Hillary?

After Hillary's speech and the tremendous unity displayed last night at the convention

Say Arc, when are you ever going to "quit" Hillary?

The White House is throwing Hillary Clinton under the 2012 election bus.

Top officials have already claimed the nation’s intelligence agencies did not alert the White House to the growing danger facing the State Department’s facility in Benghazi, Libya, which was destroyed Sept. 11 by a jihadi attack on the 11th anniversary of the atrocities in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

The claim was repeated Oct. 11 by Vice President Joe Biden during the vice presidential debate in Danville, Ky. “We weren’t told they wanted more security,” he announced.

Ben Rhodes, President Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser for communications, extended the claim Oct. 11 by telling told Foreign Policy magazine that neither Biden nor President Barack Obama knew of the growing danger.

“Biden speaks only for himself and the president and neither of them knew about the requests at the time,” Rhodes said, according to Foreign policy.

“These kinds of issues are handling in the State Department by security officials,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said during Friday’s press briefing.

Security matters “are decided at the State Department,” he said, amid tough questioning from Fox News Channel’s Ed Henry.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while lamenting the partisanship of congressional Republicans who grilled her about the Benghazi attack, encouraged Republicans not to imitate the unwillingness to compromise evinced by terrorists in North Africa.

“It has been increasingly partisan,” Clinton said today at the Newseum when asked to comment on the questioning she faced from Republicans last week. “You can be partisan, you can have a strong sense of the rightness of your position, but democracy and certainly legislative bodies require compromise. And you can’t let compromise become a dirty word because then you veer toward fanaticism.”

“I mean, we were just talking about extremists who think it’s only their way, they are the ones who have the truth, none of the rest of us have any kind of claim on what is real in their views,” she continued. “And so it’s important in our democracies – like Australia, like the United States – that yes, be passionate, be intense about your feelings, but at the end of the day you’ve got to serve the people who sent you there, and that requires compromise.”

The “extremists” Clinton had just been discussing included those that carried out the terrorist attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, resulting in the deaths of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya and three other Americans.

Hillary Clinton has wasted no time cashing in on the lecture circuit as it was revealed today that she will be charging $200,000 per speech.

The massive fee means that she will be making more from a two-hour lecture than she did in a year as Secretary of State.

The announcement that Mrs Clinton has hired a top talent agency to represent her as she begins to give paid speeches following her departure from the State Department came earlier this week, but her $200,000 asking price was only reported on Wednesday.

According to Buzzfeed, that puts her in the same league as her husband former President Bill Clinton who is so in-demand that he can command the six-figure fee.

The volume of the sum is made clear when looked at in comparison to her salary for a year as Secretary of State, which was $186,000.

Armed with confidential memos to Hillary Clinton that were stolen from the e-mail account of a former White House aide, a hacker has distributed some of the documents to a wide array of congressional aides, political figures, and journalists worldwide.

In a series of weekend e-mail blasts, the hacker known as “Guccifer” disseminated four recent memos to Clinton from Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime confidant of the former Secretary of State.

The 64-year-old Blumenthal, who worked as a senior White House adviser to President Bill Clinton, had his AOL e-mail account hacked last week by “Guccifer,” who has conducted similar illegal assaults against a growing list of public figures, including Colin Powell, relatives and friends of the Bush family, and a top United Nations official.

The hacker’s e-mails went to hundreds of recipients, though the distribution lists were dotted with addresses for aides to Senate and House members who are no longer in office. But many of the addresses to which the Blumenthal memos were sent are good (though it is unclear whether karl@rove.com is a solid address for the Republican mastermind).

Most of the e-mail recipients were sent four separate memos that were e-mailed to Clinton by Blumenthal during the past five months. Each memo dealt with assorted developments in Libya, including the September 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi. One memo marked “Confidential” was sent to Clinton on September 12.

As TSG reported last week, after Blumenthal’s e-mail account was compromised, the hacker searched it for e-mails sent to Clinton, and further sorted the mail to segregate any attachment--like Word files--that were included in Blumenthal’s correspondence to Clinton. Many of these pilfered documents were memos to Clinton on foreign policy and intelligence matters.

While “Guccifer” appears to have downloaded many of these attachments, the hacker opted not to send the actual Word files to those on the e-mail blast list (likely as a security measure since the downloaded files could contain metadata that could lead to the hacker, who is the target of a mushrooming federal criminal investigation).

Instead, “Guccifer” copied the text from the four Blumenthal memos and pasted them into separate new files. The hacker then made screen grabs of the new files and e-mailed those to the names on the weekend distribution list. As seen above, “Guccifer” made sure, of course, to choose the despised Comic Sans font (and a pink background) when recreating the memos sent to Clinton by Blumenthal, who is pictured at left with the Clintons.

The e-mails this weekend appear to have been sent from the hacked AOL account of the wife of a Hollywood actor. This tactic, which “Guccifer” has previously employed, seems to be another attempt to further shield the hacker’s identity.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton became the latest politician to come out in favor of same-sex marriage on Monday, echoing similar shifts by President Barack Obama and other potential White House hopefuls as the issue gains public approval.

In a six-minute video released by the Human Rights Campaign on Monday, Mrs. Clinton said gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans “are full and equal citizens and deserve the rights of citizenship.

“That includes marriage,” she said. “That’s why I support marriage for lesbian and gay couples. I support it personally and as a matter of policy and law.”

By announcing her support for gay marriage in a very public forum as the issue wins new converts, Mrs. Clinton further fueled speculation that she is certain to launch another White House bid in 2016. She joins other potential Democratic contenders in supporting the right for same-sex couples to marry, including Vice President Joe Biden and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

House Republicans released their report on the investigation into the Benghazi terrorist attack, having concluded that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was not telling the truth when she told Congress that she wasn’t aware that officials at the U.S. mission in Benghazi had requested extra security.

“The specific security requests pertaining to Benghazi, you know were handled by the security professionals in the department,” Clinton told Congress in January. “I didn’t see those requests, they didn’t come to me, I didn’t approve them, I didn’t deny them.”

The House report suggests that Clinton received a request for more security from Gene Cretz, who preceded Christopher Stevens as ambassador to Libya.

“On April 19, 2012, the response cable from the Department of State to Embassy Tripoli, bearing Secretary Clinton’s signature, acknowledges Ambassador Cretz’s request for additional security but instead articulates a plan to scale back security assets for the U.S. Mission in Libya, including the Benghazi Mission,” the House report says.