RUTHFULLY YOURS

Republicans Say Committee will concentrate questions on details of fatal 2012 assault, according to GOP lawmakers

WASHINGTON—The House Committee on Benghazi will focus its long-awaited questioning of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on details of the 2012 attack on a Libyan diplomatic outpost, rather than on Mrs. Clinton’s email arrangements, Republicans said this week.

The panel’s hand has been forced by recent suggestions, including by some Republicans, that the committee’s motivations are chiefly political. That has shifted the dynamics of Thursday’s high-profile hearing, with Republicans facing pressure to show they are playing fair just as Mrs. Clinton faces pressure to show she didn’t botch a tragic incident.

Republicans remain eager to press Mrs. Clinton publicly on the State Department’s Libya policy before, during and after the attack in which four Americans died, while she looks to defuse lingering claims that the incident reveals flaws in her management of the State Department, her leadership or her judgment.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign has been dogged for months by her decision to use a private email server while she served as secretary of state, an arrangement revealed by the committee’s work. But Republicans say most of Thursday’s hearing will tackle topics more directly related to the attack in Libya.

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Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch is suing the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to obtain copies of a 20-year-old draft indictment against Hillary Clinton for her role in the Whitewater scandal.

In a press release sent to reporters late on Tuesday, Judicial Watch announced its intent to file a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against NARA for withholding an indictment written by Hickman Ewing, Jr., the deputy independent counsel and prosecutor investigating Whitewater, in 1996. The agency admitted it had found the records in March 2015 but is withholding the documents, claiming their release would constitute an unwarranted invasion of Clinton’s privacy.

Las Vegas, Nev. — For years, Ronnie Najarro was a sports anchor at the local Univision affiliate in Las Vegas. He joined the station as a college intern and rose to become sports anchor and then host of the news special “8 Rounds con Oscar de la Hoya,” which won an Emmy in 2007.

He was laid off amidst the economic recession in 2008.

Last week, on a warm Thursday morning, Najarro was dropping in on volunteers with the Libre Initiative who were manning tables at a handful of Vegas-area colleges. Brochures, bracelets, sunglasses, and pens were spread across the tables. They were recruiting attendees for a policy forum with Jeb Bush set to take place this Wednesday. It was billed as an opportunity “for the Hispanic community and others to pose questions about key issues to an influential policymaker.”

“How’s it going?” Najarro asks. He’s the group’s regional press secretary.

Were an alien visitor to these United States to have picked up a newspaper this morning, he would presumably have been surprised to see which political topics were at present under discussion. There are just twelve months until the United States hosts an open presidential election — an election that will most likely determine the future of Obamacare, of the Supreme Court, and of America’s place in the world — and yet, to look across today’s buzzing media landscape is to wonder if anybody has yet noticed. On CNN, MSNBC, and Fox; in The Atlantic, the Times, and the Journal; and across talk radio, social media, and the broader political blogosphere, Americans are happily relitigating a host of fractious questions that were last debated in earnest in the fall of 2008. Among them: “Was the last Republican president responsible for the worst attack on American soil since the bombing at Pearl Harbor?”; “Should the U.S. military have been sent into Iraq or been focused instead on Afghanistan, the ‘good’ post-9/11 war?”; and “Is the current state of the Middle East the fault of local actors or of the United States?”

These are not the conversations the GOP was looking for.

Hillary Clinton’s Enabler-in-Chief
It’s an ancient story: An innocent idealist sets out to change the world and in the process becomes what he hates most. “He who fights monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster,” Friedrich Nietzsche advised.

That’s probably the best spin one can put on Sidney Blumenthal, the longtime Hillary Rodham Clinton aide and confidant. But it would be just that — spin — given that Blumenthal was never an idealist, never mind an innocent. He has remained the same man he was in 1976, when he co-edited Government by Gunplay: Assassination Conspiracy Theories from Dallas to Today. Other contributors to the paranoid collection included renowned JFK assassination conspiracy theorist Carl Oglesby and former CIA officer Philip Agee, who was giving information to the KGB and Cuban intelligence at the time.

Maybe Carly Fiorina feels like singing Carly Simon’s “That’s the way I’ve always heard it should be”. In other words, Mrs Fiorina cannot be happy with where she stands in the polls.

You may remember that she was the upcoming candidate a month ago. Her performance in that Fox News debate propelled her to the first team in the CNN debate. Everything was about Carly and how Carly would be facing Hillary sometime soon.

I will confess that I was always skeptical, in large part because presidential campaigns are not for people who’ve never run for any kind of office or won an election. Dwight Eisenhower was the exception but the landscape was very unique in 1952 for such a candidacy. Also, General Eisenhower had just won World War II and millions of Americans were connected to him because of that experience.

Again, the polls are not working for Mrs Fiorina. The latest RCP average of polls has Mrs Fiorina at 5.6%. The very latest CNN poll has her at 4%.

Bernie Sanders has been asserting more forthrightly than any of his Democratic rivals that pretty much every domestic problem—from aging infrastructure to student debt to teenage acne—could be solved by raising taxes high enough on the super rich. Rarely do interviewers perform the public service of challenging his math, which is why the Vermont senator’s exchange Sunday with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News is noteworthy.

Mr. Sanders said that he is open to raising the current 39.6% top marginal income-tax rate to as high as 90%. The self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” also explained how he would increase the death tax “so that [Donald] Trump and his billionaire friends and their families will end up paying more.” Mr. Stephanopoulos replied that the numbers still don’t compute. “To pay for all of your programs, you’re going to have to do more than tax the top 1%,” he said. “How far below the top 1% are you going to go with tax hikes?”

Hillary Clinton may not see the point, but her Thursday testimony may tell us much about her ability to lead.

Only in Perry Mason stories does the real culprit break down in open court. After Hillary Clinton’s now-immortal Capitol Hill outburst about investigations into the deadly 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya—“What difference, at this point, does it make?”—the former secretary of state and Democratic candidate for president is unlikely to offer any such spontaneity when she testifies Thursday before the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

Nonetheless, the committee’s work is utterly serious, its preparations extensive (and extensively stonewalled by Mrs. Clinton’s team) and its mission vital to our fight against still-metastasizing Islamist terrorism. Much is at stake. The hearing’s focus must be on the key policy and leadership implications of the mistakes made before, during and after the murders of Amb. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans on Sept. 11 three years ago.
Before the attack, there was ample warning that the U.S. consulate in Benghazi wasn’t secure, with terrorist threats in the area multiplying. Even the International Red Cross had pulled out of Benghazi. After a string of requests from the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli for more security, in mid-August came a joint Embassy-CIA recommendation to move the State Department’s people into the CIA’s Benghazi compound. The State Department in Washington was invariably unresponsive, even though, as Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey later testified, the rising terrorist threat in Libya was well known.

The media court-encomiasts of the Democrat Party were gushing last week over Hillary Clinton’s supposed “victory” in the first primary debate. “Crushed” was the cliché de jour used to describe Clinton’s besting of the cranks, has-beens, and nobodies running against her. Such praise is akin to calling her the tallest building in Wichita Kansas, to paraphrase William F. Buckley.

Yet when it comes to substance, there was little or nothing specific or fresh or even rational in the various nostrums the candidates shouted out like the expletives and epithets involuntarily vocalized by victims of Tourette’s Syndrome. Except for a brief tussle over who hated the NRA the most, and the occasional good sense from Jim Webb, the debate was a dreary list of reflexive progressive talking points utterly disconnected from the real world.

When gun control came up, for example, candidates immediately started twitching and barking out “assault rifles!” and “gun shows!” The facts suggest otherwise. As BusinessWeek pointed out, fewer than 3% of the 12,000 murders in 2014 involved rifles of any sort, let alone semi-automatic assault rifles––a percentage less than knives (13%) and feet and hands (6%). As for gun shows, sellers are subject to the same federal licensing laws as sellers in retail stores, and in any case guns purchased at gun shows account for no more than 2% of the guns used in crimes.