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It’s difficult to know where to start with this nonsense from a recent speech given by Hillary Clinton, in which the presumed Democratic front-runner finally defines what she sees as “smart power,” and what she claims is a 21st-century approach to diplomacy. In large part, the former Secretary of State says it means psychoanalyzing enemies to understand them better, which … is exactly what nations have been doing for centuries, if not millenia. That’s why, for instance, our nations turned out experts in Sovietology like Condoleezza Rice, so that they could rise to positions of policymaking importance and apply their...

Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said he knew Benghazi was a “terrorist attack” from the beginning, despite the Obama administration touting the incident was a “spontaneous demonstration.” Panetta made the comments on MSNBC on Tuesday during an interview with Andrea Mitchell. “I didn’t have any specific information, but the fact was–when you bring grenade launchers to a demonstration, there’s something else going on,” Panetta said. “And I just, from the very beginning, sensed that this was an attack. This was a terrorist attack on our compound.” In the secretary’s new book, Worthy Fights, he outlines his criticism of President Obama...

Former Obama Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has dropped what may be the biggest bombshell yet on his former boss. Panetta appeared on MSNBC today and explained that he knew, from the beginning, that the attack on the US facility in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012, was a terrorist attack. President Obama did not see it that way, and his actions that night remain a mystery. Host Andrea Mitchell asked Panetta, “You wrote in the book that you disagreed with David Petraeus and told the situation room he thought it was a spontaneous demonstration outside the consulate that night. Why...

The annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, an initiative of the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation dedicated to addressing "global challenges," is taking place in New York this week. The Republican National Committee marked the occasion by dumping a huge opposition research file on Clinton to reporters. Titled "Clinton Confab Complications," the research briefing declared, "As Clinton World Gathers In New York, Problems Loom Over Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Campaign." It highlighted several issues Republicans think can hurt Clinton, including her ties to "heads of state, business leaders, and actors" and alleged "conflicts of interest," business dealings of some...

BERLIN — German weekly Der Spiegel reports that the country's foreign intelligence agency eavesdropped on calls made by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his predecessor Hillary Clinton. Der Spiegel reported Saturday that the agency, known by its acronym BND, tapped a satellite phone conversation Kerry made in 2013. The magazine says the agency also recorded a conversation between Clinton and former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan a year earlier. Without naming its sources, Der Spiegel says the calls were collected accidentally and the three officials weren't directly targeted.

...But the warnings, which also came from other senior officials—including then-CIA chief David Petraeus and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta—fell on deaf ears...

The wife of former Egyptian president Muhammad Morsi is the latest Muslim Brotherhood “insider” to threaten to expose the special relationship between Morsi and the Obama administration—a relationship the latter insists never existed. Nagla Mahmoud, Morsi’s wife, is reportedly angry at some statements recently made by Hillary Clinton, including that Morsi was “naïve” and “unfit for Egypt’s presidency,” as reported by Arabic media. In the words of El-Mogaz News, Morsi’s wife “is threatening to expose the special relationship between her husband and Hillary Clinton, after the latter attacked the ousted [president], calling him a simpleton who was unfit for the...

When Fox News correspondent Jesse Watters asked Hillary Clinton fans about the deadly Benghazi terror attacks of 2012, he got some surprising answers. None were more surprising than the ones coming from several people who had no idea what Benghazi was, despite the fact that many argue it is Clinton’s biggest failure as secretary of state.

When I first saw this clip earlier today, I was inclined to dismiss it. After all, plenty of people make the mistake Hillary Clinton does in this interview with BBC Radio today. The interviewer asks the former Secretary of State to gauge the strength of the “special relationship” between the US and the UK, and offers a rather insipid answer that applies to nearly all of our allies in the West. But it’s the apparent ignorance of the UK’s political parties from a woman who served for four years as America’s chief diplomat that got the buzz (via TWS and...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton initially obliged Tuesday when she was stopped by a man in Washington, D.C., who asked if she could autograph her new book, “Hard Choices,” but she was stunned by the man’s brazen request when he asked her to make it out to “Christopher Stevens.” On Sept. 11, 2012, U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were murdered by jihadists under Clinton’s watch when she served as secretary of state.

This is Joe Biden’s reality after nearly four decades in the Senate, countless fundraisers for his party and endless ego-massaging of his colleagues: Not a single Democratic senator, including the two from his home state, are publicly urging him to run for president. And this is Hillary Clinton’s lot: A majority of current Democratic senators are calling on her to run in 2016, years before the election and months before she’s expected to even make up her mind whether to seek the White House again. That despite the fact that her eight years in the Senate ended with more than...

Jason Mattera caught up with Hillary Clinton at one of the DC stops on her book tour this week, and asked the former Secretary of State if she would mind signing a copy of Hard Choices… but with a twist. “If you could make it out to Christopher Stevens,” Mattera queried. “I think you knew him.” Christopher Stevens, of course, was the U.S. ambassador to Libya who was murdered along with three other Americans on Clinton’s watch, when Jihadists attacked two U.S. outposts in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. Hillary, surprised by the request, replied, “Yeah, I’m not gonna make...

Representatives of prominent conservative groups converged on the Heritage Foundation on Monday afternoon for the umpteenth in a series of gatherings to draw attention to the Benghazi controversy. But this one took an unexpected turn. What began as a session purportedly about “unanswered questions” surrounding the September 2012 attacks on U.S. facilities in Libya deteriorated into the ugly taunting of a woman in the room who wore an Islamic head covering. The session, as usual, quickly moved beyond the specifics of the assaults that left four Americans dead to accusations about the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrating the Obama administration, President Obama...

Obama Inc. keeps insisting that Qatar could be trusted when it was already concluded by the 9/11 Commission that the Islamist tyranny had ties to the attack on the United States. Since then Qatar has become so out of control in its backing of Jihadists that it has been disavowed by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, but that just made Obama embrace it even harder.Consider this. Obama is hugging a regime that the Saudis think is too extreme. That’s how bad things are. This latest revelation is no surprise at all. The New York Times had already let slip that...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted that she “could not have predicted” the effectiveness of the al-Qaida-affiliated terrorist group that seized control this week of two major Iraqi cities. The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), which has pledged allegiance to al-Qaida since 2004, captured the western Iraqi cities of Tikrit and Mosul, expanding its influence across the entire Sunni-dominated western region of Iraq in addition to Syria — where it remains one of the strongest rebel factions fighting dictator Bashar al-Assad. The group, led by enigmatic terrorist Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, evolved out of al-Qaida’s Bush-era...

A standard defense for Hillary Rodham Clinton when facing questions about Benghazi, Libya, has been to cite her commissioning of a report from the State Department’s Accountability Review Board (ARB), which took a deep look at the attacks that claimed the lives of four U.S. personnel on Sept. 11, 2012. In testimony before Congress in January 2013, Clinton said: “I hurried to appoint the Accountability Review Board led by Ambassador Pickering and Admiral Mullen so we could more fully understand from objective, independent examination, what went wrong and how to fix it. I have accepted every one of their recommendations.”...

All FReepers and lurkers in good standing are invited to join the members of the D.C. Chapter of FreeRepublic.com in a freep of Her Heinous Hillary Rodham Clinton this Saturday morning in Pentagon City. Clinton is scheduled for a book signing appearance for her State Department whitewash memoir at the Costco. We freeped Clinton there on her Living History tour. BufordP is going to anchor this one. When: 9: 00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Saturday, June 14, 2014 Where: on the public sidewalk in front of Costco, 1200 S. Fern St. Pentagon City, Virginia. As always, the D.C. Chapter's rules...

Some of Hillary Clinton’s closest aides blasted the New York Times for what they said was unfair coverage of the former first lady during a recent secret meeting with the paper’s Washington bureau, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.Sources said the meeting included Clinton advisers Philippe Reines and Huma Abedin, as well as Times Washington bureau chief Carolyn Ryan and national political reporter Amy Chozick, who has been on the Clinton beat for the paper.During the closed-door gathering, Clinton aides reportedly griped about the paper’s coverage of the potential 2016 candidate, arguing that Clinton has left public office and not be subjected...

The liberal media consistently dismiss or condemn hearings into Obama scandals as unnecessary and rabidly partisan, and reach those conclusions before said hearings even begin. That might explain why the public doesn't always line up with that opinion. A new ABC-Washington Post poll shows 51 percent of those polled support the new House investigation into the scandalous lack of security for our personnel at the Benghazi, Libya, consulate. ABC and the Post found 58 percent think Team Obama engaged in a cover-up, and only 32 percent denied reality and claimed they "honestly disclosed" what they knew. Perhaps it is because...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has a new book out. In keeping with the adage “there is no such thing as bad publicity” the title will not be mentioned. However, Clinton Inc. sycophants will do everything possible to hype her book onto any best seller list that they can think of or, at least at a minimum delay it from the very embarrassing remainders table at books stores. Here is her Amazon introduction: “All of us face hard choices in our lives,” Hillary Rodham Clinton writes at the start of this personal chronicle of years at the center...

With her memoir, Hard Choices set to be released in the coming weeks, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her publishing company have provided an excerpt in which she claims President Obama’s actions during the Bin Laden raid were “as crisp and courageous a display of leadership” that she had ever seen. Here are 7 reasons that Obama’s leadership during the raid was neither crisp or courageous...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has a new book out. In keeping with the adage “there is no such thing as bad publicity” the title will not be mentioned. However, Clinton Inc. sycophants will do everything possible to hype her book onto any best seller list that they can think of or, at least at a minimum delay it from the very embarrassing remainders table at books stores. Here is her Amazon introduction: “All of us face hard choices in our lives,” Hillary Rodham Clinton writes at the start of this personal chronicle of years at the center...

Hillary Clinton has already sold one million copies of her book, according to Mike Allen. Her book, Hard Choices, is set to be released next month. "EXCLUSIVE: The initial printing of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 'Hard Choices,' out June 10 from Simon & Schuster, was 1 million books – and sold out after the publisher’s unconventional “reveal” of giving Vogue a Mother’s Day excerpt. That’s a real spike, and the figure doesn’t include retail preorders: Bookstores and other retailers ordered 1 million for further sale to the public -- a seal of approval from the booksellers that people will want to...

On Wednesday, Democrats deigned to join Republicans on the House Select Committee investigating Benghazi, primarily to protect Hillary Clinton’s reputation in particular, and the Obama administration’s in general. Toward that end they will likely do what they always do whenever their party is threatened: denigrate the investigation as it unfolds and obstruct it as much as possible. Thus, it was completely unsurprising that even as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) appointed five colleagues to the panel she dismissed the need for it. “The Republican obsession with Benghazi has not been about the victims, the families or the country,” she...

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday named the five Democrats who will participate in the select committee established by House Speaker John Boehner to investigate the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya. Here they are: * Elijah Cummings, Ranking Member on the House Oversight Committee * Adam Smith, Ranking Member on the House Armed Services Committee * Adam Schiff, a member of the Appropriations Committee who vehemently opposed the creation of the panel * Linda Sanchez, a member of the Ways and Means Committee * Tammy Duckworth, a member of the Armed Services Committee A...

GOP strategist Karl Rove doubled down Sunday on his doubts about Hillary Clinton's health, which last week drew a sharp rebuke from former President Bill Clinton. "The Center for Disease Control says a concussion is a type of traumatic brain injury..."

Former President Bill Clinton defended Hillary Clinton's actions as Secretary of State following the 2012 attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi, saying his wife "did what she should have done." "In my opinion, Hillary did what she should have done. She impaneled a very high level review committee," Clinton said Wednesday at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation 2014 Fiscal Summit. “They looked into what was wrong, they gave 29 recommendations,” he added. “She took them and started implementing them and they established the fact that, whether it was right or wrong in the past, secretaries of states never were...

While some lawmakers have questions about what happened before or after the 2012 bombing of the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, Rep. Tom Cotton said he wants to know what President Barack Obama was doing during the attack. "As a former soldier myself, I particularly want to know what happened during the attacks. Why didn't the president send reinforcements from Tripoli, or from our fleet in the Mediterranean Sea, or even from Italy?" the Arkansas Republican said Monday on "Fox & Friends." While conceding that support forces "might not have reached Benghazi in time," Cotton said, "You just don't know...

The hottest competition in Washington this week is among House Republicans vying for a seat on the Benghazi kangaroo court, also known as the Select House Committee to Inflate a Tragedy Into a Scandal. Half the House has asked to “serve” on the committee, which is understandable since it’s the perfect opportunity to avoid any real work while waving frantically to right-wing voters stomping their feet in the grandstand. They won’t pass a serious jobs bill, or raise the minimum wage, or reform immigration, but House Republicans think they can earn their pay for the rest of the year by...

Families of the Benghazi victims have reached out to Democratic lawmakers and asked them not to launch another investigation into the 2012 attack that claimed the lives of four Americans, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) claimed Friday. “Two of their families have called us and said, ‘Please don’t take us down this path again,’” Pelosi said during her weekly press conference. “It’s really hard for them. It’s very sad.”

House Democratic leaders have been unstinting in their criticism of the select committee established this week to investigate the aftermath of the 2012 attack on an American compound in Benghazi, Libya. Now they are facing a touch choice about whether to join it, cautiously weighing which strategy would be riskier politically and whether their instinct to boycott the select committee might just give it more power in the end. Democratic leaders have called the new committee “a political ploy,” a “stunt,” a “sham,” a “waste of taxpayer dollars” and, in the words of White House spokesman Jay Carney, “a blatantly...

Was Hillary Clinton not merely a mediocre secretary of state but something much worse? Although Mrs. Clinton has spent the last few days huffing and puffing about the fate, likely unthinkable, of the more than 200 Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram, an Al Qaeda-linked Islamic terrorist organization, Mrs. Clinton didn’t do anything about Boko Haram when she had a chance. While Secretary Clinton, who made empowering women and girls a chief goal of her tenure, repeatedly was begged to designate Boko Haram a terrorist organization, thus allowing the U.S. to take certain actions against the group, she reportedly fought...

The Justice Department is pressing the State Department to designate Boko Haram, a Nigerian militant group alleged to be responsible for hundreds of deaths, as a "foreign terrorist organization," according to a document obtained by Reuters. Lisa Monaco, head of the Justice Department's national security division, sent a letter in January to State Department counter-terrorism chief Daniel Benjamin requesting that Boko Haram, also known as the "Nigerian Taliban," be put on the list. A Congressional source said that in the last few days, State Department representatives have lobbied Congress to try to stop legislation which would force the administration to...

Despite Hillary Clinton's current condemnation of Boko Haram for kidnapping hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls, when she had a chance as Secretary of State to designate it as a Foreign Terrorist Organization she failed to do so as reported by the Daily Beast. That report stated, "The State Department under Hillary Clinton fought hard against placing the al Qaeda-linked militant group Boko Haram on its official list of foreign terrorist organizations for two years." It will be difficult for Hillary to plead that it was not  brought to her attention as she claimed in her defense of not providing more requested...

Secretary of State John Kerry will be on a previously scheduled trip to Mexico on May 21, the day he’s been subpoenaed to appear before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to testify on Benghazi, a State Department spokeswoman said Monday. Deputy spokesperson Marie Harf said Kerry, who has been overseas, is aware of the subpoena, announced Friday by Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif. “As we’ve said repeatedly, we were all surprised, quite frankly, that instead of working with us and reaching out to us and offering first an invitation to testify, that Chairman Issa jumped immediately to subpoenaing...

A Democratic member of the House intelligence committee called Sunday for his party to boycott the newly announced committee tasked with probing the Benghazi attacks, dismissing new evidence that Republicans have called a "smoking gun" showing the White House politicized the tragedy. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., told "Fox News Sunday" that Democrats should not give the select committee more "credibility" by joining.

Political-memoir names: so cliche that they're bound to repeat. Hillary Clinton's upcoming memoir, which is expected to look back at her time as secretary of State, now has a name: Hard Choices. Which is an okay title! She no doubt had to make some tough decisions while at State, and has at least one big decision to make coming up in the next year or so. But the former Cabinet member and possible future presidential candidate may have been better served by a different title—like, say, Tough Decisions. Because Hard Choices has already been used. By another former secretary of...

<p>The State Department has no idea what happened to $6 billion used to pay its contractors.</p>

Hillary Clinton is trying to impress voters that she’s a true friend of Israel, which is odd given that relations with the Jewish state reached a low point while she was secretary of State. The Post reports: “Hillary Rodham Clinton cast doubt on the interim nuclear agreement with Iran, saying in a muscular policy speech [in New York] Wednesday night that she is ‘personally skeptical’ that Iran’s leaders will follow through on a comprehensive agreement to end their march toward nuclear weapons. Still, the former secretary of state and potential 2016 Democratic presidential candidate told a pro-Israel audience in New...

American personnel on the ground in Benghazi the night of the 2012 terror attack are outraged after learning that the CIA's inspector general never conducted an investigation into what happened -- despite two CIA workers being killed in the attack and despite at least two complaints being filed by CIA employees. Former Ambassador Chris Stevens, another State official and two ex-Navy SEALs working for the CIA were killed in that attack. Many in the agency were told, or were under the impression, that an investigation was in the works, but that is not the case. One person close to the...

President Obama’s foreign policy is based on fantasy By Editorial Board, Published: March 2 FOR FIVE YEARS, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality. It was a world in which “the tide of war is receding” and the United States could, without much risk, radically reduce the size of its armed forces. Other leaders, in this vision, would behave rationally and in the interest of their people and the world. Invasions, brute force, great-power games and shifting alliances — these were things of the past. Secretary of...

‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ Was this Samantha Power baffling Daniel Pearl tweet evil or stupid? Samantha Power@AmbassadorPower Daniel Pearl's story is reminder that individual accountability & reconciliation are required to break cycles of violence. @DanielPearlFNDN

“That information turned out, in some respects, not to be 100 percent correct," Rice said. "But the notion that somehow I or anybody else in the administration misled the American people is patently false. And I think that that's been amply demonstrated." She was, at the time, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and a top candidate to become secretary of state. However, Rice withdrew herself from consideration in the wake of the attacks on the U.S. outpost in Benghazi, Libya, after the firestorm of criticism she received for her response. Rice said Sunday she didn’t know whether her...

January 28, 2014 Hillary: Yeah, Sorry About That Benghazi Thingy… BY TOM HINCHEY Hillary Clinton was the keynote speaker at the National Automobile Dealers Association in New Orleans yesterday She was asked what her biggest regret was as Secretary of State; she answered, “My biggest regret is what happened in Benghazi. It was a terrible tragedy losing four Americans.”...

January 27, 2014, 12:46 pm Hillary: Benghazi 'my biggest regret' By Julian Pecquet Getty Images Hillary Clinton called the Benghazi terror attack the “biggest regret” of her tenure as secretary of State on Monday, a message she's expected to emphasize as she ponders a 2016 White House run. “My biggest, you know, regret is what happened in Benghazi,” Clinton said when asked to identify “do-overs” of her time as America's top diplomat during her keynote appearance before the the National Automobile Dealers Association in New Orleans. [WATCH VIDEO] “It was a terrible tragedy, losing four Americans, two diplomats and now...

During her Monday morning closing address at the National Automobile Dealers Association convention in New Orleans, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton named the September 2012 Benghazi attacks as her “biggest regret.” According to CNN’s Jake Tapper, Clinton told the NADA crowd that “My biggest regret is what happened in Benghazi. It was a terrible tragedy losing four Americans.”

January 19, 2014 Watch: The great White House Benghazi cover-up in 3 minutes flat by Michael Dorstewitz This amazing video illustrates in three minutes flat the entire White House coverup of what President Obama referred to as the “phony” Benghazi scandal.Compiled by the Heritage Foundation, it gives a perfect graphic representation of the U.S. House testimony as well as the Senate report on the event — both released this week to the public. The entire rogues gallery of characters is illustrated — Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, then-Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice and Chief White House...

Driving the Republican jihad was a claim, first reported in October 2012 by Fox News, that CIA personnel had wanted to respond more quickly to the Benghazi attack but were ordered to "stand down," perhaps by political higher-ups. Although this claim was promptly rebutted by CIA officials, it was repeated by Fox at least 85 times, according to a review by the liberal advocacy group Media Matters. This barrage fueled Republican charges that the Democrats were engaging in a cover-up.

Judge Jeanine Pirro delivers a devastating indictment of Hillary Clinton for her negligence and duplicity surrounding the Benghazi atrocity.

The government watchdog group that revealed that President Barack Obama failed to attend over half of his daily intelligence briefings (known officially as the Presidential Daily Brief, or PDB) released a devastating Benghazi timeline Wednesday. It reveals Obama’s schedule in the week leading up to the terrorist attacks that claimed the lives of four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens. Release of the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) Benghazi timeline comes as a new Senate report published Wednesday concluded that “the attacks were preventable.” As the GAI timeline reveals, Obama failed to attend his daily intelligence briefing for the five consecutive...