Judicial Watch Seeks to Question Top Obama-Clinton Officials on Clinton Email Issue, Seeks Depos...

Full title: Judicial Watch Seeks to Question Top Obama-Clinton Officials on Clinton Email Issue, Seeks Depositions of Susan Rice and Ben Rhodes on Benghazi Talking Points Documents

(Washington, DC) — Judicial Watch announced today that it submitted a court-ordered discovery plan for the depositions of several top former government officials involved in the Clinton email scandal, including Obama administration senior officials Susan Rice, Ben Rhodes, Jacob Sullivan, and FBI official E.W. Priestap.

Judicial Watch “intends to update the Court regarding the depositions of Hillary Clinton and Cheryl Mills at the conclusion of the 16-week discovery period, unless the Court believes such notice is not necessary.”

The plan for discovery is the latest development in Judicial Watch’s July 2014 FOIA lawsuit filed after the U.S. Department of State failed to respond to a May 13, 2014 FOIA request ( Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:14-cv-01242)). Judicial Watch seeks:

The Judicial Watch discovery plan is response to a December 6, 2018, ruling by Judge Royce C. Lamberth ordering the State Department and Department of Justice to join Judicial Watch in submitting discovery in three distinct areas:

In his ruling , Lamberth called Clinton’s use of the private email server “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.”

Judicial Watch seeks the depositions of former U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and former White House Deputy Strategic Communications Adviser Ben Rhodes about the creation and dissemination of the infamous Benghazi talking points because: “No one other than these individuals know better who they were communicating with and where records might be located.”

Judicial Watch also argues for “direct, unfiltered access to [additional] key witnesses with firsthand knowledge and the opportunity to ask follow-up questions” about the illicit Clinton email system. In its pursuit of answers as to whether former Secretary Clinton’s use of a private email server was intended to stymie FOIA, Judicial Watch seeks to conduct the following depositions:

Judicial Watch argues that, “as the Court has already recognized, understanding the context of the preparation and dissemination of the [Benghazi] talking points is central” to the Clinton email scandal. For instance, did the State Department know that Clinton “deemed the Benghazi attack terrorism hours after it happened, contradicting the Obama Administration’s subsequent claim of a protest-gone-awry?” Was the State Department aware that “Clinton sent or received top-secret information through her private email?”

Incredibly, Justice Department attorneys admit in a filing opposing Judicial Watch’s limited discovery that “Counsel for State contacted the counsel of some third parties that Plaintiff originally included in its draft discovery proposal to obtain their client’s position on being deposed.” This collusion occurred despite criticism from the Court that the DOJ engaged in “chicanery” to cover up misconduct and that career employees in the State and Justice Departments may have “colluded to scuttle public scrutiny of Clinton, skirt FOIA, and hoodwink this Court.”

Judicial Watch countered that “[t]he government’s proposal, which is really nothing more than an opposition to [Judicial Watch’s] plan, demonstrates that it continues to reject any impropriety on its part and that it seeks to block any meaningful inquiry into its ‘outrageous misconduct.’”

“President Trump, frankly, should demand to know why the State and Justice Department are colluding with Clinton allies and trying to protect Hillary Clinton and themselves from court-ordered questions on the Clinton email scandal,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “But a federal court wants answers – and Judicial Watch discovery plan is a key step to uncovering whether and how Hillary Clinton email misconduct stymied FOIA.”

This Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit led directly to the disclosure of the Clinton email system in 2015.

JUDUCUAL WARCH NEEDS TO CHECK THIS OUT:

Hilary aide, Huma Abedin forwarded sensitive State Department emails, including passwords to government systems, to her personal Yahoo email account before every single Yahoo account was hacked...”

Could it be that Hillary was selling secrets to foreign governments, and indirectly used Yahoo and the subsequent hack of millions of accounts to disguise it? Certainly would explain Huma’s otherwise unexplainable actions, and a widespread hack would permit the transfer of the targeted information from Hillary to go unnoticed, as well as provide a measure of plausible deniability for her if discovered (“Gee, I was just hacked like everyone else...nothing to see here”).

Keep in mind that the Clinton Foundation was connected to SOS’ Hillary’s computer......and was privy to detailed State Dept inside info. How else did the Clintons know who to shakedown next?

cont

........one of the most controversial of Ms. Clinton’s emails........released by the State Department under judicial order....... was one sent on June 8, 2011, to the then-Secy of State by Sidney Blumenthal, Ms. Clinton’s unsavory friend and confidant who was running a private intelligence service for Ms. Clinton.

This email contains an amazingly detailed assessment of events in Sudan, specifically a coup being plotted by top generals in that war-torn country. Mr. Blumenthal’s information came from a top-ranking source with direct access to Sudan’s top military and intelligence officials, and recounted a high-level meeting that had taken place only 24 hours before.

To anybody familiar with intelligence reporting, this unmistakably signals intelligence, termed SIGINT in the trade. In other words, Mr. Blumenthal, a private citizen who had enjoyed no access to U.S. intelligence for over a decade when he sent that email, somehow got hold of SIGINT about the Sudanese leadership and managed to send it, via open, unclassified email, to his friend Ms. Clinton only one day later.

NSA officials were appalled by the State Department’s release of this email, since it bore all the hallmarks of Agency reporting. Back in early January when I reported this, I was confident that Mr. Blumenthal’s information came from highly classified NSA sources, based on my years of reading and writing such reports myself, and one veteran agency official told me it was NSA information with “at least 90 percent confidence.”

We can confirm that the contents of Sid Blumenthal’s June 8, 2011, email to Hillary Clinton, sent to her personal, unclassified account, were indeed based on highly sensitive NSA information. The agency investigated this compromise and determined that Mr. Blumenthal’s highly detailed account of Sudanese goings-on, including the retelling of high-level conversations in that country, was indeed derived from NSA intelligence.

Specifically, this information was illegally lifted from four different NSA reports, all of them classified “Top Secret / Special Intelligence.” Worse, at least one of those reports was issued under the GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information (for instance, decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership, as this was). GAMMA is properly viewed as a SIGINT Special Access Program, or SAP, several of which from the CIA Ms. Clinton compromised in another series of her “unclassified” emails.

Currently serving NSA officials have told me they have no doubt that Mr. Blumenthal’s information came from their reports. “It’s word-for-word, verbatim copying,” one of them explained. “In one case, an entire paragraph was lifted from an NSA report” that was classified Top Secret / Special Intelligence.

How Mr. Blumenthal got his hands on this information is the key question, and there’s no firm answer yet. The fact that he was able to take four separate highly classified NSA reports—none of which he was supposed to have any access to—and pass the details of them to Hillary Clinton via email only hours after NSA released them in Top Secret / Special Intelligence channels indicates something highly unusual, as well as illegal, was going on.

Suspicion naturally falls on Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA senior official who was Mr. Blumenthal’s intelligence fixer, his supplier of juicy spy gossip, who conveniently died last August before email-gate became front-page news. However, he, too, had left federal service years before and should not have had any access to current NSA reports. There are many questions here about what Hillary Clinton and her staff at Foggy Bottom were up to, including Sidney Blumenthal, an integral member of the Clinton organization, despite his lack of any government position.

<><> How Mr. Blumenthal got hold of this Top Secret-plus reporting is only the first question.
<><> Why he chose to email it to Ms. Clinton in open channels is another question.
<><> So is: How did not one aide to Secy Clinton notice the highly detailed reporting looked exactly like SIGINT from the NSA?
<><> Last, why did Hillary's State Department see fit to release this email, unredacted, to the public?

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