#HotScoop of the evening, The Hill has the Vine, “Issa escorted out of Benghazi deposition“:
Former House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) tried to crash former Hillary Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal’s deposition before the House Select Committee on Benghazi on Tuesday.
Issa marched into the closed-door deposition and remained inside for about a minute before he was escorted out by the panel’s chairman, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.).
The pair briefly exchanged hushed words in a nearby hallway before Issa stormed off, throwing an empty soda can into a nearby trash bin…
Issa conducted his own lengthy investigation into the deadly 2012 siege in Benghazi, Libya, when he was chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. At one point, he called the former secretary of State to testify…
As for the actual hearing, Politico works very hard to find a pony in the manure pile:
… Blumenthal, subpoenaed by the Select Committee on Benghazi for a closed-door deposition, merely copied and pasted memos from Tyler Drumheller, a former CIA officer who was working on a Libya business venture, and sent them to Clinton, two people familiar with his testimony told POLITICO.
The sources also said Blumenthal maintained that his practice of forwarding such memos was unsolicited and that he was not being compensated for gathering or passing along the information.
The latest news comes just hours after revelations that Blumenthal had given Republican investigators 60 new Libya-related emails that either the State Department or Hillary Clinton failed to turn over….
So as part of his sinecure with the Clinton Foundation (“The Obama administration had barred Blumenthal, a close friend to the Clinton family, from working at State because of attacks he made during the 2008 Democratic primary against the now-sitting president”), Blumenthal forwarded a bunch of pro-business spam to HRClinton, whose staff deleted it from the email dump so noisily demanded by the previous six BENGHAZI!!!! panels. Along with the very significant globally important emails from Nigerian princes looking to solve America’s deficit problems if she would transmit her banking details, I’m guessing.
Vox has a very detailed history of Sidney Blumenthal’s career, if you had managed to successfully suppress all memory of the 1990s. The worst they can find to say about him is that he’d be a Democratic Karl Rove, assuming either he or the Democratic politicians he worked for had no ethical standards whatsoever — but, of course, there is no leftwing equivalent of IOKIYAR.
redshirt
I’m watching the NBA finals in Spanish. In Maine. It’s kinda cool.
Technical problem with Time Warner Cable even though I’m watching via an antennae.
jl
Issa’s losing it. Some one better keep on eye on him.
Edit: and it must eat him that it is his slightly less incompetent GOP colleagues who pulled the plug on his endless fail show. I hope Issa’s successors are only slightly less incompetent, since it would take some competence at least at PR to make a convincing case for some vile scandal, which so far seems to simply not exist at all.
Betty Cracker
@jl: Or we could all kinda refuse to make eye contact with the crazy on the subway car and leave him to his lamentable fate because we’ve got more important shit to worry about. I could live with myself if YOU could…
Mike in NC
Totally seeing an image of Issa pushing a snooping reporter in front of a DC Metro train.
Suzanne
@redshirt: I’m watching in English. But Shumpert’s hair is awesome in any language.
ms_canadada
I’m watching on vipboxtv.co
My son who loves BB (but is a Warriors fan – poor child) is in LA staying with his sister, so I’m all by my lonesome cheering on the Cavs in our house in Hamilton, Ontario.
I miss our good-natured rivalry, so I opened a bottle of red.
Go CAVS!
RaflW
Since it’s an OT, this awesomeness:
rea
Ah, Sidney Blumenthal. Remember when the right discovered that he was the (then) anonymous blogger Atrios?
Sherparick
@jl: I think Issa peaked while being a thug/car thief in the early eighties and turning that knowledge into a car security business. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darrell_Issa To some extent he is the “American Self-made man – although the GI Bill and ROTC got him through College), but also proof of Balzac’s aphorism in “Pere Goirot” “Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu’il a été proprement fait,” which is often paraphrased in English to “Behind every Great Fortune is a crime.”