05/21/15

What Does Blumenthal Know About Obama?

It appears that Hillary Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal has a network of military and intelligence connections that made him anathema to the Obama White House. Blumenthal must know something about Obama that kept him from getting a State Department job under Hillary.

Congress has the power to compel Blumenthal to testify in public about how he collected intelligence information on Obama and other matters for the use of Mrs. Clinton, before and during the time she was Secretary of State.

The New York Times reports that when Clinton was Secretary of State, she used Blumenthal as an unofficial adviser and sent his memos to “senior diplomatic officials” about such topics as Libya. Blumenthal’s contacts included Clinton friends, a private military contractor and one former CIA spy, among others, the paper said. It appears some of them were trying to do business in Libya.

The CIA spy was identified as Tyler Drumheller, described by the paper as “a colorful former Central Intelligence Agency official.”

In the course of reporting this information, the Times said that Blumenthal “had been barred from a State Department job by aides to President Obama…” But why? This question goes unanswered.

It might have something to do with how Blumenthal gained access to information and who else might have gotten access to the same information.

As the Times notes, it appears that the Romanian hacker known as “Guccifer” breached Blumenthal’s email account and discovered correspondence he sent to Mrs. Clinton. Some of this material had to do with business in Libya. A story about this correspondence ran in Gawker and Pro Publica under the headline, “Leaked Private Emails Reveal Ex-Clinton Aide’s Secret Spy Network.” The story said that some of the memos were marked “confidential” and relied in many cases on “sensitive” sources inside the Libyan opposition, in addition to Western intelligence and security services.

The publication Slate has a series of questions that need to be asked of Hillary about Blumenthal, his relationship with Hillary, and his controversial connections.

One of the proposed questions: “Did you ever consider hiring Sidney Blumenthal as an employee in your State Department? And, if so, did the Obama administration block such a move, as has been reported? Did the White House know that he provided you with unofficial advice nonetheless?”

Again, the question is why the Obama White House reportedly blocked Blumenthal from working in the State Department.

I think we know the answer, and it has nothing to do with business in Libya or anywhere else: Blumenthal had the goods on Obama’s mysterious past and controversial communist connections that made him susceptible to blackmail by foreign agents and interests.

When Hillary Clinton was running against Barack Obama for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, Blumenthal was acting as a Hillary adviser and circulated a memorandum about Obama’s communist connections. The political left was shocked.

In a May 9, 2008 column in The Huffington Post, Peter Dreier, the E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics at Occidental College in California, complained that Blumenthal had “circulated an article taken from the fervently hard-right AIM website” that was entitled, “Obama’s Communist Mentor.” I was the author.

This was, of course, the column about Obama’s relationship with Communist Party operative Frank Marshall Davis.

The column was completely accurate, but Dreier tried his best to play down the revelations. He wrote:

“The Kincaid article that Blumenthal circulated sought to discredit Obama by linking him to an African-American poet and writer whom Obama knew while he was in high school in Hawaii. That writer, Frank Marshall Davis, was, Kincaid wrote, a member of the Communist Party. Supported by no tangible evidence, Kincaid claimed that Obama considered his relationship to Davis to be ‘almost like a son.’ In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama wrote about meeting, during his teenage years, a writer named ‘Frank’ who ‘had some modest notoriety once’ and with whom he occasionally discussed poetry and politics. From this snippet, Kincaid weaves an incredulous tale that turns Davis into Obama’s ‘mentor.’”

It appears that Dreier was only one among many on the left who received this information, but he was the only person who went public and attempted to discredit it.

Notice how Dreier attempts to play down the substantial evidence of the relationship by using terms like “no tangible evidence” and an “incredulous tale.” At the same time, Dreier was astonished that “a self-professed liberal operative like Blumenthal” had been circulating “anti-Obama attacks” from “highly-ideological and militant right-wing sources.”

It must not have occurred to Dreier that the information being distributed by Blumenthal was accurate and had been verified by Hillary’s associates. It would appear that Blumenthal had the connections necessary to verify that kind of information—and perhaps to add some more important details to it.

Blumenthal’s contacts included that “colorful” former CIA spy, Tyler Drumheller, who “served as the CIA’s top spy—the division chief for the Directorate of Operations (DO)—in Europe until he retired in 2005.” It’s safe to say that Drumheller was well-positioned to have knowledge of intelligence operations throughout the world, then and now.

Considering that we now know that Blumenthal had military and intelligence connections, it is likely that Blumenthal had the information about Obama’s communist connections in Hawaii and Chicago checked out and verified. He would have concluded that the Davis connection to Obama was enough to disqualify the then-senator from Illinois from the White House.

Dreier used the terms “fervently hard-right” and “highly-ideological and militant right-wing sources,” in order to discredit the information. But the original revelation about Davis came from a left-wing source, Marxist historian Gerald Horne. He had spilled the beans about Obama’s mentor “Frank” being Frank Marshall Davis, a notorious communist with a 600-page FBI file.

The Davis material circulated by Blumenthal was just one tidbit of negative material that Dreier says had been circulating against Obama almost every day over a six-month period during the 2008 campaign, This material, he complained, “attacks Obama’s character, political views, electability, and real or manufactured associations.”

It looks like Blumenthal recognized that the Frank Marshall Davis relationship to Obama was real political dynamite and something that could sink the candidate. If Blumenthal had confirmed all of this—and he might have even had more damaging information—we have to wonder whether the information was obtained by others for possible use as blackmail material against Obama. After all, if a Romanian hacker got access to some of the more sensitive material, it seems at least possible that it was made available to others.

The additional question is why Hillary never used the damaging information against Obama. The answer to that, quite clearly, is that Obama made a deal with Hillary so she could become his Secretary of State. That part of the deal went forward, but when Hillary said she wanted to bring Blumenthal into the State Department as her trusted adviser, somebody in the Obama White House rejected that outright. Hillary may have been told that her job at State was for the taking if she would keep Blumenthal under control. She had to have known that Blumenthal was involved in circulating information about the Obama-Davis connection, since The Huffington Post had publicized it.

Hillary continued to use Blumenthal in an unofficial capacity, collecting information and intelligence on Libya and perhaps many other sensitive topics. Did she use this secret spy network to gather intelligence on Obama himself? That question is far more important than whether Blumenthal had friends who did business in Libya.

The New York Times reported that Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, planned to subpoena Blumenthal, “for a private transcribed interview.” Reuters now reports that the subpoena has been served, demanding that Blumenthal appear before the House committee on June 3 to give a deposition.

Under no circumstances, however, should this be conducted in private and behind closed doors. The American people are entitled to hear the truth in an open and public setting.

What did Blumenthal know about Obama? And when did he know it?

05/3/15

The Continuity of Government – The Mystery of Peters Mountain

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton
Hat Tip: Trapper Pettit

A friend sent me an article from Zero Hedge that I find intriguing and it raises far more questions than answers.

I did not know that there was something called a PreparAthon held by FEMA on April 30th. Did you? Supposedly the nationwide drills are for – get this – the catastrophic consequences of global warming. Right. Sure it is. I suspect that propagandic line is for the rubes, when in fact what the feds fear the most is an EMP attack or a massive cyber attack. DHS was just all abuzz over this drill evidently.

But what caught my attention, was the movement and inclusion of activities around a real underground bunker north of Charlottesville, Virginia on Peters Mountain. This not-so-secret bunker may just be the hidey-hole for feds and our nation’s intelligence operations when the Schumer hits the fan. It is the perfect bunker to protect those elitists and power mongers that matter, while everyday America devolves into barbarity and the die-off begins.

Meanwhile, FEMA and DHS held their PreparAthon aimed at severe weather events due to climate change. Talk about a massive waste of money… unless of course those exercises provide cover for drills for threats of a much more serious and dire nature. Preparations for continuity of government and all that entails once the barbarians breach our gates for real.

Would it surprise anyone that the government was stocking their bunkers and preparing for the worst? With nationwide riots, escalating nuclear threats, imminent global war, ISIS terrorist cells planted in every state, the growing threat of crippling cyber attacks and the all too real EMP catastrophe looming, it’s a virtual certainty that the government is preparing to save their own and ensure that they can continue to rule the roost even if the roost is devastated.

These massive preparations include our intelligence agencies – can’t go on existing without spies, now can we? I first learned of Peters Mountain from author and friend, Trapper Pettit and his fantastic book The Osprey Vendetta. Hugely entertaining, but aside from a great read, Peters Mountain was woven into the storyline in that series of books as well.

For the very first time this year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence made public that it would partake in the PreparAthon employing something vaguely named the National Intelligence Emergency Management Activity (NIEMA). The Director of National Intelligence merely describes NIEMA as providing “the framework, platforms, and systems to enable the Director of National Intelligence to lead an integrated and resilient [intelligence community] enterprise capable of sustaining the ‘intelligence cycle’ under any crisis or consequence management event, both at our headquarters and at our alternate operating locations.” Peters Mountain anyone? I highly doubt the DNI is shaking in his spiffy boots over climate change – but there is a whole host of real threats overshadowing the US that make preparation and fortification of utmost importance to spooks.

From Zero Hedge:

But job descriptions, contracting documents, insider resumes, and furtive discussions with Washington sources reveal that this little-known “activity” is a $100-million-a-year disaster playpen. At its 24/7/365 Response Operations Center (at a classified location), watch officers provide what’s referred to as “situational awareness and crisis support” to the nation’s leaders; and when that fails, they evacuate to their classified alternate facility, which sources say is in Albemarle County in central Virginia.

There is really only one candidate—a mysterious facility atop Peters Mountain, roughly 16 miles east of Charlottesville—and it’s undergone a $61 million plus renovation since 2007.

What follows are some intriguing photos of Peters Mountain. This is property owned by AT&T, but it is government land. Oh, so many questions there… Not only has AT&T leaked our private conversations and information to the government, they are fully in bed with them as this would seem to most certainly attest to. On top of the mountain, on a helicopter pad, is the AT&T logo for the world and Google to see.

The plot of land is strangely listed as “vacant residential land” of no value. However, it does belong to AT&T. Land with no value that has had 10’s of millions of dollars of improvements over the last several years. Hmmmm.

Zero Hedge points out that the building permits submitted since 2007 amount to $61,124,583.00 for interior and exterior alterations, including the building of the helicopter pad, a new bunker entrance, “alteration to interior spaces” and installation of two new satellite dishes.

I would say it is safe to assume that this property is something ‘other’ than residential and houses something deep inside. Why else would you need a bunker entrance? There are also a number of other buildings on the property along with a rather large parking lot. Just what is AT&T and the government up to?

Google and Bing each have satellite views of the mountain top, showing the same structures and the progress of construction since 2007. And I find these pictures just fascinating. On the right hand side you can see the parking lot and the bunker entrance. The two large building like structures could be air purification installments and ventilation. Just a guess. The structure must be buried deep within the mountain to protect from bombing etc. Dirt is an excellent protector. Although it doesn’t sport an outwardly military appearance, it reeks of it.

The two large structures on top of the mountain, to the left of the helicopter pad, are assumed to be vent stacks and hardened power and communications antennae. Two satellite dishes added after 9/11 are also now apparent, suggesting autonomous and enduring communications. Starting to get that ‘military’ feel yet?

Consider the Mormon’s Granite Mountain Vault for document storage and how massive that is. You might also want to consider Perpetual Storage Inc.’s vault in Utah as well, which houses computer equipment, digital records, etc. Neither of these are set up as actual living bunkers. The scale inside Peters Mountain must be massive to provide for human living, food storage and growth, waste elimination, supplies of water and electricity, computer processing, medical provisions, defense provisions, etc. for hundreds, if not thousands, of people

There is nothing that refers to NIEMA, the DNI or the intelligence community on record in that county. But of all the places that could hold hardened fortification, Peters Mountain more than fits the bill. Sources, according to Zero Hedge and Gawker, describe the national Warning, Alert and Mobilization System (WAMS) which would alert a select group of civilian executives from across the intelligence community to deploy to the bunker. The alert would come from “The Communicator” Automated Notification System and would take two forms: alerts for everyone and alerts for the “core” participants. Because Washington is notorious for traffic congestion, those so-called core participants, those who have to move away from Washington within minutes of notification, would congregate and board helicopters which would take them to the bunker.

Gawker even sent a driver to go up the road on the mountain. But when he encountered a “Road Closed – No Trespassing – Private Property” sign, he decided he would go no further. I guess he didn’t want to be shot or arrested.

It appears to me that exercises at this bunker occur frequently and that along with Mount Weather, Raven Rock and the Olney bunkers, it’s stocked, primed and ready at a moment’s notice for those who would be fortunate enough to be invited in should the very worst happen.

Yep, I know this is the stuff of conspiracy theories… but ask yourself, with everything that is happening in America, do you honestly believe our government isn’t providing an escape plan for our so-called select leaders? Peters Mountain raises far more questions with me than answers. But the aerial footage is pretty self-explanatory to an extent and even their work permits specified a ‘bunker entrance.’ It doesn’t get much more obvious than that.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who has looked around and has noticed the government buying up food and weaponry, as well as supplies, etc. I keep wondering why the hurry? Do they know something we don’t? Why is the Fed fortifying its building in Chicago? And the kicker… NORAD just returned to Cheyenne Mountain. In a refreshing twist, NORAD comes right out and says it is because of the EMP threat.

From NewsMax:

“Why the return?” write Henry F. Cooper and Peter Vincent Pry. “Because the enormous bunker in the hollowed-out mountain, built to survive a Cold War-era nuclear conflict, can also resist an electromagnetic-pulse attack, or EMP.”

While the Pentagon is moving to shield its global air defense command from being knocked out by an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack, the Obama administration has failed to act on urgent recommendations to protect the country’s civilian electronic infrastructure from a similar catastrophe, they write.

“An EMP strike, most likely from the detonation of a nuclear weapon in space, would destroy unprotected military and civilian electronics nationwide, blacking out the electric grid and other critical infrastructure for months or years,” Cooper and Pry write.

“The staggering human cost of such a catastrophic attack is not difficult to imagine.”

The likeliest source of such an attack would be North Korea or Iran, according to Cooper, former director of the Strategic Defense Initiative, launched by the late President Ronald Reagan, and Pry, executive director of the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security and a veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Iran is a nuclear-ready state with ballistic missiles capable of striking the United States now, Cooper, Pry and and two other Reagan administration alumni wrote in an op-ed for Newsmax in February.

In the Journal, Cooper and Pry reiterate that “Iran should be regarded as already having nuclear missiles capable of making an EMP attack against the U.S.,” noting, “Iran and North Korea have successfully orbited satellites on South-Polar trajectories that appear to practice evading U.S. missile defenses, and at optimum altitudes to make a surprise EMP attack.”

So, consider this… if the military fears an EMP from Iran (or Russia or China) and is prepping like hell for it, why is our President striking deals with them? That’s treasonous in my book. These same leaders who make fun of bloggers warning on the power grid and its vulnerabilities and preppers who preach preparedness, are the same leaders who won’t harden the electric grid and take it off the Internet where it is vulnerable, while prepping bunkers where they can run to when it all goes south. Sounds to me as if the elitists are all for the continuity of government and the fall of America… right into the clutches of a global government construct.

03/11/15

Hillary’s Emailgate Explained

By: Bethany Stotts
Accuracy in Media

Exclusive to Accuracy in Media.

Clinton’s 2016 presidential chances undoubtedly have been harmed by the revelation that she exclusively used a private email address while serving as Secretary of State. But while the media remain mired in calculations about whether Mrs. Clinton can survive this latest crisis, and who the villains are in this unfolding story, additional questions call out for answers.

Mrs. Clinton made many claims at her press conference on Tuesday. The media shouldn’t simply regurgitate them wholesale, as the AP has done, but rather they should approach them with due skepticism.

“Well, the system we used was set up for President Clinton’s office, and it had numerous safeguards,” said Mrs. Clinton. “It was on property guarded by the Secret Service and there were no security breaches. So, I think that the use of that server, which started with my husband, certainly proved to be effective and secure.”

In contrast, Philip Bump reports for The Washington Post that the domain, clintonemail.com, was established “the same day that Clinton’s confirmation hearings began before the Senate.” That is suspicious timing for a system allegedly set up to support her husband’s office.

The professional assessment by security experts quoted in the media seems to be that Mrs. Clinton’s private email was vulnerable to hacking. “The system could have previously been hardened against attack, and left to get weedy and vulnerable after she left government,” writes Sam Biddle for Gawker. “We don’t know. … With Clinton’s off-the-books scheme, there are only questions.”

“We can only go by what Clinton says,” reports USA Today.

Mrs. Clinton told the press that she had set up the account for both private and work-related emails to avoid the inconvenience of having to set up two phones and two separate accounts, but that, in retrospect, she should have thought better about it. She offered few answers about the actual details of her server, and avoided questions about whether she would subject it to independent analysis, asserting that she had done her full duty by turning over 30,490 vetted emails to the State Department.

There were about 60,000 emails in total, she said—but after the private vetting process, controlled by her and her advisors, she has since deleted the private ones. “At the end I chose not to keep my private personal emails—emails about planning Chelsea’s wedding, or my mother’s funeral arrangements, condolence notes to friends, as well as yoga routines, family vacations—the other things you typically find in inboxes,” she said. Yet the Select Committee on Benghazi’s Chair Trey Gowdy indicated that no emails have been turned over to Congress covering the duration of her 2011 trip to Libya.

Mrs. Clinton apparently expects the media to swallow whole the argument that all her emails on that trip regarded personal affairs.

What can be established at this juncture is depressingly disturbing for national security.

“…security experts consulted by Gawker have laid out a litany of potential threats that may have exposed [Mrs. Clinton’s] email conversations to potential interception by hackers and foreign intelligence agencies,” writes Biddle. This, despite Mrs. Clinton’s assertion that there were no breaches.

Problems identified by Biddle’s sources include that the URL log-in was accessible by anyone in the world, and could have been linked to an “administrative console interface to the Windows machine or a backup,” allowing the possibility that Mrs. Clinton’s emails could have been copied in their entirety by hackers. And, as of March, reports Biddle, “the server at sslvpn has an invalid SSL certificate.” Without a valid SSL certificate there is no third-party indicating that the key is still good, and not hacked.

“An exact physical address could not be determined” for the server, but Internet records indicate that it’s in Chappaqua, New York, reported Bloomberg News.

The server, as of March 4, was on “factory default for the security appliance” when it could have been “replaced by a unique certificate purchased for a few hundred dollars,” making it vulnerable to hacking, it reports.

But, the paper hedges, “While Clinton didn’t have a classified e-mail system, she had multiple ways of communicating in a classified manner, including assistants printing documents for her, secure phone calls and secure video conferences.”

Similarly, Mrs. Clinton asserted at the press conference that she never sent classified information through her private email.

It is not necessary to reveal classified information directly to jeopardize national security or the international diplomatic process. As Thomas Patrick Carroll, formerly of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Operations, explained in 2001 for the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, “classification usually has relatively little to do with the information itself, but a lot to do with the protection of sources and methods.” His given example was how a foreign minister’s personal assistant might have a private conversation with that minister and obtain “the minister’s private observations on the matter,” later relaying this to U.S. intelligence for their exploitation. These types of inside observations prove invaluable for all foreign intelligence services.

If Mrs. Clinton’s email was hacked, then foreign governments such as Iran, China, Russia, and others, might have gained access to her private internal musings about diplomatic talks as she worked out the details with her staff—an intelligence treasure trove.

One must also ask, if Mrs. Clinton refused to set up a government email, how high was that refusal relayed? If it wasn’t relayed to the very top by security specialists, then why not?

Mrs. Clinton was sworn in on January 21, 2009. A couple months after she took office, in March of 2009, the University of Toronto and TheSecDevGroup issued their report on Ghostnet, a cyberespionage network established by an unknown party to mine data from the Tibetans. They found “real-time evidence of malware that had penetrated Tibetan computer systems” which was connected to a large network of 1,295 infected computers in 103 countries—almost 30 percent of which were high-value targets such as ministries of foreign affairs.

The authors of the report found “that GhostNet is capable of taking full control of infected computers, including searching and downloading specific files, and covertly operating attached devices, including microphones and web cameras,” and was sent through “contextually relevant emails” that look like real emails.

Granted, the mechanism of action for Ghostnet would not have been the same as that which could have compromised the server that Mrs. Clinton was using. But few can claim ignorance about the degree of threat posed by the use of insecure systems at the time.

The Ghostnet network compromised computers at the “ministries of foreign affairs of Iran, Bangladesh, Latvia, Indonesia, Philippines, Brunei, Barbados and Bhutan; embassies of India, South Korea, Indonesia, Romania, Cyprus, Malta, Thailand, Taiwan, Portugal, Germany and Pakistan.”

Even if the Obama administration’s appointees lacked the know-how to anticipate cyber threats when they took office, they were undoubtedly immediately educated about the dangers by the government’s more knowledgeable members. Bob Gates, the former Director of Central Intelligence, and later Defense Secretary under Obama, commented in his 2014 book, Duty, that “A number of the new appointees, both senior and junior, seemed to lack an awareness of the world they had just entered.” He noticed that “fully half” of those in the Situation Room had their “cell phones turned on during the meeting, potentially broadcasting everything that was said to foreign intelligence electronic eavesdroppers” and he ensured that such behavior stopped.

The Ghostnet story made page A1 of the New York Times in March 2009. Can this administration really claim innocence about the security threats posed by an insecure, private email server when Clinton served as Secretary of State? How much did President Obama know, and when?

It now appears that the Obama administration received questions from Gawker’s John Cook about the ramifications of Clinton’s private email use back in 2013. The Obama administration has likely spent at least those two years—if not much longer—covering for Mrs. Clinton. Her press conference to explain her exclusive use of private email fails to satisfy, and the press should continue demanding answers until this presidential hopeful provides some real ones.

03/10/15

Obama and Hillary: What Did They Know, and When Did They Know It?

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

The latest revelations about Hillary Clinton’s use of private emails while Secretary of State for the Obama administration have proven “politically problematic,” and invited discomfort by some of her fellow Democrats, possibly encouraging other ambitious Democratic hopefuls to contend for the presidential primary, according to some in the media.

By defining the problem as just “political,” these reporters can cast the issue as one dividing political parties to distract from the pressing issues of the day. This media frenzy works in the Obama administration’s favor. “…why did Hillary Clinton become the Obama administration’s bête noire this very week…? questions Lee Smith writing for Tablet Magazine. Perhaps because Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent speech before Congress reflected badly on the administration’s plan for an Iran deal. “This week’s tarring of Hillary Clinton is part of the White House’s political campaign to shut off debate about its hoped-for deal,” he asserts.

Smith’s suspicions are raised by the fact that Gawker’s John Cook emailed then-deputy White House press secretary Josh Earnest, now White House press secretary, about the issue of Clinton’s private email account back in 2013—two years ago!

Yet on Saturday, President Barack Obama told CBS News’ Bill Plante in an interview that he learned about Mrs. Clinton’s private email system at “The same time everybody else learned it through news reports,” much like he claims to have learned about so many others of his scandals.

The most recent claim apparently didn’t stand up to common sense scrutiny. After all, one needed only to ask if the President and Secretary of State hadn’t exchanged emails for years. On Monday Josh Earnest told the press that President Obama and Secretary Clinton had exchanged emails, that the President had noticed the private address, and that “The point that the President was making is not that he didn’t know Secretary Clinton’s email address… But he was not aware of the details of how that email address and that server had been set up or how Secretary Clinton and her team were planning to comply with the Federal Records Act.” Yeah, that’s the ticket.

But few in the media seem to be asking about who actually saw Cook’s email back in 2013. Either the White House has known about the potential political fallout for years, or someone failed to pass the word up the chain of command.

Some members of the media prefer to view this latest scandal, like so many others, as some sort of right-wing conspiracy, with conservatives out to get Mrs. Clinton. Michael Tomasky of The Daily Beast stubbornly refuses to define this growing debacle as a “scandal,” writing instead, “If she does become president, the right is going to be gunning for her from Day One, sniffing around for impeachable offenses from the second she takes the oath.” This implies, again, that opposition to Clinton’s lack of transparency is rooted in politics and ideology, as if real outrage were impossible or unjustified.

It’s not just the right this time, with people like Ruth Marcus, Mark Halperin, Mika Brzezinski, Maureen Dowd and Ron Fournier also taking Hillary to task. It’s enough to suggest a different conspiracy theory: that the left wants to dump Hillary for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), or someone they believe would be more electable, and more to their liking.

And while some in the media may have tacitly admitted that there is already blood in the proverbial water, and that Clinton may see greater challenges coming from other candidates, the narrative persists that the Select Committee on Benghazi was established simply to damage Mrs. Clinton. So the villain in this growing scandal, for Clinton acolytes, is not Clinton herself. It is, instead, the Select Committee on Benghazi, which apparently had known about her multiple private email accounts since at least last summer, according to National Review’s Andy McCarthy.

“The panel’s Republican House members are seizing on the revelations regarding Clinton’s private e-mail domain to expand their committee’s mandate, delay Clinton’s testimony and extend their investigation indefinitely,” write Josh Rogin and Eli Lake for Bloomberg. Similarly, Tomasky writes that “… it smells like the Times may have been rolled by the Republican staff of the Benghazi panel. And hey, great work by them and Chairman Trey Gowdy to use the nation’s leading liberal newspaper in this way.”

Mrs. Clinton and President Barack Obama were some of the main decision-makers during the 2012 Benghazi attacks, and have always dominated the heart of the Benghazi scandal—as inconvenient as this may be for some in the media.

The media are, once again, accusing the Republicans on the Select Committee of engaging in run-away politicking during an election season. “Republican Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy has insisted he wants his investigation to be impartial, not to be partisan nor about Hillary Clinton personally,” reports The Daily Beast. “But the pull of conservatives clamoring for answers regarding the scandal has focused the committee’s attention on the presumptive front-runner for the Democratic nomination.”

These politicized assessments ignore and minimize the valid security and transparency concerns raised by Clinton’s exclusive use of a private email account during her entire term as Secretary. But the lack of transparency revealed by this latest Clinton scandal demonstrates that Mrs. Clinton has a problem with humility, and as “heir apparent” for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination may have internalized a feeling of invincibility—as if she is above public accountability and standards of conduct.

The additional debate about fairness to Mrs. Clinton in The New York Times reporting also ignores the larger, overlooked picture: the Obama administration’s culpability in enabling Mrs. Clinton’s behavior. In cases where Clinton’s email was requested by citizens’ groups and news reporters, “the State Department acknowledged receipt of the [Freedom of Information Act] requests and assigned case numbers but did not produce any of the requested documents,” The New York Times reported.

According to the Associated Press, the State Department “never suggested that it didn’t possess all her emails” when the A.P. requested records more than a year ago. That is a scandal in and of itself.

To put it mildly, the fact that there were no records to produce from Mrs. Clinton’s service until this recent date likely proved politically convenient for the administration, and provides further evidence of a government cover-up on Benghazi. Now-public records have already demonstrated Mrs. Clinton’s guilty knowledge about the attacks. Her pro-active attempts at concealing her communications through the use of a private email server have already been thwarted by the Freedom of Information Act.

The newly released Judicial Watch emails documenting correspondence sent to Cheryl Mills (then-Chief of Staff to Sec. Clinton), Jacob Sullivan (then-Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy), and Joseph McManus (then-Hillary Clinton’s Executive Assistant) provided ample evidence that Mrs. Clinton had guilty knowledge of the nature of the terrorist attack in Benghazi as early as a half an hour after the attack.

“Also littered throughout the State Department emails, obtained by conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, are references to a so-called Benghazi Group,” reports Catherine Herridge for Fox News. “A diplomatic source told Fox News that was code inside the department for the so-called Cheryl Mills task force, whose job was damage control.”

And as I have previously reported, the President was told this was an attack by terrorists—not the result of a spontaneous demonstration that got out of control—by his military advisors on September 11, 2012, shortly after the attacks began.

Mrs. Clinton has now requested her emails’ public release, and may hold a press conference in the next several days, according to Politico. Perhaps it was the ridicule from Saturday Night Live that convinced her to speak up, or the sting from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) on Meet the Press calling on Hillary to come clean if she expects to be the party’s standard bearer. But the process of releasing her emails could take months, according to Reuters, which reports that “The email controversy could intensify long-standing Republican criticism of Clinton’s transparency and ethics.”

Clinton’s request to make her emails public should be treated with urgency, and may yet yield additional information regarding the Benghazi attacks and other administration policies during her time as Secretary. But in a real sense it may not matter now whether the State Department actually releases this set of emails, as they were first vetted by Clinton’s advisers. One must ask: What did these advisers choose to omit?

The media shouldn’t be fooled by these “latest [Clinton] efforts to demonstrate transparency” if they are designed to conceal politically damaging material from the public while appearing to be open and fair. Neither should they accept platitudes from Mrs. Clinton if and when she does hold her press conference. But in an even greater sense, the media spotlight shouldn’t be on Mrs. Clinton—it should be on President Obama. What did he know, and when did he know it?