Dems Rebuild

[TGHusker]

Scandals or investigations never seem to go away in DC. District Court demands State Dept to dig deeper into Benghazi emails

Court Orders State Department Probe of Clinton Aides’ Emails for Benghazi Information

 

 

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/theresa-smith/judicial-watch-court-orders-state-department-probe-clinton-aides-emails

A federal judge has ordered the State Department to expand the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi-related emails by searching the email servers of three former Clinton aides.

 

According to Judicial Watch, D.C. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta ordered the State Department to look into the email accounts of former chief of staff Cheryl Mills, former deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin and former director of policy planning Jacob Sullivan.

 

“This major court ruling may finally result in more answers about the Benghazi scandal – and Hillary Clinton’s involvement in it – as we approach the attack’s fifth anniversary,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, referring to the Sept. 11, 2012 terror attack on the U.S. Consulate in the Libyan city.

 

“It is remarkable that we had to battle both the Obama and Trump administrations to break through the State Department’s Benghazi stonewall,” he said. “Why are Secretary [of State Rex] Tillerson and Attorney General [Jeff] Sessions wasting taxpayer dollars protecting Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration?”

 

On March 4, 2015, Judicial Watch requested that the State Department release all Clinton emails involving the attack. When it did not respond, Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit on May 6, 2015.

 

On February 12, 2017, Judicial Watch asked the D.C. District Court to compel the Trump State Department to release all of emails of Clinton and her aides relating to the Benghazi attack.

 

 

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The court last week ruled in favor of Judicial Watch, saying that the State Department’s search was “inadequate” because it did not search “one record system over which it has always had control and that is almost certain to contain some responsive records: the state.gov e-mail server.”

 

The ruling said the department did not release all of Clinton’s emails because the former secretary of state used a private server “to transmit and receive work-related communications.”

 

Although Clinton’s private emails were “beyond the immediate reach of the State,” it said emails regarding Benghazi may have been sent to her aides’ state.gov email addresses.

 

“If Secretary Clinton sent an email about Benghazi to Abedin, Mills, or Sullivan at his or her state.gov email address, or if one of them sent an email to Secretary Clinton using his or her state.gov account, then State’s server presumably would have captured and stored such an email,” stated the memorandum.

 

 

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“Therefore, State has an obligation to search its own server for responsive records,” it said.

 

Elsewhere in the memorandum, the court said, “State has offered no assurance that the three record compilations it received [from Clinton and her aides], taken together, constitute the entirety of Secretary Clinton’s e-mails during the time period relevant to plaintiff’s FOIA request.”

 

“Absent such assurance, the court is unconvinced ‘beyond material doubt’ that a search of the state.gov accounts of Abedin, Mills and Sullivan is ‘unlikely to produce any marginal return.’”

 

In order to adequately complete the FOIA suit, the court therefore ordered the department to look further than the Clinton state.gov emails:

 

“Accordingly, the court finds that the State has not met its burden of establishing it performed an adequate search in response to [Judicial Watch]’s FOIA request and orders State to conduct a supplemental search of the state.gov e-mail accounts of Abedin, Mills, and Sullivan.”

 

The State Department must update the court on it progress by September 22.

[TGHusker]

Warren pushing the party to the left or perhaps confirming its already existing leftist tilt:

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/12/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-democrats-liberals.html

 

(The first few paragraphs posted here)

 

Senator Elizabeth Warren used a speech to a grass-roots conference Saturday to take direct aim at Democrats’ diminished moderate wing, ridiculing Clinton-era policies and jubilantly proclaiming that liberals had taken control of the party.

While not invoking former President Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton by name, Ms. Warren sent an unambiguous message that she believes the Clinton effort to push Democrats toward the political center should be relegated to history.

“The Democratic Party isn’t going back to the days of welfare reform and the crime bill,” she said, highlighting measures Mr. Clinton signed into law as president that are reviled by much of the left. “It is not going to happen.”

Yet Ms. Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat who is widely thought to be considering running for president in 2020, noted to about 1,000 activists here for the yearly Netroots Nation meeting that they hardly needed to worry about the party shifting to the middle as it did in the 1990s. Liberals, she said, have taken charge.

“We are not the gate-crashers of today’s Democratic Party,” Ms. Warren said, invoking a term first used to describe the liberal blogosphere that

emerged a decade ago. “We are not a wing of today’s Democratic Party. We are the heart and soul of today’s Democratic Party.”

[BigRedBuster]

I will never understand why a party that is getting their asses kicked in elections by a party that is going out into wacko land in the other direction....doesn't come more to the center.

 

You are not going to lose the wacko fringe on the left. You stand to gain a lot of voters in the middle.

[RedDenver]

I will never understand why a party that is getting their asses kicked in elections by a party that is going out into wacko land in the other direction....doesn't come more to the center.

 

You are not going to lose the wacko fringe on the left. You stand to gain a lot of voters in the middle.

That's not necessarily true.

 

First, the last few elections have shown that it's possible for the Dems to lose the vote from the left.

 

Second, it depends on where the voters who would conceivably vote for the Dems actually are. The Dems have been moving right for decades, so there's a lot of voters to the left of the party establishment. And how many voters to the right of the Dems would actually vote for them? Remember that moving right was already unsuccessfully tried, famously summarized by this Chuck Schumer quote from last year: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

[zoogs]

It's not the wacko left. It's the "non-right" left.

 

The Democrats are dominated by fiscal conservatives (the real variety), corporate interests, and war hawks. They just also aren't of the bigoted (overt or personally), isolationist, and science-denying camps. This is the fundamental tension within the Democratic Party. It's not a real leftist party, and not by a long shot. America deserves a real conversation between left and right. But until we get to that fantasy land I'll settle for trying to keep the current GOP out of power.

[Crusader Husker]

She is rallying the base and you have to run left for the party nomination. They run to the middle in general elections.

[Danny Bateman]

The Sheer Number Of Democrats Running For Congress Is A Good Sign For The Party

 

Quote

Last year, I wrote a few pieces about the numbers of candidates who had filed to run for Congress. Since 2010, there had been more Republicans than Democrats filing to run for Congress in every election cycle.

 

Ed Kilgore ran a similar analysis recently at New York Magazine, drawing from a longer time series made available by the Campaign Finance Institute. The main finding was that Democrats hold an enormous advantage in early candidate filings for the 2018 midterm elections. In particular, if we limit the analysis to the number of challengers to House incumbents who have filed for next year and have raised at least $5,000 — in an effort to narrow our sample to truly viable candidates — we see a record advantage for Democrats right now.

------

But the environment right now suggests that Republican incumbents are vulnerable. President Trump’s approval ratings are in the mid-30s, even amid a strong economy, and it’s hard to see how the environment will improve much for the GOP by next year. And one way Democrats have been responding to Trump’s various norm violations is by running for office.

 

Of the 237 House challengers who raised at least $5,000 for the 2018 midterms by the end of June, 209 of them (88 percent) are Democrats. If we were to plug that into the regression line above, it suggests Democrats would pick up 93 House seats. This figure seems highly improbable given the number of seats that are actually competitive, as Kilgore and Kyle Kondik note. But it does suggest strong potential gains for the Democrats next year.

 

Of course, it’s still early, and the people who went to rallies last January and said “Hell yes, I’m running for Congress!” might ask “What was I thinking?” by the time next January rolls around. And it’s hard to know just what the political system will look like by this time next year given the rapid pace of events lately. But indicators thus far suggest a strong year for the Democrats.

 

Here is the regression line they were talking about. They plotted the Democratic share of early, well-funded candidates vs. the number of seats they picked up in that election cycle. A higher share has a very strong relationship to higher seats picked up.

 

[TGHusker]

Moderate Dems fire back at Warren.  The struggle in the party continues as they decide what and who will be the dominate voice.

 

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/347012-centrist-dems-push-back-on-warren

 

 

beginning paragraphs

Moderate Democrats are pushing back at Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) view that progressives have taken control of the party. 

“We can't win the House back with progressives running in swing states,” said former Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), a surrogate for Hillary Clinton who is leading the “Fight Back California” super PAC aimed at winning back seven House seats in the Golden State.

Interviews with Democratic strategists, donors and organizers from across the country reveal deep disagreement with Warren’s premise that progressives make up the “heart and soul” of the Democratic Party

[zoogs]

Ugh, what a quote.

[RedDenver]

3 hours ago, TGHusker said:

Moderate Dems fire back at Warren.  The struggle in the party continues as they decide what and who will be the dominate voice.

 

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/347012-centrist-dems-push-back-on-warren

 

 

beginning paragraphs

Moderate Democrats are pushing back at Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) view that progressives have taken control of the party. 

“We can't win the House back with progressives running in swing states,” said former Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), a surrogate for Hillary Clinton who is leading the “Fight Back California” super PAC aimed at winning back seven House seats in the Golden State.

Interviews with Democratic strategists, donors and organizers from across the country reveal deep disagreement with Warren’s premise that progressives make up the “heart and soul” of the Democratic Party

Really hard to take the Clinton surrogates seriously.

[zoogs]

Oh, they're serious. Dems get the leftists by default but are fundamentally a quite conservative party.

[Danny Bateman]

Is "We should run more moderate candidates in more conservative districts" a fringe position now?

[RedDenver]

6 minutes ago, zoogs said:

Oh, they're serious. Dems get the leftists by default by are fundamentally a quite conservative party.

I know they're serious. What I mean is that I have trouble taking the Clinton surrogates seriously. The Clinton campaign was incompetent on so many levels that when I hear a political position taken by any of them, I generally assuming they're wrong.

[Danny Bateman]

If you remove your bias against Clinton-associated persons, running progressives in red districts is generally inadvisable.

[RedDenver]

1 minute ago, dudeguyy said:

Is "We should run more moderate candidates in more conservative districts" a fringe position now?

The new thought is that the more conservative districts aren't so much conservative as anti-establishment and that progressive positions can actually do better in those districts than "moderate" Dems. And there's some evidence to support this idea since many progressive/liberal policies poll well.

 

So it's more challenge the idea of what a "conservative district" actually means.

3 minutes ago, dudeguyy said:

If you remove your bias against Clinton-associated persons, running progressives in red districts is generally inadvisable.

That remains to be seen. The Republican party isn't well-liked even among Republican voters.