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Home Front: Culture Wars
Clinton campaign used Benghazi as distraction from email scandal
2016-10-12
Emails taken from the inbox of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chair, and published this week by WikiLeaks shed light on the campaign's efforts to confuse voters by blurring the lines between separate controversies over Benghazi and her private email use.

For example, one Oct. 2015 email from Oren Shur, Clinton's director of paid media, showed the campaign used a focus group to test whether voters would believe their attempts to paint the two scandals as one and the same.

"I feel like we really need to understand whether voters will believe that we can credibly conflate Benghazi and emails," Shur wrote to a group of high-level campaign aides.

Robby Mook, Clinton's campaign manager, expressed his optimism that the message could "cut through" the "crap they hear about her on the news" with the message Shur proposed for ads slated to run in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The conversations took place just weeks ahead of Clinton's highly-anticipated appearance before the House Select Committee on Benghazi, where she testified for 11 hours about her role in handling the 2012 terror attack.

Later, when pressed to explain her misstatements about the email controversy amid an expanding criminal investigation, Clinton consistently pointed to her Benghazi testimony as evidence that she had already answered for her emails.
The two controversies are unrelated.

Shur's email, which was published by WikiLeaks on Tuesday, was not the only indication that the Clinton campaign tried to make the email scandal disappear inside the Benghazi probe.

In a conversation from March of last year, Podesta told aides to steer the media's attention back to the House Benghazi investigation, which the campaign had already framed as a Republican witch hunt.
Witch hunt? You be the judge. Cold, calculating and devious, conniving and dishonest. No doubt on that one. One could almost believe the left/Dems are the enemy of all Americans (sarc).
Posted by:JohnQC

#2  When "Shadow governments" operate without transparency, WikiLeaks dumps are helpful. Podesta claims his emails were "altered" and Hillary said the Russians did the hacking. That said, I don't see a lot of people on the left denying they said what is in WikiLeaks.
Posted by: JohnQC   2016-10-12 15:55  

#1  I am beginning to see the advantages of Wikileaks.
Posted by: Bobby   2016-10-12 11:42  

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