Gowdy screws the pooch left and right
by digby
House Benghazi Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy appears to have accidentally released the name of a CIA source in the midst of a back-and-forth with Democrats about how sensitive the information was and whether its presence in former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email account constituted a security breach.
The email posted Sunday on the panel’s website included in one instance the name of Mousa Kousa, a former Libyan government spy chief and foreign minister. The name appeared to have been redacted in several other instances, but was included in a subject line of a forwarded email.
The redacted email was released at Gowdy’s direction “so the American people could decide for themselves regarding concerns about sources and methods,” the Benghazi committee said in a statement. The committee replaced the document online Monday morning with another version in which Kousa’s name does not appear.
[…]
The top Democrat on the Benghazi panel, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, revealed Sunday morning that the CIA had not requested the deletion of the source’s name and did not consider the information classified. Cummings said the CIA’s stance undercut Gowdy’s earlier claim that Clinton had endangered national security by having such information on her private server and by forwarding the message to one of her aides.In Gowdy’s response Sunday, he said he was committed to protecting the source’s identity, even if the CIA was not.
It’s just so.. ridiculous.
The article does point out that the name was also redacted by the state department, but fails to mention that the State Department claims it was for personal privacy reasons not because it was classified.
Meanwhile, just to add to the craziness, there’s this from Alabama congressman Mo Brooks:
“In my judgement, with respect to Hillary Clinton, she will be a unique president if she is elected by the public next November,” he added. “Because the day she’s sworn in is the day that she’s subject to impeachment because she has committed high crimes and misdemeanors.”
We are so far down the rabbit hole now we don’t know which end is up.
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