New documents released by a federal court show President Obama called then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the night of the 2012 Benghazi attack -- but the contents are being withheld by the State Department.
It had previously been disclosed that Clinton and Obama spoke the night of the terror attacks. But the documents offer additional information about the timing of the call -- after the initial attack on the U.S. consulate, but before the second wave where mortars hit the nearby CIA annex and killed former Navy SEALs Ty Woods and Glen Doherty.
The contents of the call, however, are being withheld, not because the information is classified but because the administration claims they represent internal deliberations about the 2012 terror assault.
The claim comes as Clinton also faces accusations that she withheld Benghazi-related emails from her private server in the trove of emails handed over to the State Department.
The contents of the call were only shared with Obama's and Clinton's closest aides. Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes sent an email on the call to State Department officials Jake Sullivan and Philippe Reines, and National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan.
The email was released as part of an ongoing lawsuit by conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.
The email on the Obama-Clinton phone call bears the subject line, "Call." The text of the email says, "Readout of President's Call to Secretary Clinton," but the rest of the details are...
Radical and Communist Roots
Valerie Jarrett was born as Valerie Bowman on November 14, 1956 to American parents in Shiraz, Iran.
Her father—an American-born physician named James Bowman (1923-2011)—worked as a pathologist and geneticist at a children’s hospital in Shiraz as part of a U.S. aid program to assist developing countries. As evidenced by his lengthy FBI file, Bowman was a Communist who often collaborated with fellow Communists based in Chicago. In 1950, for instance, he communicated with a paid Soviet agent named Alfred Stern, who later fled the U.S. to Prague after being charged with espionage in 1957. Bowman was also a member of the Association of Internes and Medical Students (AIMS), a group that, according to Bowman's FBI file, engaged in un-American activities and “has long been a faithful follower of the Communist Party line.” This information is further buttressed by documents on Bowman from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which show that the FBI investigated him for his membership in a group that “follows the communist party line.” Bowman moved to Iran, where Valerie Jarrett was born, after his discharge from the Army Medical Corps in 1955.
Valerie Jarrett's mother is the early-childhood-education author Barbara Taylor Bowman (born 1928), who in 1966 co-founded a Chicago-based graduate school in child development known as the Erikson Institute, named after the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson; in 1950 Erikson became a hero to the left by choosing to resign from his professorship at the University of California rather than sign an anti-communist loyalty oath as the school required. Indicative of the Erikson Institute's radical political orientation is the fact that its board of trustees has included, in addition to Mrs. Bowman, such figures as Tom Ayers (father of the former Weather Underground terrorist and lifelong Marxist Bill Ayers) and Bernardine Dohrn (longtime wife of Bill Ayers). Bill Ayers, for his part, called Mrs. Bowman “a neighbor and friend” in his 1997 book A Kind and Just Parent, noting that his neighbors also included Louis Farrakhan and “writer Barack Obama.”
Jarrett's maternal grandfather was a Chicagoan named Robert Taylor, the first African-American head of the Chicago Housing Authority. In the 1940s he was involved with such Communist fronts as the American Peace Mobilization and the Chicago Civil Liberties Committee. Also a member of these groups was Frank Marshall Davis, the Communist journalist who in the 1970s would mentor a young Barack Obama. An FBI-file document shows that Taylor was believed to have been “in contact with [Soviet agent Alfred] Stern on a number of occasions.”
Jarrett's maternal grandmother, Dorothy Taylor, was a...
The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.
-George Orwell
