FYI, I want to let folks here know that I have published the essay below on reddit, to let folks there know about the timeline published here.

A Timeline that Shows What You Most Need to Know about Emailgate - Obama, Benghazi, Coverup, Collusion, Bribery, FBI, DOJ ...

Hopefully reddit folks will find their way here and generate some new traffic. I was so tired from creating the timeline itself, I didn't have the psychic energy to give it a good preface. I think I did a much better job below, after a good night's sleep, hopefully you agree.

I have recently published a timeline on c99p, which shows key events and WikiLeaks in a way that makes it easy to find important source material that you need to know to understand Email-gate. I wish I could say ALL of the important source material is on it, but most likely there is much that we still don't know. Please read the timeline and consider sharing it with others.

Here are a few key takeaways from the exercise of putting the timeline together:

First takeaway – do you know how the scandal actually started? Brace yourselves, liberal friends, the answer is: Benghazi. Some citizen wanted to look at official records in order to better understand what happened. In a nutshell, very few records were found for the person who was serving as America's then Secretary of State, a certain Hillary Rodham Clinton. Under “Summer 2014” in the timeline, a NYT article Hillary Clinton Asks State Department to Vet Emails for Release says,

WASHINGTON — As State Department lawyers sifted last summer through a new batch of documents related to the Benghazi attacks, they repeatedly saw something that caught their attention: emails sent to and from a personal account for Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The lawyers, according to current and former State Department officials, were working to respond to a request from a specially appointed House committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Libya. But they noticed that among the 15,000 documents they examined, there were no emails to or from an official departmental account for Mrs. Clinton.

Question: is this a problem or not? To avoid the expected partisan squabbling over that specific question, one must ask the question more generically: do American citizens have the right know the truth about the acts of any government official while they are serving us in an official capacity? Do we have a right to understand what they are actually doing? Under the Federal Records Act, the head of each federal agency is required to make and preserve records that document the work of the agency. Under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, Americans have the right to obtain those records.

In 2014, some American citizen had made a FOIA request to obtain the relevant records about Benghazi, State Department officials had been trying to respond to the FOIA request, and they noticed, hey, there aren't many documents here for Hillary. That's really strange. Why aren't there more records? As they tried to answer that question, they realized she had been using a personal email account instead of her official state.gov account. And they didn't have any way to access the emails sent and received using her personal email account.

Second key takeaway – what is the biggest horror behind Email-gate? FOIA has been shown to be a completely toothless watchdog. And that means that the right of American citizens to understand what their government is doing is not actually much of a right at all. And now, the very woman who successfully left very little trace of her official acts around Benghazi is on the verge of becoming the President of the United States and new leader of the entire free world. If she succeeds, we have every reason to believe she will also leave very little trace of her official acts as President.

To understand what citizens shall lose under a Clinton presidency, listen to the 2009 version of Obama near the time of his inauguration, when he beautifully spelled out why FOIA is so important to common American citizens: Obama: Transparency Will Be Touchstone (2:02 min) transcript
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72g7qmeP1dE]

The way to make government responsible is to hold it accountable. And the way to make government accountable is make it transparent so that the American people can know exactly what decisions are being made, how they're being made, and whether their interests are being well served.

The directives I am giving my administration today on how to interpret the Freedom of Information Act will do just that. For a long time now, there's been too much secrecy in this city. The old rules said that if there was a defensible argument for not disclosing something to the American people, then it should not be disclosed. That era is now over. Starting today, every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information but those who seek to make it known.

To be sure, issues like personal privacy and national security must be treated with the care they demand. But the mere fact that you have the legal power to keep something secret does not mean you should always use it. The Freedom of Information Act is perhaps the most powerful instrument we have for making our government honest and transparent, and of holding it accountable. And I expect members of my administration not simply to live up to the letter but also the spirit of this law.

I will also hold myself as President to a new standard of openness. Going forward, anytime the American people want to know something that I or a former President wants to withhold, we will have to consult with the Attorney General and the White House Counsel, whose business it is to ensure compliance with the rule of law. Information will not be withheld just because I say so. It will be withheld because a separate authority believes my request is well grounded in the Constitution.

Let me say it as simply as I can: Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.

These were pretty, pretty words from a shiny new president who most of us believed actually meant what he said. What is devastating is that we have learned a sad truth: Obama is simply not the man he made himself out to be in 2009. Many of us suspect that Obama took extraordinary action to help Hillary Clinton avoid being accountable for her “extremely careless” attitude toward national security. We are shocked beyond words. Worse than that, we have evidence that the man who uttered the words, “And the way to make government accountable is make it transparent so that the American people can know ... whether their interests are being well served,” has lied to the American people on at least two occasions, which raises the question: on what other occasions has he also been lying? [HINT: MAKE NO MISTAKE, TPP IS A GRAVE DANGER TO EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US IN THE MIDDLE AND LOWER CLASSES]. The idea that America is a country of laws? That has proven to be a myth. We now know the truth: America's laws apply only to the “little people” (and when TPP is enacted, the new name for those folks will be “serfs”). Why did Obama let Hillary Clinton avoid being accountable for her “extremely careless” actions? For one reason alone: his own personal self-interest. He was protecting his own behind, and is greasing the wheel to become an immensely wealthy man, just like Mr. and Mrs. Clinton. This is the tainted legacy that is actually left behind from the man who said "Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency."

Behind the scandal of Email-gate is the biggest question of all: who does America serve? The American people? Or those who hold the reigns of power?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have provided the evidence, however, examining their raw information is like drinking from a firehose. The purpose of my essay on c99 is to provide some clarity and structure to that information. Here is a sample:

A Timeline that Shows What You Most Need to Know about Emailgate - Obama, Benghazi, Coverup, Collusion, Bribery, FBI, DOJ ...

Have you been feeling overwhelmed and confused about all of the developments regarding Email-gate? If so, read on.

I have collected links to great sources of information about this scandal, and organized them into a timeline. The result is a resource that can be used to understand and remember all of the many twists and turns that have happened over the past year or so. Most of the links were found by using a feature of reddit that allows one to find the most popular items to read; they come from my favorite reddit subsites, Kossacks for Sanders and WayOfTheBern. All of the wonderful participants in both of those communities have made this document possible, so I want to give all of those folks the most sincere kind of thank you that I can. I also want to thank everyone here on c99p, your work is equally fabulous, I just didn't have enough time cycles to add your links to the inventory (but as a regular participant here, I think that many or most of these topics have been well documented and discussed here as well).

In addition, I was introduced to a wonderful, awesome and amazing site called http://www.mostdamagingwikileaks.com/. A big h/t to Sandino on c99p for telling me about this site. Some mysterious patriot has put in a ton of work to try to make sense of what has been going on, and I think they've connected many or most of the dots quite nicely (which might be the understatement of the year).

P.S. FYI, I'm considering making a "reddit" version of the timeline. That is in progress, I'm still not sure if it technically feasible for me to do or not.