"June 15, 2015 -- House Republicans probing the 2012 Benghazi attacks are turning their attention to a figure from Hillary Clinton's past as the Democratic frontrunner tries to sell voters on her ideas about the future.

"On Tuesday, the GOP-led Select Committee on Benghazi will hold a closed-door, hours-long deposition of Sidney Blumenthal that will focus on the longtime Clinton family ally's email exchanges with Clinton about Libya while she was secretary of State.

"'Establishing the facts surrounding the large number of emails regarding Libya sent by Mr. Blumenthal to former Secretary Clinton is why he has been called to appear before the committee,' a committee aide said.

"On the eve of the deposition, the Benghazi panel's GOP Chairman Trey Gowdy said that Blumenthal had provided the committee with about 120 new pages of his emails with Clinton. The messages were not included in the Clinton-Blumenthal emails that the State Department had already provided to the committee months ago, he said."

"The Internal Revenue Service found 6,400 more Lois Lerner emails -- but they're not handing them over in court.

"The IRS' latest excuses are nothing short of infuriating.

"Department of Justice lawyers Geoffrey J. Klimas and Stephanie Sasarak, acting as counsel for the IRS, submitted a U.S. District Court filing June 12 in the case Judicial Watch v. Internal Revenue Service. The court filing, provided to The Daily Caller, claims the IRS received new Lerner emails from the Treasury Department's inspector general (TIGTA) but can't fork over the emails to Judicial Watch, a nonprofit group suing to get the emails. Why? Because the IRS is busy making sure that none of the emails are duplicates - you know, so as not to waste anyone's time.

"However, the inspector general already made sure that none of the emails were duplicates, so the IRS' latest excuse falls flat."

"Declaring that Republican-controlled states have 'systematically and deliberately' tried to 'disempower and disenfranchise' voters, Hillary Clinton has called for a sweeping expansion of federal involvement in elections. In a speech last week in Houston, laying out what promises to be a major campaign theme, Mrs. Clinton called for automatic voter registration at age 18, a 20-day early-voting period and a maximum 30-minute wait period to vote.

"She has also endorsed the idea of a federal law permitting convicted felons to vote and allowing individuals, such as students, who reside in one state to vote in another. All of these federal mandates would augment and make more onerous an unconstitutional election-regulating federal statute known as the 'Motor Voter' law enacted during her husband's White House tenure.

"A federal takeover of election laws -- and rolling back state voter-ID laws intended to discourage election fraud -- is a high priority for progressives. The billionaire financier George Soros reportedly has pledged $5 million to bankroll legal challenges to laws like those that Mrs. Clinton decries. Part of the effort is intended simply to galvanize the Democratic base by stoking a sense of grievance, but the strategy should be taken seriously -- and rebutted as unconstitutional."

"The National Commission on Presidential Debates recently invited Americans to suggest topics for the 2016 presidential debates. The commission is sure to receive thousands of proposals, but it should devote an entire debate to government reform. Why? Trust in the federal government has slumped to near-record lows, moving far beyond healthy skepticism toward a crisis of confidence. Whoever wins this 'FixTrust' debate could have an inside track to the presidency.

"According to a 2010 Pew Research Center poll, 74% of Americans rated the federal bureaucracy as only fair or poor in running its programs. In another Pew poll in January 2014, 75% said they trusted the federal government to do what is right 'only some of the time' or 'never.' And in a September 2014 Gallup poll, Americans estimated that Washington wastes 51 cents of every dollar it spends.

"The stakes of comprehensive reform are high. A new president serious about reform could take immediate action by executive order to collect the $700 billion already on the books in unpaid taxes, delinquent debts, and improper payments to individuals and government contractors. These numbers are estimates of the federal government’s own agencies.

"That'€™s just for starters. Sen. Ron Johnson (R., Wis.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, says that there is $1.4 trillion that could be saved from the federal budget."

"June is shaping up as a time of reckoning for President Obama -- and his legacy.

"Over the next three weeks, he could record significant wins on three of his most ambitious initiatives. Or have each of them blow up in his face.

"And those outcomes are largely outside of the president's control.

"On Capitol Hill, lawmakers in the House are nearing a make-or-break vote on Obama's broad Pacific Rim free trade deal with 11 other countries. At the Supreme Court, the nine justices will soon rule on a crucial provision in the president's landmark 2010 health-care law, with the insurance plans of more than 6 million people in the balance. And in Geneva, U.S. and Iranian diplomats face a June 30 deadline to announce a deal on the future of Tehran'™s nuclear program."

"There is an ongoing debate over who's more to blame for the Islamic State and the disintegration of Iraq and Syria -- Bush, for invading Iraq, or Obama for abandoning it prematurely. But that debate is largely academic at this point. Obama will have no one but himself to blame if his dithering and lack of coherent strategy turns the Islamic State into a permanent presence on the world map."

"The future of Obamacare teeters, waiting for a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, and many Americans are concerned over budget-breaking rate increases in their health insurance coming in 2016. Proposed rates from major insurance companies look to be arriving on a runaway train and those Americans appear to be tied up and lying across the tracks. This was not the way President Obama promised it would be. ...

"Sometimes, the masterminds in Washington are too clever by half. Their robbing of $700 million from Medicare to pay for Obamacare, their wasting of another $700 million on unworkable Obamacare exchange websites for Massachusetts, Oregon, Maryland, Hawaii and Nevada, and their shifting of health care expenses from older, ailing Americans to the young, are of a piece with the wealth redistribution ploys that invariably doom pie-in-the-sky socialist schemes.

"Americans have repeatedly given Mr. Obama the benefit of the doubt in the face of his incompetent judgment, but he has proved that he is in over his head as president. Obamacare is in critical condition, and the conundrum over how to pay the nation's health care bill could wind up right where it was stuck six years ago -- in the lap of Congress. As an interim measure, Congress could create a special inspector general for Obamacare to control the exploding costs of health care. Such a watchdog, independent of meddling and supervision, is clearly in order."

"So even the Environmental Protection Agency now concedes that fracking is safe, which won't surprise anyone familiar with the reality of unconventional oil and natural gas drilling in the U.S. But if no less than the EPA is saying this, then the political opposition doesn't have much of a case left.

"'We did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States,' the EPA observes in a 1,399-page report and multiple appendices. By mechanisms, the researchers mean the practice of injecting water and chemicals into shale at high pressure to extract oil or natural gas. ...

"EPA's conclusion really is remarkable. The agency has yearned for an excuse to take over fracking regulation from the states, which do the job well. So if there was so much as a sliver of evidence that fracking was dangerous, the EPA would have found it. Think of this as the Obama Administration's equivalent of the Bush Administration failing to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."

"Senior IRS officials set up a special internal committee after congressional investigators sent information requests to the IRS's two White House political appointees to investigate conservative and tea party non-profit applicants.

"Mary Howard, the IRS's director of privacy, governmental liaison and disclosure division, told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Wednesday she never saw any of the information requests because the requests were forwarded to the special committee. Howard is also the tax agency's chief Freedom of Information Act officer.

"'I think Lois Lerner was just the tip of the iceberg,' Howard said."

"As the June 30 deadline for the Iran nuclear deal approaches, President Obama is putting all his cards on the table -- by announcing he is keeping no cards in his hand.

"In an astonishing interview with Israel's Channel 2, the president declared that 'the best way to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon is a verifiable, tough, agreement.

"'A military solution will not fix it, even if the United States participates. It would temporarily slow down an Iranian nuclear program, but it would not eliminate it.'

"Why is this astonishing? Because Obama is publicly eliminating any American possibility that we will bomb Iran's nuclear sites even if the deal in which he has invested so much collapses."