Benghazi and EDiscovery

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“My Dinner with Andre” is a 1981 movie directed by Louis Malle and starring Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn. The film was critically acclaimed, and it was not because of the action sequences. The 111 minute long movie basically depicts a conversation between two men over dinner.

Almost two hours of little but talking? As Wallace Shawn would later exclaim in The Princess Bride—“Inconceivable!”

If you share this sentiment, then no matter your politics, you must at least admire the stamina that Hillary Clinton displayed at the marathon October 22^nd House Benghazi hearing. There was more than 11 hours of testimony, much of it termed little more than bickering.

Some may wonder what and how so many politicians found so much to talk about. It’s important to note that motivation for this session, no matter what was publicly declared was no doubt at least partly generated by the Republican-led House committee’s desire to dent Hillary Clinton’s campaign for President. And a motivated House member can find all kinds of things to talk about.

According to the Wall Street Journal, there were thousands of emails plus testimony from scores of individuals scoured for information that could be used in an attempt to trip up the Secretary of State. Certain Republican members absolutely want to make the case that then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s actions exposed Americans in Libya to unacceptable risks.

Four Americans did die in the Benghazi attacks, including the Ambassador to Libya. The events have been analyzed extensively, and for those who are interested, here is a timeline of the events.

Rep. Jim Jordan introduced an email from Clinton to the Egyptian prime minister in which she categorized the events as a ‘terrorist attack,’ while she told Americans the attack was a response to the infamous YouTube clip mocking Muslims. He questioned why she told two different stories to two different sets of interested parties. Some may feel the distinction is a thin one, but many legal careers have been built on exploiting such fine distinctions.

When faced with testifying before Congress, an individual would be wise to remember how many of them are in fact lawyers. Less than 1% of the United States adult populations are attorneys, but 41% of the 113^th Congress are. And lawyers—like Rep. Jim Jordan— are typically experts at using E-Discovery tools to look through mounds of data in order to build a case and tell the story that they want to tell.

Electronic Discovery, or E-Discovery refers to discovery in litigation or government investigations in which data is identified as being potentially relevant, and analyzed by digital forensic procedures. E-Discovery and Litigation support tools can probe volumes of electronic messages like emails and message chats, databases and other structured data, and voicemails. Information—including photos and video– can be retrieved from different servers, from hard drives, from data repositories, and more.

Then all this data is automatically analyzed, with email threading, concept and keyword search, similar document search, data clustering, filtering, and elimination of duplicate info. There are also tools like http://www.forensic-data-svc.com/ that help retrieve data from damaged sources, and provide assistance in analyzing that data.

With the right tools, forensic analysis works no matter how large the document store is. Law firms, corporate legal departments, Fortune 500 companies, medical firms, and the good old United States Government all make use of E-Discovery and Litigation support tools.

5i Solutions, Inc. offers E-Discovery and Litigation support tools like iPro for E-Discovery and iconect for litigation review. These powerful tools allow scalability from a single lawyer practice to any size legal enterprise. And 5i Solutions will create a custom solution, with full service case management, imaging, and hosted retrieval systems.