Scrubbing the Record on Benghazi

A startling new revelation about the Benghazi scandal broke today. If politics in this country were normal, the news would scupper the candidacy of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race. But 21st-century politics in the USA is far from normal, so who knows?

A former State Department employee has revealed that Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff ordered that certain records concerning what happened in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 be withheld from the official investigation. Below is the report aired by Sharyl Attkisson on Fox News:

Here’s more from The Daily Signal:

As the House Select Committee on Benghazi prepares for its first hearing this week, a former State Department diplomat is coming forward with a startling allegation: Hillary Clinton confidants were part of an operation to “separate” damaging documents before they were turned over to the Accountability Review Board investigating security lapses surrounding the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.

According to former Deputy Assistant Secretary Raymond Maxwell, the after-hours session took place over a weekend in a basement operations-type center at State Department headquarters in Washington, D.C. This is the first time Maxwell has publicly come forward with the story.

At the time, Maxwell was a leader in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs (NEA), which was charged with collecting emails and documents relevant to the Benghazi probe.

“I was not invited to that after-hours endeavor, but I heard about it and decided to check it out on a Sunday afternoon,” says Maxwell.

He didn’t know it then, but Maxwell would ultimately become one of four State Department officials singled out for discipline — he says scapegoated — then later cleared for devastating security lapses leading up to the attacks. Four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were murdered during the Benghazi attacks.

“Basement Operation”

Maxwell says the weekend document session was held in the basement of the State Department’s Foggy Bottom headquarters in a room underneath the “jogger’s entrance.” He describes it as a large space, outfitted with computers and big screen monitors, intended for emergency planning, and with small offices on the periphery.

When he arrived, Maxwell says he observed boxes and stacks of documents. He says a State Department office director, whom Maxwell described as close to Clinton’s top advisers, was there. Though the office director technically worked for him, Maxwell says he wasn’t consulted about her weekend assignment.

“She told me, ‘Ray, we are to go through these stacks and pull out anything that might put anybody in the [Near Eastern Affairs] front office or the seventh floor in a bad light,’” says Maxwell. He says “seventh floor” was State Department shorthand for then-Secretary of State Clinton and her principal advisors.

“I asked her, ‘But isn’t that unethical?’ She responded, ‘Ray, those are our orders.’ “

A few minutes after he arrived, Maxwell says in walked two high-ranking State Department officials.

In an interview Monday morning on Fox News, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, named the two Hillary Clinton confidants who were allegedly present: Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff and former White House counsel who defended President Bill Clinton during his impeachment trial; and Deputy Chief of Staff Jake Sullivan, who previously worked on Hillary Clinton’s and then Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns…

Hat tip: Vlad Tepes.

9 thoughts on “Scrubbing the Record on Benghazi

  1. I think that any American with half a brain cell understands by now that the Obama admin is a criminal operation. They will go to any lengths to cover up their craven power and horrible mistakes.
    It would make a great movie…
    Unfortunately, we happen to be living it.

    • Babs do you remember all the Clinton fiascos? She will make Obama seem harmless:

      * There was the illegal order for personnel records to be sent to the White House;

      *Travel Gate ( which ruined many careers with its expensive litigation just so innocent people could protect their reputations). Hillary got long-term employees fired so she could give the jobs to donors;

      *The unsolved mystery of Vince Foster’s death

      My mind started to glaze over …lo and behold! a Clinton wiki. It says there are 44 pages:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Clinton_administration_controversies

      Yet you hear every day people’s enthusiasm for Hillary. Things like, “we’ve had a black President, now it’s time for a woman”.

      Indeed. Given the many stories building about her Muslim Brotherhood aide, and the long history of her rude, ugly mistreatment of secret service personnel whose great misfortune was to be assigned to her…I was thinking back to a man we met at one of my high school reunion parties, and his stories of how wonderful it was to work under George HW Bush. Hillary, when I asked, got a roll of the eyes and a “everything you ever heard is true and then some.” I didn’t push…

      Now it seems someone has come out with a timely book, probably meant to scuttle her campaign (they’re a tad early):

      http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2713591/Hillary-told-one-agent-f-suit-looked-cheap-Secret-Service-agents-say-guarding-former-First-Lady-wasthe-worst-form-punishment-author-reveals-explosive-new-book.html

      There is surely a moral parallel between the bimbos and Hillary’s well – known hatred of security. She was even like that in Arkansas with the state police. IOW, that “Power” Couple have personality disorders whihc appear equal and opposite.

      The tell-all stories will be interesting. The American Spectator learned to their expensive sorrow how vengeful she could be. Those London papers are probably safe from her.

      • Dymphna, what was the nature of the expensive payback against TAS? I never heard about that.

        Re one Clinton staffer: Craig Livingstone is one man who became a non person. He just evaporated. He was involved in Filegate, as you no doubt recall (AYNDR). Poof.

      • If memory serves, those weren’t personnel records, but FBI files that were discovered in her possession. Highly illegal. As long as we’re taking a walk down memory lane, let’s not forget bill clinton’s scandals, which I’m sure hrc was up to her neck in. Remember james riady and charlie trie, whom one law enforcement officer described as having disappeared faster and more completely than any mob informant ever has? And who can forget bernie schwartz, a big clinton backer and ceo of loral, a large aerospace/defense contractor to the US gov’t that actually worked w/ the chicoms to solve their vexing problem of targeting ballistic nuclear missiles? he, too, was never prosecuted.

        • Those were great times. I used to stand by the mailbox and wait for the next issue of The American Spectator. The Japanese LDP/Craig Spence blackmail operation in D.C. held great promise by way of educating Americans on how politics is played here but that underappreciated gem disappeared under the waves in no time flat, like Riady, Trie, and Schwartz.

          I think of what passes for news or reality in the MSM is like what a destroyer picks up with sonar between the thermal layer and the surface. Pings (“news”) are seized on with alarm and enthusiasm but there’s still a lot more stuff lurking around under that layer. (With apologies to ASW cogniscenti who may know that the thermal layer as a barrier is passe.)

  2. Obama is to the America Republic what Tiberius Graccus was to the Roman Republic. Hillary Clinton will be like Gaius Graccus.

  3. Move along, folks, nothing to see here! Why fret about corruption in government when Dancing with the Stars is on? Or the latest iGadget just came out? Or the Republican “War on Women” is ongoing?

    How far this country has fallen. It seems literally half the population is sleeping while the republic is being destroyed.

    • “Half of the people are stoned
      And the other half are waiting for the next election.
      Half of the people are drowned
      And the other half are swimming in the wrong direction.”

      -Lines by Paul Simon, from Bernstein’s “Mass” (1971).

  4. Hillary and her upstart boss Barack and both Dancing With the Devil.

    Lying about everything … from the smallest things [changing facts to burnish their hollow resumes] to the greatest {Islam’s true intentions]… eventually implodes the posturing deceivers.

    As their follies explode around their heads.

    And rain down on ours.

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