Has Hillary Clinton's Benghazi Smoking Gun Surfaced?

The special House committee investigating the 2012 terror attack in Benghazi, headed by Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, the panel's chairman, debuted Wednesday in a less confrontational style than previous congressional Benghazi hearings. The panel's first public hearing focused mostly on whether the State Department has learned its lesson about security. Gowdy said the State Department has a history of resisting change and his committee will pursue this as well as all the other questions still not answered about the Benghazi attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Democrat members of the 7 Republican-5 Democrat committee largely agreed with Gowdy's opening statement, which is in line with the Democrat Senate report on Benghazi publishrd in January 2014 and drafted by the Democrat majority of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. That report found that the State Department, then under Hillary Clinton, refused repeated requests to boost security despite warnings from the CIA and its own staff about the danger of militant attacks. The report found that : "The attacks were preventable, based on extensive intelligence reporting on the terrorist activity in Libya - to include prior threats and attacks against Western targets - and given the known security shortfalls at the US Mission." So we seem to have a common thread tying together the Democrat Senate and the Republican House -- the State Department under Hillary Clinton was responsible for the lax security that led to the attack and death of Stevens and other Americans. ~~~~~ And a story has just appeared on The Lonely Conservative website that may bring Democrats and Republicans even closer together about what happened and why in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. While Hillary Clinton was in Iowa over the weekend campaigning for Senator Tom Harkin and fueling more speculation about her presidential ambitions, and while she talked about a “new chapter” for America, as if she has nothing to do with the current international mess she was instrumental in creating, a former State Department diplomat came 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 terrorist attacks on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya. Clinton, who was Secretary of State during the rise of the ISIS, was also in charge when the US consulate in Benghazi was attacked. 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. This is the first time Maxwell has publicly come forward with the story. At that time, Maxwell was a leader in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, which was charged with collecting emails and documents relevant to the Benghazi probe. Maxwell was later singled out for discipline before he was cleared of wrongdoing. Maxwell says that also present at the after-hours meeting was Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff. “I was not invited to that after-hours endeavor, but I heard about it and decided to check it out on a Sunday afternoon,” Maxwell says. 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 of being responsible for catastrophic security lapses that led to the attacks. 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 task : “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 advisersn “I asked her, ‘But isn’t that unethical?’ She responded, ‘Ray, those are our orders.’” A few minutes after he arrived, Maxwell says, two high-ranking State Department officials arrived. In a Fox News interview, Representative Jason Chaffetz named the two Hillary Clinton confidants who allegedly were  present as Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff, and a former White House counsel who defended President Bill Clinton during his impeachment trial. The other, Chaffetz said, was Deputy Chief of Staff Jake Sullivan, who previously worked on Hillary Clinton’s and then Barack Obama's presidential campaigns. “When Cheryl saw me, she snapped, ‘Who are you?’ Jake explained, ‘That’s Ray Maxwell, an NEA deputy assistant secretary.’ She conceded, ‘Well, OK.’” Maxwell says the two officials, close confidants of Clinton, appeared to check on the operation and then left. Maxwell says after Mills and Sullivan arrived, he, the office director and an intern moved into a small office where they looked through some papers. Maxwell says his stack included pre-attack telegrams and cables between the US embassy in Tripoli and State Department headquarters. After a short time, Maxwell says he decided to leave : “I didn’t feel good about it,” he says. The Lonely Conservative says it contacted Mills and Sullivan to ask about the allegations and the purpose of the. separation of documents, but they did not return calls or emails, and neither did Hillary Clinton, who declined an interview request and offered no comment. A State Department spokesman told The Lonely Conservative it would have been impossible for anybody outside the Accountability Review Board (ARB) to control the flow of information because the board 'cultivated so many sources.' When the ARB issued its call for documents in early October 2012, just weeks after the Benghazi attacks, the executive directorate of the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs was put in charge of collecting all emails and relevant material. It was gathered, boxed and - Maxwell says - ended up in the basement room prior to being turned over. In May 2013, when critics questioned the ARB’s investigation as not thorough enough, co-chairmen Ambassador Thomas Pickering and Admiral Mike Mullen responded that “we had unfettered access to everyone and everything including all the documentation we needed." Maxwell says when he heard that statement, he couldn’t help but wonder if the ARB - perhaps unknowingly - had received from his bureau a scrubbed set of documents with the most damaging material missing. Maxwell also criticizes the ARB for failing to interview key people at the White House, State Department and the CIA. Maxwell says he has been interviewed privately by several members of Congress in recent months, including Chaffetz, a member of the House Oversight Committee, and Representative Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Chaffetz told The Lonely Conservative that Maxwell’s allegations “go to the heart of the integrity of the State Department. The allegations are as serious as it gets, and it’s something we have obviously followed up and pursued. I’m 100% confident the Benghazi Select Committee is going to dive deep on that issue.” Former Obama Supporter Maxwell, 58, strongly supported President Barack Obama and personally contributed to his presidential campaign. But post-Benghazi, he has abandoned Obama and Clinton, saying he was sacrificed as a scapegoat while higher-up officials directly responsible escaped discipline. Maxwell spent a year on paid administrative leave with no official charge ever levied against him. Ultimately, the State Department cleared and reinstated him before he retired in November 2013. Several weeks after he was placed on leave, Maxwell met with a State Department ombudsman. “She told me, ‘You are taking this all too personally, Raymond. It is not about you.' I told her that ‘My name is on TV and I’m on administrative leave, it seems like it’s about me.’ Then she said, ‘You’re not harmed, you’re still getting paid. Don’t watch TV. Take your wife on a cruise. It’s not about you; it’s about Hillary and 2016.’" ~~~~~ Dear readers, before the Democratic Party anoints Hillary Clinton as its 2016 standard bearer, it should get to the bottom of these allegations. They are consistent with Mrs. Clinton's past efforts to hide her culpability by managing the facts and accusing others in order to deflect attention from her own actions.