Unfortunately This Is Not A Surprise

Yesterday’s Daily Beast reported that Secretary of State John Kerry has cleared the Benghazi officials placed on administrative leave by Hillary Clinton after the terrorist attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi. The four State Department officials come back to work at the State Department starting today.

The article reports:

Last December, Clinton’s staff told four mid-level officials to clean out their desks and hand in their badges after the release of the report of its own internal investigation into the Benghazi attack, compiled by the Administrative Review Board led by former State Department official Tom Pickering and former Joint Chiefs Chairman Ret. Adm. Mike Mullen. Those four officials have been in legal and professional limbo, not fired but unable to return to their jobs, for eight months… until today.

Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Raymond Maxwell, the only official from the State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs bureau to lose his job over the Benghazi attack, told The Daily Beast Monday he received a memo from the State Department’s human resources department informing him his administrative leave status has been lifted and he should report for duty Tuesday morning.

No explanation, no briefing, just come back to work. So I will go in tomorrow,” Maxwell said.

This a classic cover-up operation. Choose four scapegoats, wait until the scandal is no longer on the front pages of the newspaper, and then re-instate them. The article mentions that none of the four officials will be able to get his previous job back.

The article concludes:

There was also concern in Congress that only mid-level officials with little direct responsibility for the Benghazi attack had been taken out of their jobs following the ARB report release.

“The ARB tried to blame everyone but hold no one responsible, except for some of the lower level people who were not in control of the situation,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), chairman of the House Oversight National Security subcommittee, told The Daily Beast in May.

Unless Congress develops a backbone and truly investigates what happened at Benghazi and why, this scandal will fade quietly into the sunset. This is what happens when organizations investigate themselves.

 

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If It Were Not Horrible It Would Be Funny

I have already chosen the quote of the week, but I wonder if I can put the following quote up for next week’s Quote of the Week.

Scott Johnson posted a story at Power Line yesterday about some of the recent revelations about Benghazi. Included in that story was the following quote:

“They’ve tried to point a finger at people more senior than where we found the decisions were made,” Pickering said of Clinton’s critics. On the other hand, according to Pickering, they also found it unnecessary to chat with her because she had already accepted “the full responsibility.”

Let me get this straight–the Accountability Review Board (ARB), led by former U.N. Ambassador Thomas Pickering and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen, did not feel it was necessary to interview Secretary of State Hillary Clinton because she had already accepted “the full responsibility.” Therefore, it was not important to find out what she knew, when she knew it, or what decisions she was responsible for on the night of the attack on Benghazi or before that night. Wow! How many teenagers would welcome a deal like that?!

The article at Power Line reminds us of another aspect of the ARB:

How did the estimable men of the ARB miss Gregory Hicks in the information gathering phase of their work? The ARB harks back to Richard Nixon’s desired resolution of the controversy over production of the Watergate tapes: The Stennis Compromise. In lieu of producing the tapes, Nixon proposed, bring in some eminent but hearing-impaired older man to check out the tapes and report back. The Stennis Compromise was laughed out of consideration. Only Democrats can get away with something like that.

This is truly a sad chapter in American history.Enhanced by Zemanta