Accountability was a quaint concept anyway.
Last December, [Secretary of State] 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.
Along with Maxwell, Deputy Assistant Secretary Charlene Lamb, Assistant Secretary Eric Boswell and another official have been reinstated. Well, reassigned and reinstated, as they have been shuffled into other positions. They won’t face any further disciplinary actions, and they were never even told why they were put on administrative leave. They have just been put on ice, and they taken off the ice, by one SoS and then the other.
More: The Obama administration’s continued lack of transparency regarding Benghazi is unacceptable, yet there seems to be nothing that Congress or anyone else can do about it. Recall that the FBI didn’t even get to the site of the attack for about three weeks. CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson has been seeking information from the FBI for months, and last week she reported that she has been denied all documents. The FBI has sent her a letter telling her that it will not hand over any documents, saying that doing so would jeopardize its investigation. That investigation, which was weeks late in getting started, has resulted in no arrests, even as the main suspects behind the attack are out in the open giving press interviews. The State Department has now reinstated four officials without any explanation. CNN reported that the 30-odd survivors of the attack have been threatened, polygraphed, moved around and even had their names changed to keep them from talking to the media or Congress.
All signs point to a cover-up beginning under Clinton’s watch and now continuing under Kerry’s.
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