The Department of Justice will drop charges against American arms merchant Marc Turi, who is accused of selling arms illegally to Libyan rebels and lying to the State Department in official applications.
But Turi is claiming that the real reason the DoJ is not going to pursue the case any further is that it would expose administration efforts to circumvent the law and arm Libyan rebels. It is alleged that some of those arms ended up in the hands of terrorists — which, if true, would almost certainly sink the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.
Turi says that he was under the impression that his arms dealing was sanctioned by the U.S. government. The deals involved Turi brokering the shipping of arms to other countries like Qatar and UAE, which would then send the arms on to the rebels trying to overthrow Qaddafi. Unfortunately, neither country cared very much who got the arms as long as they were anti-Qaddafi. Some of the weapons almost certainly ended up in the hands of Syrian extremists.
As Turi told Fox News last July:
“When this equipment landed in Libya, half went one way, and the half went the other way,” Turi said in an interview broadcast on Fox Business Channel. “The half that went the other way is the half that ended up in Syria.”
Turi is backed up in his story by an 18-year career intelligence officer David Manners. Manners confirms that Turi believed he was operating with the approval of the U.S. government:
In a sworn declaration to the District Court of Arizona May 5th 2015, a career CIA officer David Manners said, “It was then, and remains now, my opinion that the United States did participate, directly or indirectly, in the supply of weapons to the Libyan Transitional National Council.” The timing matters because in the Spring of 2011 the Libyan opposition was not formally recognized, and the direct supply of arms was not authorized. At that time, the CIA Director was David Petraeus.
[…]
Manners’ declaration supports statements made exclusively to FOX News by Turi about what President Obama’s team and members of Congress knew about weapons flowing into the region during the chaotic Arab Spring of 2011.
Turi says he never sold any arms to Qatar. That was the job of key Clinton aide Andrew Shapiro, who headed up the State Department export-control process. He was the quintessential middle man — a facilitator who had a reputation for getting the job done.
This is how he was rewarded:
In May 2011, Turi got a brokering approval from the State Department for Qatar. In July, his Arizona home was raided by federal agents.
“They came in the full body armor, and weapons and, they take my computers and my cell phones and that was it. That was the last time I saw them. And they’ve been chasing me all over the world for the past three years, speaking to associates of mine all over the United States and looking into my records and my past.”
His attorney Jean-Jacques Cabou told Fox in a series of emails that his client had a track record working for the “US government through the Central Intelligence Agency” and the government case is an “epic fishing expedition.” Adding his client”…neither lied on any application nor did he do anything other than support U.S. foreign policy and interests in the Middle East.”
Turi’s attorney believes that the government was trying to scapegoat the arms dealer to cover up Hillary Clinton’s crimes:
“The U.S. government spent millions of dollars, went all over the world to bankrupt him, and destroyed his life — all to protect Hillary Clinton’s crimes,” he said, alluding to the deadly Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
What is it that the Justice Department is looking to cover up?
It was an open secret that the U.S. was supplying anti-Qaddafi rebels with arms, despite the fact that it was illegal to do so. What wasn’t known at the time — and would be difficult to prove today — is that perhaps a large portion of the arms we were sending to Libya were ending up in the hands of al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups in Syria.
If the Justice Department has documents proving that American arms ended up with terrorists, it would almost certainly come out at Turi’s trial. And that would almost certainly prove to be the end of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy for presidency.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member