Obama’s final solution 229

Why is twice-and-forever president, Barack Obama, limitlessly generous, submissive, helpful to the cruel theocracy of Iran?

Why has he helped it become a nuclear power?

Lee Smith writes at Tablet:

[In January, 2024] Kata’ib Hezbollah launched a drone that killed three U.S. soldiers in Jordan. But President Biden didn’t want to retaliate against Iran for fear of collapsing the pro-Iran policy established by his former boss Barack Obama, so U.S. intelligence officials leaked an assessment to the press that Iran doesn’t control the proxy groups it trains, funds, and arms to kill Americans and U.S. allies in the Middle East.

That got Biden off the hook‚ but it’s hard to pose as a global superpower while allowing the servicemen and women you put in harm’s way to be killed with impunity. Biden considered his options, then announced his intentions to hit targets in Iraq and Syria, which gave the Iranians a week to scatter high-value assets and personnel, after which he bombed meaningless targets in those countries. One U.S. official made sure to tell the Iranians through U.S. media that “there are no indications that members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were killed as part of the operations.” The U.S. president thereby signaled to the Iranians that they are free to continue directing their Arab assets to kill Americans.

Iran’s proxies and cutouts are successful in this sickening game that puts the lives of hostages and servicemen alike at risk only to the extent that officials in the Biden administration are willing to deny and disguise the regime’s active role in targeting Americans. By contrast, when Donald Trump withdrew from the 2015 U.S.-Iran agreement that legalized the terror state’s nuclear weapons program, he signaled that unlike his predecessor he didn’t see Tehran as a regional partner to replace Israel and Saudi Arabia. Accordingly, when Iranian proxies killed an American contractor and laid siege to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad in December 2019, Trump cut off the head of Iran’s paramilitary snake by killing Soleimani. The January 2020 drone strike that got the Iranian terror chief also tagged then-leader of Kata’ib Hezbollah, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, thereby underscoring the fact that Iran is directly responsible for the actions of its proxies.

In comparison, Biden’s Iran policy is a hall of mirrors designed to hide facts likely to disturb the American electorate while allowing the White House to deepen its relationship with Iran.

All that is manifest or at least probable and credible.

But then Smith writes this:

For Americans, the most repugnant feature of what the Biden team sees as a program of regional integration under the Iranian banner is this: U.S. forces are based in Iraq and Syria to protect Iranian interests in those countries. Under the guise of counterterrorism missions, American troops are detailed to target any Sunni Arab population that the Iranians and their allies designate as ISIS, and thereby risk their lives to secure Iran’s position in countries the Islamic Republic has helped destroy.

America is actively helping Iran wage its battles for supremacy in the Islamic world? A shocking fact if true. It is bad enough that the Obama gangsters incomprehensibly fund the Iranian tyranny with American tax dollars, plead with the mullahs for permission to lick their boots, and pant in vain for their gratitude, but to deploy American forces to fight and die for those genocidal sadists would surely be going too far in using  America as Obama’s own property.

If it is true, why is Iran killing American soldiers?

The Iranians persist in targeting American troops to remind the White House who calls the shots.

Yes, the Iranians have directed more than 160 attacks on U.S. forces since October, but the reason for these attacks is hardly Israel’s post-Oct. 7 military response to Hamas: The Iranians have been launching regular attacks on U.S. troops in the region since Biden took office—starting with an attack against a U.S. airbase in Iraq in February 2021.

The Iranians and their proxies are free to attack American forces because the White House has abandoned them to the mercies of Tehran, effectively turning U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines into a security deposit ensuring that the Biden administration will continue to advance Iranian, rather than American, interests.

“Ensuring that the Biden administration will continue to advance Iranian, rather than American, interests.” 

But why, why, why?  If Obama is a Muslim at heart, does the Democrat Party of America have to put Iran’s interests ahead of its own, and not only ahead of its own but at the cost of its own?

Taking hostages, after all, is how Iran does business. When in its infancy the Islamic Republic seized the U.S. Embassy in 1979 and ransomed 52 Americans, it led the news almost every night, for 444 days. It cost Jimmy Carter the presidency. In the intervening years, the Iranians and their proxies have kidnapped so many people—like Terry Anderson (Hezbollah, 1985-91), Roxanne Saberi (the Iranian regime, 2009), Austin Tice (the Syrian regime, 2012 to the present) and most recently Elizabeth Tsurkov (Kata’ib Hezbollah, 2023 to the present)—that Hamas’s Oct. 7 abductions are just part of the background music of the Middle East. It should shock the world that a nation-state and its proxy forces regularly imprison, torture, and rape innocents until their governments cough up enough money to get them back—or until they are dead. But nearly half a century after the 1979 hostage crisis, the Iranians have acclimated most of the world to the idea that this barbaric practice is just a conventional instrument of their foreign policy.

As president, Obama further normalized Iran’s terms. He helped legitimize hostage-taking as a function of Iranian statecraft by directing his officials to use hostage talks as an entry point that could double as a diplomatic channel …  In 2009, the Iranians kidnapped three Americans who had inadvertently crossed over the Iraq border. Oman mediated U.S.-Iran hostage negotiations, and sure enough the White House used that line of communication for secret talks with Iran to legalize its nuclear weapons program. The nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was the Obama administration’s top foreign policy priority, with the end goal of turning Iran into a regional hegemon.

Why?

Representing the administration in those secret talks were [the under-devils] William Burns and Jake Sullivan now Biden’s CIA director and national security adviser, respectively.

With the nuclear deal concluded in 2015, Obama went back to the hostage stratagem and gave the Iranians a signing bonus of $1.7 billion, including $400 million in cash, in exchange for four U.S. hostages in January 2016. With that flourish, hostages became an official medium of exchange, which allowed the White House, in the absence of any formal diplomatic agreement or congressional approval or oversight, to ship pallets of cash to Tehran.

Biden loaded his administration with many of the same people who ran Iran policy under Obama, including former Iran envoy Robert Malley, whose security clearances were revoked [in April 2023]  after he was alleged to have mishandled classified information.

Why have we heard nothing more about that? Is the (odious) Robert Malley to be indicted? If not, why not? It’s a puzzle. If he gave classified information to Iran, that would be in line with the Obama agenda. Which may mean that the Biden administration is protecting him from any further punitive action. But if that is so,  who dared to revoke his security clearance? How is he or she to be punished? No doubt very discreetly. Top secretly.

In his role as head of the Washington NGO the International Crisis Group, and then while serving as a U.S. government official, Malley supported and facilitated an Iranian influence operation targeting Western capitals, including Washington itself, and pushed one of its assets, Ariane Tabatabai, into the U.S. government. She, too, appears to be part of the hostage-industry infrastructure. Tabatabai remains chief of staff to the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, a portfolio that includes hostage rescue operations. [Emphasis in original.] Recently her boss posted photos of himself traveling with Tabatabai to visit U.S. troops at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. For Tehran, the pictures signal that no matter what the headlines may say, the understanding with Washington is unchanged.

Which is surely evidence that Obama still reigns.

The hostage-industry infrastructure gives the White House a way to service the unofficial alliance between the two governments, without having to explain why the U.S. is sending money to Iran, or what the Iranians are doing with it. For instance, in August the Biden administration gave Iran access to $6 billion in previously frozen oil revenues in exchange for five Americans. Was any of that money used to fund Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre? The White House says no. Instead, it claims that according to Qatar, which brokered the deal and parked the $6 billion in its central bank, the Iranians haven’t touched it. The fact that the White House thinks the American public and their elected representatives should take the word of Iran’s bagman is evidence that Qatar’s exertions as an “impartial mediator” have normalized the idea that it’s OK to pay off the Iranians and their proxies for kidnapping and killing Americans and our allies.

This deliberate misdirection is what Obama intended in 2012, when he asked Qatar to establish a channel with Hamas on behalf of the U.S. Given that Doha is one of Hamas’s benefactors—as of 2023, total aid from Qatar to Gaza is believed to be more than $2.1 billion—the official U.S. line is that the Qataris have leverage over Hamas. They must, or why else would they be brokering negotiations to return the Oct. 7 hostages?

(Gaza survives chiefly on the charity of rich states, non-governmental organizations, and the services of UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for “Palestine Refugees” only). Most of the donated money is retained by Hamas who use it to keep up continual violence and periodic warfare against Israel. Hamas is the government of Gaza, elected by the population. Israel supplied Gaza with fuel, food and special medical services, and employed thousands of Palestinian day-workers from Gaza, some of whom exploited their jobs as an opportunity to collect information useful to Hamas for its invasion of October 7, 2023.)

Accordingly, the Netanyahu government and Oct. 7 hostage families believe that since the U.S. has leverage over Qatar, it can compel the emirate to use its power and influence on Hamas. In this view, Qatar should defund the Palestinian terror group and throw its leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Meshaal out of their luxury hotel suites in Doha and put them in prison until Hamas releases its captives. But the Biden team isn’t going to pressure Qatar for the same reason it hit irrelevant targets in Syria and Iraq: it wants to preserve its relationship with Iran.

Why?

As the world’s go-to goodwill ambassador, Qatar says it’s impartial. But the only party in the region on whose behalf Qatar “mediates” is the one that takes hostages. Qatar works for Iran. It’s ugly, but it makes sense: If your foreign policy is keyed to the money you spend buying foreign elites and their institutions, and the source of that wealth is a giant natural gas field that you share with Iran, you take sides. And it’s not a hard choice: Is it the side that tortures and rapes hostages and kidnapped 28 Qatari royals, or is it the Americans, who won’t even shut down the local bureaus of Qatar’s flagship propaganda arm Al Jazeera, never mind make good on vague threats to move U.S. Central Command’s forward base out of Al Udeid airfield? It is Qatar that holds leverage over the U.S., which it exercises on its own behalf and Iran’s.

Consider the money that Qatar spreads around Washington, D.C. From the $14.8 million check that Obama administration peace processor Martin Indyk cashed as director of the Brookings Institution’s Foreign Policy Program to the billions Doha has spent on Al Udeid to lobby the Pentagon, as well as its massive investments in key American institutions like major universities, Qatar has leverage over nearly all parts of the U.S. government and American elites.

Qatar’s lavish expenditures are meant to show that the rewards for aligning with Qatar are great, while the punishment meted out by Iran’s fixer can be painful.

In 2017 Qatar hired former CIA agent Kevin Chalker to spy on and smear U.S. legislators like Republican Sens. Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton, and Democratic Congressman Ed Royce, who all supported legislation against Hamas. “An attack on Hamas is an attack on Qatar,” Chalker warned in a lengthy document prepared for his Qatari clients.

The ex-agency man also recommended that Qatar target rival United Arab Emirates by “exposing [the] enemy secrets” of the UAE’s well-connected Washington Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba. Chalker recommended that Qatar call on its media assets, identifying, among others, Max Blumenthal, anti-Israel activist and son of fading Clinton-world influencer Sidney Blumenthal; The Intercept; and The New York Times. Only months after Chalker produced the report, the Times published stories based on hacked Otaiba emails in a campaign intended, as reporter David Kirkpatrick acknowledged, “to embarrass the U.A.E. and benefit Qatar.” From the Pentagon to the capital’s paper of record, Qatar has Washington covered. It’s Iran’s stalking horse.

What happens in Gaza, then, will have consequences throughout the world—for Iran’s hostage infrastructure is built with something grander in mind than just trading human flesh for cash. After Oct. 7, Iran has made it clear that the purpose of its nuclear weapons program was never just to threaten Israel and Saudi Arabia, but also to hold the whip hand in world trade and energy markets. With Biden all but standing down the U.S. Navy, the Houthis, Iran’s proxy in Yemen, have closed Red Sea shipping lanes and forced major container shipping lines to take alternate routes, raising the prices of goods around the world. With a nuclear bomb in its arsenal, Iran’s next hostage is the global economy.

“Its nuclear weapons program was never just to threaten Israel …”  No, indeed not. It is first of all to destroy Israel.  And the only plausible explanation for Obama’s policy, still being pursued by his frontman Biden, of helping Iran become nuclear armed is because he wants Israel to be destroyed. 

Not all the Democrats in positions of authority are anti-Israel. There are even some who are strongly pro-Israel. So a Democrat-led American government could not openly destroy the small embattled country; but it can and does, with unwavering dedication and at enormous price, make it possible for Iran to attempt that truly genocidal operation.

China spanks Biden’s envoys 174

The Democrats continually declare America to be a morally rotten country, racist, bigoted, unjust, cruel. (Example: see what Vice President Harris has to say about America here.)

Naturally that delights its enemies – China in particular.

As leaders of a contemptible country, representatives of the Biden administration found themselves too weak to withstand even a merely verbal attack by a Chinese delegation.

What could they say in its defense, they who scorn and condemn it as ruthlessly as any enemy might do?

John Hinderaker reports and comments at PowerLine:

On Thursday, delegations headed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi met at the Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage. It was the first such meeting of the Biden administration. … The parties agreed that the public session would begin with a two-minute statement by each. Blinken spoke for two minutes, after which Yang contemptuously ignored the agreed-upon protocol and delivered a 20-minute attack on the United States. From there, things went from bad to worse.

The London Times, which, like pretty much all mainstream European news outlets, favors the Democrats, reports:

The Chinese side came to the talks in Alaska prepared to counter every US rebuke with one of their own. To the charge of Chinese cyberattacks, Yang said that “the US is the champion” while in response to the repression of Uighurs being labelled as genocide, he said that the US was guilty of the slaughter of black Americans.

The Chinese … know that the Democrats’ peddling BLM mythology disables them from defending the United States against such attacks, and they take full advantage of the Biden administration’s weakness.

“The United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength,” said Yang, who was accompanied by Wang Yi, a state councillor.

He criticised what he said was America’s struggling democracy and its poor treatment of minorities.

The Daily Wire reports on the meeting from a perspective [even] less friendly to the administration:

The meeting in Alaska came at the request of the Biden administration and was their attempt at trying to restart bilateral relations with China. Instead, after addressing some issues that the administration had with China, China openly mocked and attacked the U.S.

“Biden is weak. And many other countries are happy about it,” former Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell said. “And the woke US media is too partisan to report fairly.”

One of the Biden administration’s most contemptible themes is its declaration that “America is back.” It was during the Obama administration – when, of course, Joe Biden was vice president – that America retreated from the world, appeased its enemies, and let its defense capabilities wither.

The Donald Trump administration took important steps to strengthen our armed forces and, unlike Obama and Biden, stood up to both Russia and China, advancing American interests under the banner of “America first”. The only thing that is “back” under Joe Biden, or whoever is running U.S. foreign policy these days, is weakness. And the Chinese know it.

Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Rebeccah Heinrichs told The Daily Wire:

Critical race theory and identity politics at home makes us a splintered, self-loathing mess. The CCP knows this. It’s why they used all those BLM talking points in Alaska. …

Center for Security Policy President Fred Fleitz — former NSC Chief of Staff, CIA analyst, and House Intel Com staff member — effectively said that the Biden administration was responsible for the meeting being a disaster: 

Blinken foolishly did not anticipate that the Chinese officials would retaliate in their remarks responding to him. This gave the Chinese officials a rare opportunity to dress down the Secretary of State before the press. Blinken was visibly unnerved by the Chinese response. Blinken’s response was defensive and incoherent. He also repeated Biden’s silly “America is back” theme.

Most disturbing, despite Blinken and [National Security Advisor Jake] Sullivan’s criticism of China, there was not one word on Beijing’s criminal negligence that allowed the coronavirus to become a dangerous pandemic, or any criticism of China for its continuing refusal to fully cooperate with international investigations of the origins of the virus, including inspections of the Wuhan biolabs.

This press event in Alaska was a debacle that will build a perception that the US is returning to Jimmy Carter-like incompetence in foreign policy. America’s enemies are watching and planning

After all that scheming, contriving, cheating to get back into power, now they’ve got there the “transform America” party doesn’t know what to do, or how to do anything at all to protect the country it leads and hates.

The Clintons and Islam 178

If ever the US waged an unnecessary war, it was Bill Clinton’s in ex-Yugoslavia.

Joseph Klein writes at Front Page:

A Hillary Clinton presidency would likely continue along the pro-Islamist foreign policy arc that both her husband’s administration and the Obama administration have developed.

President Bill Clinton committed U.S. military resources to help Muslims during the so-called “humanitarian” intervention in Bosnia. However, he chose to turn a blind eye to the genocide that swamped Rwanda during his administration. As G. Murphy Donovan wrote in his American Thinker article How the Clintons Gave American Foreign Policy its Muslim Tilt, “Muslim lives matter, Black Africans, not so much.” Noting that “it was Muslim unrest that precipitated Serb pushback, civil war, and the eventual collapse of Yugoslavia”,  Donovan added, “Bosnians are, for the most part, Muslims with a bloody fascist pedigree.”

Nevertheless, with no strategic U.S. national interest at stake, Bill Clinton tilted American foreign policy in favor of the Muslim side in the Bosnia conflict. We are now reaping the lethal consequences of that tilt.

Donovan points out in his article that, on a per capita basis, Bosnia Herzegovina is the leading source of ISIS volunteers in all of Europe.

That Obama loves Islam, and has been an immense help to the Muslim Brotherhood, and to Iran with its ambition to become a nuclear power, can be accounted for. He is the son and step-son of Muslims, and lived among – and was schooled with – Muslims in Indonesia.

But why do the Clintons zealously woo, employ, aid and coddle the bellicose enemies of the USA and Western civilization?

President Obama, along with then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, took the side of Islamist “rebels” against the secular authoritarian regimes in Egypt, Libya and Syria that had managed to keep the lid on jihadist terrorism for many years. These Islamists included members of al Qaeda as well as the Muslim Brotherhood.

In Libya, Hillary Clinton was the leading voice pressing for military intervention against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s regime. She did so, even though, according to sources cited in a State Department memo passed on to Hillary by her deputy at the time, Jake Sullivan, in an e-mail dated April 1, 2011, “we just don’t know enough about the make-up or leadership of the rebel forces.”  In fact, as subsequently reported by the New York Times, the only organized opposition to the Qaddafi regime that had developed underground during Qaddafi’s rule were the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a terrorist group, and the Muslim Brotherhood.  The author of the State Department memo had acknowledged the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group’s terrorist past but said they “express a newfound keenness for peaceful politics”.  Was Hillary Clinton relying on such assurances of a reformed “peaceful” Islamic group fighting against Qaddafi, even though it had been on the State Department’s terrorist list since 2004 and one of its leaders, Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi,  praised al Qaeda members as “good Muslims” in a March 2011 interview?  If so, that is just another indication of her bad judgment.

As for Egypt, Hillary was informed by her outside adviser and confidante Sid Blumenthal, in an e-mail dated December 16, 2011, that the Muslim Brotherhood’s intention was to create an Islamic state. Moreover, the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda and other radical groups was “complicated”, Blumenthal quoted a source “with access to the highest levels of the MB” as saying. Blumenthal also reported, based on a confidential source, that Mohamed Morsi, who was then leader of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, believed that “it will be difficult for this new, Islamic government to control the rise of al Qa’ida and other radical/terrorist groups”.

Radical terrorist groups, that is to say, which were in rivalry for hegemony with Morsi’s own group. (The MB claims to be non-violent in pursuing its jihad – but it launched the terrorist organization Hamas.)

Nevertheless, the Obama administration supported the Muslim Brotherhood in its bid to seek power in Egypt through a shaky electoral process. After Morsi’s election to the presidency, Hillary visited Egypt where Morsi warmly welcomed her and she expressed strong support for Egypt’s “democratic transition”.

However, the only real transition Morsi had in mind was to impose sharia law on the Egyptian people, the very antithesis of true democratic pluralism. Yet the Obama-Clinton gravy train of military aid to the Muslim Brotherhood-backed Islamist regime continued without any preconditions. Hillary Clinton herself and her State Department referred to the importance of the U.S.’s “partnership” with the Muslim Brotherhood-backed regime.

When Morsi was removed from power, after millions of Egyptians had taken to the streets to protest the increasingly theocratic regime, the Obama administration decided to suspend aid to the more secular successor military regime. The “partnership” was no more once the Islamists were swept out of office.

There were close ties between the Clinton Foundation and Morsi and his MB:

While Morsi was still president, the Clinton Foundation, which has taken millions of dollars in donations from Muslim majority governments and affiliated groups and individuals, invited Morsi to deliver a major address at the Clinton Global Initiative. This invitation was extended just a month after an individual named Gehad el-Haddad, who was working simultaneously for the Muslim Brotherhood and the Clinton Foundation in Cairo, left his Clinton Foundation job to work for Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood full time. Fortunes changed for this individual, however, when, after Morsi was overthrown, Haddad was arrested for inciting violence and given a life sentence.

Hillary Clinton was willing to find a way round the First Amendment in her eagerness to please Islamic powers:

The Obama administration, while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, also cooperated with the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to pass and implement a United Nations resolution that was intended to curb speech considered Islamophobic. Clinton, in full spin mode, insisted that the new UN resolution was totally consistent with the free speech protections of the First Amendment, as opposed to the “defamation of religions” resolutions that the OIC had sponsored in the past but was willing to have replaced. The truth, however, is that all we were seeing was old wine in new bottles. To make sure that the OIC was comfortable regarding the Obama administration’s intentions, Clinton assured the OIC that she was perfectly on board with using “some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor”. She was trying to publicly assure American citizens that their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and press were safe, while working behind the scenes with her OIC partners to find acceptable ways to stifle speech offensive to Muslims.

The signs of Hillary Clinton’s Islamist tilt as she runs for president include the sweepingly general and demonstrably false assertion in her tweet last November that Muslims “have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism”.  She has obviously learned nothing from her disastrous tenure as Secretary of State. Neither is she willing to acknowledge that the terrorists whom she has called a “determined enemy” are jihadists animated by an ideology rooted in core Muslim teachings of the Koran and the Hadith …Is there something about the word “Muslim” in the Muslim Brotherhood and “Islamic” in the Islamic State that she is having problems understanding?

Perhaps, it is Hillary’s close association with Huma Abedin, her top campaign aide and confidante, who has had questionable links to Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated organizations, which explains Hillary’s denial of the truth. If someone as close to Hillary as Huma Abedin, whom she apparently trusts with her life, is a Muslim, then how could any Muslim possibly have anything to do with terrorism?

Then again, perhaps Hillary’s willingness to give Islamists the benefit of the doubt is [explained by] all the money that the Clintons have received over the years from foreign donors in Muslim majority countries, including the Saudi government and affiliated groups and individuals. Hillary Clinton has also reached out for campaign donations from a pro-Iranian lobby group, the National Iranian American Council. Whatever human rights abuses are inflicted on people in these countries, it would be counterproductive to bite the hand that feeds you, in the Clintons’ way of thinking.

Finally, the Democratic Party itself has moved much further to the Left since the days of Bill Clinton’s presidency, which has led to the broadening out of the pro-Islamist bias that began to take shape with Bill Clinton’s intervention in Bosnia. As David Horowitz wrote in a January 8, 2016 article published by National Review:

Leftists and Democrats have also joined the Islamist propaganda campaign to represent Muslims — whose co-religionists have killed hundreds of thousands of innocents since 9/11 in the name of their religion — as victims of anti-Muslim prejudice, denouncing critics of Islamist terror and proponents of security measures as “Islamophobes” and bigots. Led by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Democrats have enabled the Islamist assault on free speech, which is a central component of the Islamist campaign to create a worldwide religious theocracy.

And perhaps it is through both sentiment and venality that Hillary Clinton has helped and would continue to help Islam pursue its “holy war” against the USA and our civilization.

Dirty tricks at Hillary Clinton’s State Department 167

An article by Sharyl Attkisson at the Daily Signal uncovers deep and shameless corruption in Hillary Clinton’s State Department.

It is a shocking story. If it is true – and it certainly rings true – it should not merely put Hillary Clinton out of the running for the presidency, but bring her reputation into such disrepute that the best thing she could do is retire permanently from public life. It should also launch a legal investigation if the Obama DOJ under Eric Holder were not equally corrupt.

Deputy Assistant Secretary Raymond Maxwell, a chief officer in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, was one of the four totally innocent people “disciplined” for unspecified wrong-doing over the Benghazi attack. In other words, they were scapegoated, while those guilty of letting four Americans, including the Ambassador – the high representative of the United States of America – be murdered in Benghazi, have been exonerated by a white-washing Accountability Review Board (ARB).

It is Maxwell who reveals what happened.

His department “was charged with collecting emails and documents relevant to the Benghazi probe”.

On a certain week-end, “confidants” of then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (how many is not told) gathered in a basement room where documents were stored, and separated some before handing over a batch to the ARB. 

“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.

When he arrived …  he observed boxes and stacks of documents. A State Department office director, whom Maxwell described as close to Clinton’s top advisers, was there. Though technically she worked for him, he hadn’t been 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’.”

“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, ‘Those are our orders’.”

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

They were two more of Hillary Clinton’s “confidants”: 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.

“When Cheryl saw me, she snapped, ‘Who are you?’” Maxwell says. “Jake explained, ‘That’s Ray Maxwell, an NEA Deputy Assistant Secretary. She conceded, ‘Well, OK’.”

The two Clinton “confidants” (“conspirators” would be a better word for them) “appeared to check in on the operation and soon left”.  

Maxwell “did not feel good” about what was going on, and walked out.

He views the after-hours operation he witnessed in the State Department basement as “an exercise in misdirection”.

In May 2013, when critics questioned the ARB’s investigation as not thorough enough, co-chairmen Ambassador Thomas Pickering and Adm. 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.

“Perhaps unknowingly”? Maxwell put that in, but he does not have faith in the ARB.

Maxwell also criticizes the ARB as “anything but independent,” pointing to Mullen’s admission in congressional testimony that he called [Cheryl] Mills to give her inside advice after the ARB interviewed a potential congressional witness.

Smell a rat? The smell of a whole nest of rats is strong enough to bring the exterminators without a call to summon them.

Maxwell also criticizes the ARB for failing to interview key people at the White House, State Department and the CIA, including not only Clinton but Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Nides, who managed department resources in Libya; Assistant Secretary of State for Political Military Affairs Andrew Shapiro; and White House National Security Council Director for Libya Ben Fishman.

Those three officials must have been suspected of being honest.

“The ARB inquiry was, at best, a shoddily executed attempt at damage control, both in Foggy Bottom and on Capitol Hill,” Maxwell says.

Maxwell “spent a year on paid administrative leave with no official charge ever levied against him”. He was eventually “cleared of wrong-doing” and reinstated. Soon after that he retired, in November 2013.

Several weeks after he was placed on leave with no formal accusations, Maxwell made an appointment to address his status with a State Department ombudsman.

“She told me, ‘You are taking this all too personally, Raymond. It is not about you’.”

But his reputation had been besmirched. He was being named by the media as a man who had contributed to the disaster of Benghazi.

“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′.”

The question now is: will the mainstream media report the story?

You don’t believe so? Neither do we.