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Paul Merrell

The Conscience of a Benghazi Whistleblower | The American Conservative - 0 views

  • Raymond Maxwell claims he witnessed top Hillary Clinton aides purge State Department files. Here's why you should believe him.
  • Ray Maxwell has a helluva story: Hillary Clinton’s most senior aides participated in a Benghazi cover-up. Maxwell says he knows because he was there. Proving or disproving his allegations will be an uncertain task. People will claim he is nothing more than a disgruntled employee with an agenda. I don’t think that’s true. Because I was once in his place. Raymond Maxwell was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, covering Libya. Soon after Ambassador Chris Stevens and others were killed in Benghazi, Maxwell participated in a secret Sunday session, he says, where Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Jake Sullivan oversaw a document review with the aim to “pull out anything that might put anybody in the front office or the seventh floor in a bad light.” (“Seventh floor” is slang for the Secretary of State.)
  • As the House Select Committee on Benghazi held its first hearing Wednesday, the focus was on the Secretary of State’s role in securing American embassies and consulates abroad. Maxwell did not testify, and may or may not be eventually called to speak publicly to the Committee, but his allegations loom in the background. I’ve met Maxwell and talked with him, though he did not confide in me. When you join State, you serve whomever is in the White House, and like myself Maxwell worked from Reagan through Obama. “For any Foreign Service Officer, being at work is the essence of everything,” Maxwell told a reporter after he was ultimately pushed into an early retirement following State’s internal review of the Benghazi debacle. In 2013, Maxwell spoke to the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the House Oversight Committee yet kept quiet about the bombshell information. Maxwell impresses as a State Department archetype, dedicated to the insular institution, apolitical to the point of frustration to an outsider, but shocked when he found his loyalty was not returned.
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  • He has revealed what he knows only two years after the fact. People will say he is out for revenge. But I don’t think that’s the case. As a State Department whistleblower who experienced how the Department treats such people, I know it’s not a position anyone wants to be in.
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    This might prove troublesome for Hillary. Spoliation of evidence is usually fairly easy to prove because of references to shredded documents in other documents that were retained, breaks in the sequence of document numbering, etc. 
Paul Merrell

Judge Orders NSA To Stop Destroying Evidence For Third Time | The Daily Caller - 0 views

  • A federal judge has ordered the government to stop destroying National Security Agency surveillance records that could be used to challenge the legality of its spying programs in court. U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White’s ruling came at the request of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is in the midst of a case challenging NSA’s ability to surveil foreign citizen’s U.S.-based email and social media accounts. According to the EFF, the signals intelligence agency and the Department of Justice were knowingly destroying key evidence in the case by purposefully misinterpreting earlier preservation orders by multiple courts, multiple times.
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    Folks at the NSA are getting scared and desperate. Ordered three times to stop destroying evidence, NSA continued destroying it anyway. They're playing with fire. Judge White has the power to hold them in criminal contempt of court and slap them in the pokey. Lots of lesser sanctins too. The federal justice system is not kind to those who wilfully disobey court orders, especially on preservation of evidence. If you don't want to obey a federal district court judge, the correct route is to appeal the order, not just disobey it. Judges cannot tolerate disobedience or the judicial system unravels. Judges know that. Federal officials and lawyers are granted more leeway than mere mortals, but not when it comes to obedience.  
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