Benghazi: Former State Department official claims the department “separated” documents to protect Hillary Clinton

The Benghazi select committee is going to begin hearings later this week and if this story is true they might just have a new line of inquiry to pursue in this scandal. A former State Department official, Raymond Maxwell, is alleging he walked in on a secret basement meeting after he had heard he was not invited (even though people who work under him were) and he found that they were separating documents ahead of the original Benghazi probe.

Here is more:

a former State Department diplomat is coming forward with a startling allegation: Hillary Clinton confidants were part of an operation to “separate” damaging documents before they were turned over to the Accountability Review Board investigating security lapses surrounding the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya. According to former Deputy Assistant Secretary Raymond Maxwell, the after-hours session took place over a weekend in a basement operations-type center at State Department headquarters in Washington, D.C. At the time, Maxwell was a leader in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, which was charged with collecting emails and documents relevant to the Benghazi probe. When he arrived, Maxwell says he observed boxes and stacks of documents. He says a State Department office director, whom Maxwell described as close to Clinton’s top advisers, was there. Though the office director technically worked for him, Maxwell says he wasn’t consulted about her weekend assignment.

So, he was in charge of collecting emails and documents related to the scandal and yet while some of his underlings were at this meeting he was not invited? That sounds strange, does it not?

Naturally he asked why the Department was separating documents and this is what he was told:

“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,’” says Maxwell. He says “seventh floor” was State Department shorthand for then-Secretary of State Clinton and her principal advisers.

And of course he knew this was not on the up and up so he asked the natural followup question and this is what he got for an answer:

“I asked her, ‘But isn’t that unethical?’ She responded, ‘Ray, those are our orders.’ ”

If you have been following the Benghazi scandal closely the name Raymond Maxwell probably rings a bell with you: he was the only person who lost his job as a result of the scandal before John Kerry cleared him and gave him his job back.

I guess now we know why he was fired in the first place but of course there is not even a smidgen… oh wait, wrong scandal. What I meant to say is, what difference, at this point, does it make? Dude, this was like two years ago…