BENGHAZI BACKLASH: Did Clinton Skate Through Q&A After Deadly Attack?

• 

  FILE: Jan. 15, 2013: House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and other lawmakers on Capitol Hill, in Washington, D.C.AP

Congressional Republicans on Sunday pressed their investigation into the Benghazi attacks, suggesting depositions of high-ranking officials and more whistle-blowers testifying amid further questions about why then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was not thoroughly interviewed about the issue.

Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told “Fox News Sunday” that more potential and self-proclaimed “whistle-blowers” might come forward after three of them – career State Department foreign service employees – testified last week before the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee.

“We have had people come forward because of the (hearing) and say we would also like to talk," the Michigan Republican told “Fox News Sunday.” "I do think we're going to see more whistle-blowers. Certainly my committee has been contacted; I think other committees as well."

Rogers’ remarks came as Thomas Pickering, the former U.S. ambassador who helped write a report on security at a U.S. outpost in Benghazi, Libya, defended his assessment but absolved Clinton.

"We knew where the responsibility rested," Pickering told CBS’ “Face the Nation.”  “They've tried to point a finger at people more senior than where we found the decisions were made.”

Pickering said he and retired Adm. Mike Mullen had to work within the legal scope of the investigation and that they “knew and understood” Clinton’s role based upon “talking to other people at meetings.”

Four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, were killed in the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks on the U.S. outpost.

Congressional Republicans have since led efforts to learn whether the Obama administration provided adequate security and if the explanation of events was altered as part of a possible political cover-up.

Among the lingering questions are whether Clinton was involved in changing the CIA memo about how the attacks started, or was she at least partially responsible for the apparent lack of adequate security.

The Accountability and Review Board, led by Pickering and Mullen, did not question Clinton at length about the attacks but concluded the decisions about the consulate were made well below the secretary's level.

However, Pickering's defense of the panel's conclusions Sunday appeared to do little to quiet Republicans' calls for more accountability for the attacks, which killed Stevens, Information Officer Sean Smith, and two embassy security personnel, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, both former Navy SEALs.

Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House oversight committee, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” he would like to interview under oath Pickering and Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein told NBC that Congress' review seems aimed at discrediting Clinton and her potential 2016 presidential bid.

Pickering and Mullen's report was released in December and found that "systematic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels" of the State Department meant that security was "inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place."

The House oversight committee hearing last week included testimony from Gregory Hicks, a former deputy chief of mission to Libya.

Hicks, a self-proclaimed whistle-blower, detailed his phone conversations from Tripoli with Stevens, who died during the two nighttime attacks.

Hicks and two other State Department witnesses criticized the Pickering and Mullen review. Their complaints centered on a report they consider incomplete, with individuals who weren't interviewed and a focus on the assistant secretary level and lower.

The hours-long hearing produced no major revelation but renewed interest in the attacks that happened during the lead-up to the November 2012 presidential election.

Five days after the attacks, in the final weeks of President Obama’s re-election bid, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice went on Sunday talk shows and said the attacks were “spontaneous” and sparked by protests elsewhere in the Middle East over an anti-Islamic video.

However, new reports show the original CIA memo on the incident was scrubbed of the mention of “Islamic militants” and early intelligence about Al Qaeda in the region.

The series of emails that circulated between the State Department and the CIA led to weakened -- and, in some cases, wrong -- language that Rice used to describe the assault.

Issa also said he will on Monday request private testimonies from Pickering and Mullen and that his oversight panel has not been provided sufficient details on the State Department review.

Pickering, who was sitting next to Issa during “Meet the Press,” said he wanted to appear at the Republican-led hearing Wednesday but was blocked.

Issa said Democrats could have invited their own witnesses, such as Pickering, but did not.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., on Sunday renewed congressional Republicans’ call for a House select committee on Benghazi -- like the one used to investigate Watergate -- and called the Obama administration’s handling of the terror attacks “a cover-up.”

"I would call it a cover-up in the extent that there was willful removal of information, which was obvious,” McCain said on ABC’s “This Week.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

View the original article here

BENGHAZI BACKLASH: Report: Clinton Tried to Cut Anti-Terror Unit Out of Loop

• 

On the night of Sept. 11, as the Obama administration scrambled to respond to the Benghazi terror attacks, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a key aide effectively tried to cut the department's own counterterrorism bureau out of the chain of reporting and decision-making, according to a "whistle-blower" witness from that bureau who will soon testify to the charge before Congress, Fox News has learned.

That witness is Mark I. Thompson, a former Marine and now the deputy coordinator for operations in the agency’s counterterrorism bureau. Sources tell Fox News Thompson will level the allegation against Clinton during testimony on Wednesday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif.

Fox News has also learned that another official from the counterterrorism bureau -- independently of Thompson -- voiced the same complaint about Clinton and Under Secretary for Management Patrick Kennedy to trusted national security colleagues back in October.

Extremists linked to Al Qaeda stormed the American consulate and a nearby annex on Sept. 11, in a heavily armed and well-coordinated eight-hour assault that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, and three other Americans.

Thompson considers himself a whistle-blower whose account was suppressed by the official investigative panel that Clinton convened to review the episode, the Accountability Review Board (ARB). Thompson's lawyer, Joseph diGenova, a former U.S. attorney, has further alleged that his client has been subjected to threats and intimidation by as-yet-unnamed superiors at State, in advance of his cooperation with Congress.

Sources close to the congressional investigation who have been briefed on what Thompson will testify tell Fox News the veteran counterterrorism official concluded on Sept. 11 that Clinton and Kennedy tried to cut the counterterrorism bureau out of the loop as they and other Obama administration officials weighed how to respond to -- and characterize -- the Benghazi attacks.

"You should have seen what (Clinton) tried to do to us that night," the second official in State's counterterrorism bureau told colleagues back in October.  Those comments would appear to be corroborated by Thompson's forthcoming testimony.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki called the counterterrorism officials' allegation "100 percent false." A spokesman for Clinton said tersely that the charge is not true.

Thompson's attorney, diGenova, would not comment for this article.

Documents from the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council, first published in the May 13 edition of "The Weekly Standard," showed that senior officials from those agencies decided within days of the attacks to delete all references to Al Qaeda's known involvement in them from "talking points" being prepared for those administration officers being sent out to discuss the attacks publicly.

Those talking points -- and indeed, the statements of all senior Obama administration officials who commented publicly on Benghazi during the early days after the attacks -- sought instead to depict the Americans' deaths as the result of a spontaneous protest that went awry. The administration later acknowledged that there had been no such protest, as evidence mounted that Al Qaeda-linked terrorists had participated in the attacks. The latter conclusion had figured prominently in the earliest CIA drafts of the talking points, but was stricken by an ad hoc group of senior officials controlling the drafting process. Among those involved in prodding the deletions, the documents published by "The Weekly Standard" show, was State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, who wrote at one point that the revisions were not sufficient to satisfy "my building's leadership."

The allegations of the two counterterrorism officials stand to return the former secretary of state to the center of the Benghazi story. Widely regarded as a leading potential candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, Clinton has insisted she was not privy to decisions made by underlings about the inadequate security for the U.S. installations in Benghazi that were made in the run-up to the attacks. And she has portrayed her role -- once the attacks became known in Washington -- as that of a determined fact-finder who worked with colleagues to fashion the best possible response to the crisis.

Clinton testified about Benghazi for the first and only time in January of this year, shortly before leaving office. She had long delayed her testimony, at first because she cited the need for the ARB to complete its report, and then because she suffered a series of untimely health problems that included a stomach virus, a concussion sustained during a fall at home, and a blood clot near her brain, from which she has since recovered. However, Clinton was never interviewed by the ARB she convened.

Fox News disclosed last week that the conduct of the ARB is itself now under review by the State Department's Office of Inspector General. A department spokesman said the OIG probe is examining all prior ARBs, not just the one established after Benghazi.

The counterterrorism officials, however, concluded that Clinton and Kennedy were immediately wary of the attacks being portrayed as acts of terrorism, and accordingly worked to prevent the counterterrorism bureau from having a role in the department's early decision-making relating to them.

Also appearing before the oversight committee on Wednesday will be Gregory N. Hicks, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Libya at the time of the Benghazi terrorist attacks. Like Thompson, Hicks is a career State Department official who considers himself a Benghazi whistle-blower. His attorney, Victoria Toensing, a former chief counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, has charged that Hicks, too, has faced threats of reprisal from unnamed superiors at State. (Toensing and diGenova, who are representing their respective clients pro bono, are married.)

Portions of the forthcoming testimony of Hicks -- who was one of the last people to speak to Stevens, and who upon the ambassador's death became the senior U.S. diplomat in Libya -- were made public by Rep. Issa during an appearance on the CBS News program "Face the Nation" on Sunday.

Hicks told the committee that he and his colleagues on the ground in Libya that night knew instantly that Benghazi was a terrorist attack, and that he was astonished that no one drafting the administration's talking points consulted with him before finalizing them, or before U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice delivered them on the Sunday talk shows of Sept. 16.

Hicks was interviewed by the ARB but Thompson was not, sources close to the committee's investigation tell Fox News.

James Rosen,

Related Stories

Benghazi witness: We knew it was a terrorist attack 'from the get go'

Democrats now critical of Rice's Benghazi explanation, amid more damaging evidence

View the original article here

Top EPA official to resign amid email backlash

A top EPA official plans to resign, just three weeks after Republican Sen. David Vitter questioned him over the use of a personal email account to conduct "official business." 

EPA spokeswoman Alisha Johnson confirmed to FoxNews.com that Region 8 Administrator James Martin plans to resign effective Friday. She said it was "for personal reasons." 

Martin was facing questions about his use of personal email, as former EPA boss Lisa Jackson also comes under scrutiny for using alias emails to communicate with employees. 

The agency reportedly is disputing the notion that Martin's resignation had anything to do with the email controversy. 

But Vitter, R-La., top Republican on the Senate environment committee, claimed Martin is leaving at least in part because of the "open investigation about his use of a non-official email account to conduct official business." 

Vitter claimed Martin had recently hired legal counsel, following a Jan. 29 letter in which Vitter and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., challenged the EPA official. Vitter and Issa said documents showed he used his private me.com account to confirm a meeting with the general counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund. 

The EPA, according to Politico.com, downplayed the communication as a one-time occurrence. 

But the Republican lawmakers wrote that "it does not appear that this transaction was an isolated incident." 

"Rather, the body of emails suggests that you regularly used this personal email account to stay informed on matters relating to your official duties," they wrote. Further, they said the issue raises concern that he could be trying to "insulate" himself from formal records requests and "circumvent" federal records law. 

It's not the first time administration critics have tried to tie a high-profile resignation to the unfolding email controversy. 

A Washington attorney suing the Obama administration for access to Jackson's alias emails claimed in December that a decision by the Justice Department to release thousands of those emails contributed to Jackson's decision to resign. Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said the scrutiny over the alias emails is clearly a factor. 

Jackson, though, said she was leaving after four years for "new challenges, time with my family and new opportunities to make a difference." Several top officials in the Obama administration have resigned in recent weeks, as part of what the administration says in normal turnover going into a second term. 

Vitter, in a statement Tuesday, turned his scrutiny to Jackson's acting replacement Bob Perciasepe. He noted that another tranche of emails released late last week showed Perciasepe using a personal account. 

The emails -- which included a number involving Jackson's alias "Richard Windsor" account -- largely showed routine chatter about press clippings. CEI later complained that the documents were heavily redacted. But Vitter objected to the use of personal accounts. 

"Now we know that Lisa Jackson's acting replacement, Bob Perciasepe, appears to have been doing the same thing to dodge the agency's mandatory recordkeeping policy. EPA owes us all some answers about their absolute disregard for transparency, especially from their acting administrator or any potential nominee to be administrator," Vitter said. 

The EPA has downplayed Republican concerns. 

In November, when reports of the alias accounts were first surfacing, an EPA spokesman said the agency has for roughly a decade assigned internal and public email addresses to administrators -- and that they use the internal ones to communicate with staff because of the massive amount of traffic on the public accounts.

View the original article here