Benghazi or Bust - Lloyd Billingsley

by Lloyd Billingsley

Deep-state Democrats endanger embassies, need careful investigation.

Sgt. LaDavid Johnson, one of the four American victims of the October 4 terrorist attack in Niger, first enlisted in the Army as a Wheeled Vehicle Mechanic but rose through the ranks to the 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne), qualified as a marksman and sharpshooter, and earned the Global War on Terrorism Medal. More than a month after his body was found, it emerged that the ISIS forces had captured Johnson and executed him by bashing in his head. The damage was so severe that the Army would not let Johnson’s wife Myeisha see the body.

Also killed in the attack were U.S. Army Sgts. Bryan Black, Jeremiah Johnson and Dustin Wright. That did not prevent Rep. Frederica Wilson, Florida Democrat, from proclaiming that the attack was Trump’s Benghazi, or as other critics of the president put it, “Benghazi on steroids.” To say the least, the parallel is a stretch.

In Niger, terrorists attacked uniformed soldiers in the field, and the Army acknowledged a group linked to ISIS. President Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson made no claim that the attack was about a video.

In Benghazi in 2012, Islamic terrorists attacked a U.S. diplomatic compound. The victims included U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens, and foreign service officer Sean Smith. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denied terrorism was involved and proclaimed the attack a protest of some internet video.

This September, Sean Smith’s mother Pat Smith told Fox News that Hillary still has not called her despite a promise to do so. Sean Smith’s uncle Michael Ingmire told Fox News Hillary “was standing, basically before the coffins of Americans, blaming a horrible anti-Islamic video, but she’s just being consistent with her psychosis. The liar, the criminal, the crooked politician—those are the three faces of Hillary.”

Benghazi was hardly the first terrorist attack on a U.S. embassy. In August, 1998, al Qaeda terrorists bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 and wounding thousands. The National Security Advisor at the time was Samuel “Sandy” Berger, a pal of the Clintons since the McGovern campaign in 1972 and deputy national security advisor during the Clintons’ first term.

Berger had served in the State Department but none of his counsel prevented the terrorist attacks in Kenya and Tanzania. Those supposedly alerted Clinton to Osama bin Laden, but the entire U.S. intelligence community was unable to prevent bin Laden from masterminding September 11, 2001.

That prompted the 9/11 Commission and the Clintons’ representative was Sandy Berger. In 2004, several months before his testimony, Berger slipped into the National Archives and stuffed classified documents into his jacket, pants and socks. Berger then stashed the stolen material on a construction site, where he retrieved it on the sly.

The documents he ripped off included a sensitive after-action report on Clinton administration handing of terror threats, and documents outlining American vulnerabilities at airports and seaports. As it turned out, the Justice Department official who dealt with Berger was none other than deputy attorney general James Comey.

“As a general matter, we take issues of classified information very seriously,” Comey told reporters.  “It’s our lifeblood, those secrets. It’s against the law for anyone to intentionally mishandle classified documents either by taking it to give to somebody else or by mishandling it in a way that is outside the government regulations.” None of that severity emerged in the deal Berger struck with the Justice Department, which let Berger avoid jail, pay a $50,000 fine, and decline to reveal what he had ripped off.

As Christopher Andersen noted in American Evita: Hillary Clinton’s Path to Power, as a U.S. attorney Comey also helped the Clintons by closing out the investigation on the New Square clemency case. Clinton’s pardon of fugitive Marc Rich also drew an investigation and Andersen found it odd that the Bush administration would “help the Clinton’s out” by refusing to release documents related to the pardons. And “in accordance with his boss’s wishes, U.S Attorney James Comey gave Bill and Hillary a pass.”

In 2007, the DC Bar began to probe Berger’s document theft but the Clinton insider chose to give up his law license rather than reveal everything he stole and destroyed. Berger passed away in 2015 and the Clintons hailed him as “a consummate National Security Advisor.”  He was also Hillary’s mentor in the handling of classified material.

On September 4, 2013, James Comey became director of the FBI. In that role, Comey oversaw the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s destruction of some 30,000 emails and the bleaching of her bootleg server. Comey was going to call it “gross negligence” but changed that to “extremely careless,” which in the style of the Berger deal avoided any recommendation for criminal charges. This took place within a single week, shortly before the Democrats’ convention. As David Horowitz said, “It was, all in all, the most breathtaking fix in American history.”

One year after her election loss to Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton told Mother Jones, “there are lots of questions about its legitimacy” and that the Russian interference “wasn’t just influencing voters—it was determining the outcome.”

This comes as some in Congress press for a probe of Clinton’s affairs. Any such investigation should take a hard look at Benghazi, and don’t forget James Comey, the Democrats’ strategic deep-state enabler.

Lloyd Billingsley is the author of Barack ‘em Up: A Literary Investigation, and Bill of Writes: Dispatches from the Political Correctness Battlefield.

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/268468/benghazi-or-bust-lloyd-billingsley

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