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Obama administration officials threatened whistle-blowers on Benghazi, lawyer says
By James Rosen
Published April 29, 2013
FoxNews.com
At least four career officials at the State Department and the
Central Intelligence Agency have retained lawyers or are in the process
of doing so, as they prepare to provide sensitive information about the
Benghazi attacks to Congress, Fox News has learned.
Victoria Toensing, a former Justice Department official and
Republican counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, is now
representing one of the State Department employees. She told Fox News
her client and some of the others, who consider themselves
whistle-blowers, have been threatened by unnamed Obama administration
officials.
“I'm not talking generally, I'm talking specifically about Benghazi –
that people have been threatened,” Toensing said in an interview
Monday. “And not just the State Department. People have been threatened
at the CIA.”
Toensing declined to name her client. She also refused to say whether
the individual was on the ground in Benghazi on the night of Sept. 11,
2012, when terrorist attacks on two U.S. installations in the Libyan
city killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris
Stevens.
However, Toensing disclosed that her client has pertinent information
on all three time periods investigators consider relevant to the
attacks: the months that led up to the attack, when pleas by the
ambassador and his staff for enhanced security in Benghazi were mostly
rejected by senior officers at the State Department; the eight-hour time
frame in which the attacks unfolded, and the eight-day period that
followed the attacks, when Obama administration officials incorrectly
described them as the result of a spontaneous protest over a video.
“It's frightening, and they're doing some very despicable threats to
people,” she said. “Not ‘we're going to kill you,’ or not ‘we're going
to prosecute you tomorrow,’ but they're taking career people and making
them well aware that their careers will be over [if they cooperate with
congressional investigators].”
Federal law provides explicit protections for federal government
employees who are identified as “whistle-blowers.” The laws aim to
ensure these individuals will not face repercussions from their
superiors, or from other quarters, in retaliation for their provision of
information about corruption or other forms of wrongdoing to Congress,
or to an agency’s inspector-general.
Rep. Darrell Issa, the Republican from California who chairs the
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, wrote to Secretary of
State John Kerry on Friday to complain that the department has not
provided a process by which attorneys like Toensing can receive the
security clearances necessary for them to review classified documents
and other key evidence.
“It is unavoidable that Department employees identifying themselves
as witnesses in the Committee’s investigation will apply for a security
clearance to allow their personal attorneys to handle sensitive or
classified material,” Issa wrote. “The Department’s unwillingness to
make the process for clearing an attorney more transparent appears to be
an effort to interfere with the rights of employees to furnish
information to Congress.”
The Obama administration maintains that it has been more than
forthcoming on Benghazi and that it is time for the State Department to
move on. At a recent hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee,
Kerry noted that administration officials have testified at eight
hearings on Benghazi, provided 20 briefings on the subject and turned
over to Congress some 25,000 documents related to the killings.
“So if you have additional questions or you think there's some
document that somehow you need, I'll work with you to try to get it and
see if we can provide that to you,” Kerry told committee Chairman Rep.
Ed Royce, R-Calif., on April 17. But Kerry added: “I do not want to
spend the next year coming up here talking about Benghazi.”
Asked about Issa’s complaints about attorneys not receiving security
clearances, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell on Monday
indicated that – far from threatening anyone – the administration hasn’t
been presented with any such cases. “I'm not aware of private counsel
seeking security clearances or -- or anything to that regard,” Ventrell
told reporters. “I'm not aware of whistle-blowers one way or another.”
Ventrell cited the work of the FBI – whose probe of the attacks
continues almost eight months later and without any known instances of
perpetrators being brought to justice – and the Accountability Review
Board. The board was an internal State Department review panel led by
former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Thomas Pickering and former
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen. An unclassified
version of the board’s final report that was released to the public
contained no conclusions that suggested administration officials had
willfully endangered their colleagues in Benghazi or had misled the
public or Congress.
“And that should be enough,” Ventrell said at Monday’s press
briefing. “Congress has its own prerogatives, but we've had a very
thorough, independent investigation, which we completed and [which was]
transparent and shared. And there are many folks who are, in a political
manner, trying to sort of use this for their own political means, or
ends.”
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/04/29/obama-administration-officials-have-threatened-whistle-blowers-on-benghazi/#ixzz2Rtw37Kef
By James Rosen
Published April 29, 2013
FoxNews.com
At least four career officials at the State Department and the
Central Intelligence Agency have retained lawyers or are in the process
of doing so, as they prepare to provide sensitive information about the
Benghazi attacks to Congress, Fox News has learned.
Victoria Toensing, a former Justice Department official and
Republican counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, is now
representing one of the State Department employees. She told Fox News
her client and some of the others, who consider themselves
whistle-blowers, have been threatened by unnamed Obama administration
officials.
“I'm not talking generally, I'm talking specifically about Benghazi –
that people have been threatened,” Toensing said in an interview
Monday. “And not just the State Department. People have been threatened
at the CIA.”
Toensing declined to name her client. She also refused to say whether
the individual was on the ground in Benghazi on the night of Sept. 11,
2012, when terrorist attacks on two U.S. installations in the Libyan
city killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris
Stevens.
However, Toensing disclosed that her client has pertinent information
on all three time periods investigators consider relevant to the
attacks: the months that led up to the attack, when pleas by the
ambassador and his staff for enhanced security in Benghazi were mostly
rejected by senior officers at the State Department; the eight-hour time
frame in which the attacks unfolded, and the eight-day period that
followed the attacks, when Obama administration officials incorrectly
described them as the result of a spontaneous protest over a video.
“It's frightening, and they're doing some very despicable threats to
people,” she said. “Not ‘we're going to kill you,’ or not ‘we're going
to prosecute you tomorrow,’ but they're taking career people and making
them well aware that their careers will be over [if they cooperate with
congressional investigators].”
Federal law provides explicit protections for federal government
employees who are identified as “whistle-blowers.” The laws aim to
ensure these individuals will not face repercussions from their
superiors, or from other quarters, in retaliation for their provision of
information about corruption or other forms of wrongdoing to Congress,
or to an agency’s inspector-general.
Rep. Darrell Issa, the Republican from California who chairs the
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, wrote to Secretary of
State John Kerry on Friday to complain that the department has not
provided a process by which attorneys like Toensing can receive the
security clearances necessary for them to review classified documents
and other key evidence.
“It is unavoidable that Department employees identifying themselves
as witnesses in the Committee’s investigation will apply for a security
clearance to allow their personal attorneys to handle sensitive or
classified material,” Issa wrote. “The Department’s unwillingness to
make the process for clearing an attorney more transparent appears to be
an effort to interfere with the rights of employees to furnish
information to Congress.”
The Obama administration maintains that it has been more than
forthcoming on Benghazi and that it is time for the State Department to
move on. At a recent hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee,
Kerry noted that administration officials have testified at eight
hearings on Benghazi, provided 20 briefings on the subject and turned
over to Congress some 25,000 documents related to the killings.
“So if you have additional questions or you think there's some
document that somehow you need, I'll work with you to try to get it and
see if we can provide that to you,” Kerry told committee Chairman Rep.
Ed Royce, R-Calif., on April 17. But Kerry added: “I do not want to
spend the next year coming up here talking about Benghazi.”
Asked about Issa’s complaints about attorneys not receiving security
clearances, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell on Monday
indicated that – far from threatening anyone – the administration hasn’t
been presented with any such cases. “I'm not aware of private counsel
seeking security clearances or -- or anything to that regard,” Ventrell
told reporters. “I'm not aware of whistle-blowers one way or another.”
Ventrell cited the work of the FBI – whose probe of the attacks
continues almost eight months later and without any known instances of
perpetrators being brought to justice – and the Accountability Review
Board. The board was an internal State Department review panel led by
former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Thomas Pickering and former
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen. An unclassified
version of the board’s final report that was released to the public
contained no conclusions that suggested administration officials had
willfully endangered their colleagues in Benghazi or had misled the
public or Congress.
“And that should be enough,” Ventrell said at Monday’s press
briefing. “Congress has its own prerogatives, but we've had a very
thorough, independent investigation, which we completed and [which was]
transparent and shared. And there are many folks who are, in a political
manner, trying to sort of use this for their own political means, or
ends.”
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/04/29/obama-administration-officials-have-threatened-whistle-blowers-on-benghazi/#ixzz2Rtw37Kef
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