Tuesday, August 20, 2013

More Benghazi Fallout

This is interesting. State Department officials were placed on administrative leave with no explanation as to why. If a corporation did that the government would probably sue them for some violation of labor laws, but it's okay for the Feds to do it. Benghazi just won't go away, nor should it until these frauds tell the truth. For those old enough to remember this feels a lot like Watergate, drip, drip, drip, and then the damn bursts.

Kerry Reinstates Benghazi Officials Clinton Punished

by Josh Rogin Aug 19, 2013 10:04 PM EDT

Secretary of State John Kerry has determined that the four State Department officials placed on administrative leave by Hillary Clinton after the terrorist attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi do not deserve any formal disciplinary action and has asked them to come back to work at the State Department starting Tuesday.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pounds on her table while testifying on the September attack on U.S. diplomatic sites in Benghazi, Libya during a hearing held by the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington on January 23, 2013. (Jason Reed/Reuters, via Landov)

Last December, Clinton’s staff told four mid-level officials to clean out their desks and hand in their badges after the release of the report of its own internal investigation into the Benghazi attack, compiled by the Administrative Review Board led by former State Department official Tom Pickering and former Joint Chiefs Chairman Ret. Adm. Mike Mullen. Those four officials have been in legal and professional limbo, not fired but unable to return to their jobs, for eight months… until today.

Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Raymond Maxwell, the only official from the State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs bureau to lose his job over the Benghazi attack, told The Daily Beast Monday he received a memo from the State Department’s human resources department informing him his administrative leave status has been lifted and he should report for duty Tuesday morning.

“No explanation, no briefing, just come back to work. So I will go in tomorrow,” Maxwell said.

Maxwell previously told The Daily Beast that the reasons for his administrative leave designation had never been explained to him. He contended that he had little role in Libya policy and no involvement whatsoever in the events leading up to the Benghazi attack.

“The overall goal is to restore my honor,” Maxwell had said.

While not a formal discplinary action, Maxwell regarded his treatment as punishment because he was not able to work and was publicly identified as being blamed for the tragedy that cost the lives of four Americans, including his friend Ambassador Chris Stevens.

Maxwell had filed grievances regarding his treatment with the State Department’s Human Resources Bureau and the American Foreign Service Association, which represents the interests of foreign-service officers. The other three officials placed on leave were in the Diplomatic Security Bureau, including then Assistant Secretary Eric Boswell and Deputy Assistant Secretary Charlene Lamb.

A senior State Department official confirmed to The Daily Beast Monday that all four officials placed on administrative leave were now returned to regular duty and would not face any formal disciplinary action. The administrative leave designation was not a formal punishment, but did prevent the officials from working while the Kerry team, which inherited the Benghazi issue from the Clinton team in February, reviewed their cases

The Real Cost of Scandals

This is absolutely spot on. It makes no difference whether it's Democrats or Republicans, scandals by public officials undermine the basic fabric of our society, and our credibility around the world. If we can't trust public officials to act in a morally ethical manner, how can we possible feel comfortable entrusting with the level of power that they have?

Scandals costing us American exceptionalism: Column

Glenn Harlan Reynolds 4:50 p.m. EDT August 19, 2013

The flood of scandals shows us that the U.S. needs leaders with stronger moral compasses.

"Who can you trust?" That's the title of a pretty good album, but it's also the question for our age. One of the underpinnings of successful representative government is that voters feel they can trust their representatives, and those in the bureaucracy to whom power is delegated, to follow the law. That trust in government officials' willingness to follow the law is the foundation for a sense that the law is legitimate, so that citizens feel a duty to follow the law as well.
But that trust has taken a big hit lately. Over the weekend, the IRS scandal hit the 100th day since the IRS admitted targeting conservative groups during the 2012 election year. Yet the IRS is still being charged with stonewalling Congressional investigators. IRS official Lois Lerner, of course, has already taken the Fifth rather than testify about what went on.
Meanwhile, new revelations of NSA lawbreaking have come out. As the Washington Post reported, the NSA violated privacy rules thousands of times per year. It appears that despite assurances that there was no domestic spying program, the NSA was, in fact, hoovering up vast numbers of phone calls, emails, etc. in order to spy on Americans. (New White House talking point: Hey, it's not a domestic spying program, it's just a program that does a lot of domestic spying!)
Back in June, President Obama told us that if you trust Congress, you can trust the NSA. That wasn't all that reassuring, considering how few Americans trust Congress. And, in fact, it appears that Congressional overseers either didn't know what was going on, or went along with the lawbreaking. (Last week we also saw the conclusion to the Bradley Manning trial, where we discovered that Bradley Manning's most damaging revelation was that our national-security establishment was willing to put dangerous secrets in the hands of . . . a guy like Bradley Manning).
Meanwhile, the Benghazi scandal -- successfully pushed off past the 2012 elections by scapegoating an obscure YouTube filmmaker -- is looking worse and worse. Although government officials blamed the video the administration in fact knew that Al Qaeda was involved from the beginning.
And now former Washington U.S. Attorney Joseph DiGenova, representing a Benghazi whistleblower, even says that missiles were being funneled through Benghazi to the Syrian rebels and that 400 were stolen by Al Qaeda terrorists at the time of the attack. CNN has reported that dozens of CIA agents were on the ground in Benghazi -- and that they're being pressured to keep quiet. Are these missiles real, or figments of Di Genova's imagination? Who knows?
After the administration's willingness to blame a filmmaker for what they knew was a terrorist attack, even the wildest theories start to seem more plausible than they otherwise might. Whatever went on in Benghazi -- and especially in Washington, afterward -- it doesn't inspire trust.
Then there's the wrap up of the Whitey Bulger trial in Boston. Bulger was a mobster who was in tight with Justice Department officials and Massachusetts politicos, (Bulger's brother, a Democratic pol, was president of the Massachusetts Senate) and after his conviction one juror reported that she was "stunned" by the extent of government corruption that came out in the trial. That's impressive. It's getting harder and harder to stun people with government corruption these days.
And that's the problem. Enough breaches of trust -- and I haven't even started to hit all the scandals out there, by a long shot -- and ordinary people will start to assume that the whole system is corrupt. And if that happens, people will quit following the law because they think it's the right thing to do, and only do so to the extent they're afraid of getting caught. Plenty of countries operate on that principle. They're just not as nice to live in as countries where the law has moral stature. When government officials breach trust, they push us closer to that sort of third world condition. Which is why, when they're found doing so, they should be punished severely.
It's also why we should try electing, and employing, people with strong moral compasses of their own; government officials who will follow the law because they think it's the right thing to do, rather than simply to the extent they're afraid of getting caught.
Based on the evidence to date, there seems to be plenty of room for improvement in that department. As we look forward to 2014 and 2016, perhaps we need to think harder about the character of the people we put into office.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is professor of law at the University of Tennessee and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself. He blogs at

Searching Your Cellphone Without a Warrant

Why is your cellphone any different than your other property that is protected by the 4th amendment? Obviously, the Administration thinks it's different. Where do we draw the line? You decide.

Obama administration asks Supreme Court to allow warrantless cellphone searches

By Timothy B. Lee, Updated: August 19, 2013

If the police arrest you, do they need a warrant to rifle through your cellphone? Courts have been split on the question. Last week the Obama administration asked the Supreme Court to resolve the issue and rule that the Fourth Amendment allows warrantless cellphone searches.
In 2007, the police arrested a Massachusetts man who appeared to be selling crack cocaine from his car. The cops seized his cellphone and noticed that it was receiving calls from “My House.” They opened the phone to determine the number for “My House.” That led them to the man’s home, where the police found drugs, cash and guns.
The defendant was convicted, but on appeal he argued that accessing the information on his cellphone without a warrant violated his Fourth Amendment rights. Earlier this year, the First Circuit Court of Appeals accepted the man’s argument, ruling that the police should have gotten a warrant before accessing any information on the man’s phone.
The Obama Administration disagrees. In a petition filed earlier this month asking the Supreme Court to hear the case, the government argues that the First Circuit’s ruling conflicts with the rulings of several other appeals courts, as well as with earlier Supreme Court cases. Those earlier cases have given the police broad discretion to search possessions on the person of an arrested suspect, including notebooks, calendars and pagers. The government contends that a cellphone is no different than any other object a suspect might be carrying.
But as the storage capacity of cellphones rises, that position could become harder to defend. Our smart phones increasingly contain everything about our digital lives: our e-mails, text messages, photographs, browser histories and more. It would be troubling if the police had the power to get all that information with no warrant merely by arresting a suspect.
On the other hand, the Massachusetts case involves a primitive flip-phone, which could make this a bad test case. The specific phone involved in this 2007 incident likely didn’t have the wealth of information we store on more modern cellphones. It’s arguably more analogous to the address books and pagers the courts have already said the police can search. So, as Orin Kerr points out, if the Supreme Court ruled on the case, it would be making a decision based on “facts that are atypical now and are getting more outdated every passing month.”