This comes perilously close to being ‘too bad to be true’ territory. Meet Ray Maxwell, former Deputy Assistant Secretary at the State Department – and one of the people fingered, then cleared, of wrongdoing in the Benghazi ambassador disaster. (He since has retired, having served for over two decades. And also, yeah, the entire ‘pariah’ thing.) Mr. Maxwell is now testifying that Hillary Clinton loyalists organized a band of plumbers* to sanitize the relevant files between said disaster, and the inevitable investigation:
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.
“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 advisors.
“I asked her, ‘But isn’t that unethical?’ She responded, ‘Ray, those are our orders.’ ”