Career State Department staffer accuses Hillary Clinton’s staff of sanitizing Benghazi records.

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.’ ”

My choice of the word ‘sanitize’ was deliberate: I suspect that if formal testimony to Rep. Trey Gowdy’s investigative committee has not yet taken place, then it will shortly.  Maxwell has already ‘privately’ talked with Reps. Gowdy and Jason Chaffetz; I’m sure that all involved found the conversation fascinating.

More via Hot Air: it’s important to note, by the way, that Ray Maxwell has also placed Hillary Clinton’s then-Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills and then-Deputy Chief of Staff Jake Sullivan. It’s equally important to note that Reps. Chaffetz and Gowdy have been told about that already, too. Ed Morrissey thinks that all of this will give the Accountability Review Board an excuse to retract the whitewash that it did on this issue two years ago: I do not think that the ARB will do that retraction, but I kind of don’t mind if they don’t.  The more damage this thing does while it falls through the floors, the happier I’m going to be.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Wasn’t that what Richard Nixon called them?