Another Day, Another (Other) Scandal: State Department Engaged in Widespread Cover-Ups of Misbehavior to Avoid Bad Headlines, Scandals

A great many incidences of small-ball behavior occurred. But that is itself not the scandal. We can expect any pool of human beings to engage in vices and even crime.

The scandal is that the State Department ordered the IG to cover it up.

Bear in mind, this is the habit, the attitude, the mindset that dominated State during the Benghazi cover-up.

I'll just direct you to the article for details about the misconduct that was covered up. It includes drug use, soliciting prostitutes, and sexual abuse. But as bad as these things are, they are, the common misbehaviors of human beings.

Of course soliciting prostitutes and drugs in a foreign country is also an enormous source of compromise for US officials -- foreign intelligence services often have hookers and drug-vendors on their pad (and under their protection) in exchange for blackmail material. But usually these things can be handled -- firings, disciplinary actions, reassinging possibly compromised agents to nonsense rubber room duties.

That is, these things can be handled... unless higher-ups decide to cover-up the misbehavior entirely.

The real problem, and the real scandal, is that higher-ups ordered this investigation suppressed.

Who? We don't know. But an interesting name, one familiar to those who've followed BenghaziGate, has surfaced.

CBS News' John Miller reports that according to an internal State Department Inspector General's memo, several recent investigations were influenced, manipulated, or simply called off. The memo obtained by CBS News cited eight specific examples.

...

In such cases, DSS agents told the Inspector General's investigators that senior State Department officials told them to back off, a charge that Fedenisn says is "very" upsetting.

"We were very upset. We expect to see influence, but the degree to which that influence existed and how high up it went, was very disturbing," she said.

...

John Miller spoke with Mike Pohelitz, a retired Senior Agent at the DSS who was involved in one of the cases listed in the Inspector General's memo. Pohelitz said he was told to stop investigating one of the cases and that the order likely came from the upper ranks of the DSS.

"I got the information through my DS channel," he told Miller. "But it had to come from somebody higher than DS, I'm sure."

Now, in one case, Patrick Kennedy appears to have played the role of fixer, having a chat with an ambassador -- an ambassador, mind you! -- who routinely evaded his security detail in order to solicit prostitutes in a public park. This is of course an enormously compromising behavior -- and yet Patrick Kennedy just had a chin-wag with him and then instructed him to return to his post.

As ambassador. We are not talking about some minor visa-processor.

And Patrick Kennedy is a central figure in the Benghazi scandal-- one Hillary's hit-man. For example, it is suspected -- but no one will confirm -- that it was Patrick Kennedy who ordered the FEST (Foreign Emergency Service Team) to not attempt a Benghazi rescue.

The official said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s deputy, Patrick Kennedy, quickly dispensed with the idea. A senior State Department official Thursday told CBS News, “Under Secretary Kennedy is not in the decision chain on FEST deployment” but would not directly confirm whether Kennedy or somebody else dismissed the FEST.

posted by Ace at 02:28 PM

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