Raymond Maxwell, the only official at the State Department's bureau of Near Eastern Affairs to lose his job after the attacks, tells Josh Rogin that he’s been scapegoated by Hillary Clinton’s team.
Following
the attack in Benghazi, Libya, senior State Department officials close
to Hillary Clinton ordered the removal of a midlevel official who had no
role in security decisions and has never been told the charges against
him. He is now accusing Clinton’s team of scapegoating him for the
failures that led to the death of four Americans last year.
Raymond Maxwell was placed on
forced “administrative leave” after the State Department’s own internal
investigation, conducted by an Administrative Review Board (ARB) led by
former State Department official Tom Pickering. Five months after he was
told to clean out his desk and leave the building, Maxwell remains in
professional and legal limbo, having been associated publicly with the
death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other American for reasons
that remain unclear.
Maxwell,
who served as deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern
affairs from August 2011 until his removal last December, following
tours in Iraq and Syria, spoke publicly for the first time in an
exclusive interview with The Daily Beast.
“The
overall goal is to restore my honor,” said Maxwell, who has 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,
leaving Maxwell as the only official in the Bureau of Near Eastern
Affairs (NEA), which had responsibility for Libya, to lose his job.
“I
had no involvement to any degree with decisions on security and the
funding of security at our diplomatic mission in Benghazi,” he said.
More @ The Daily Beast
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