Mrs. Clinton has spent the last few weeks learning that federal court is not the mainstream media. Because of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits brought by Judicial Watch, she and her top aides are finally being asked tough questions about conducting government business over a private communications system - a system that Clinton designed in order to hide her communications from public inspections, congressional inquiries, and judicial proceedings. We've thus learned that Team Clinton may have concealed government records, stored and transmitted classified information on private e-mail systems, and erased tens of thousands of government files.
If Mrs. Clinton thinks FOIA is a headache, wait until she sees what happens when a top government official's reckless mass deletion of e-mails takes center stage in a terrorism prosecution of intense national interest. Federal criminal court is not the nightly news. There, mass deletion of files is not gently described as "emails a government official chose not to retain"; it is described as "destruction of evidence" and "obstruction of justice."
In criminal cases, the government is required to disclose to the defense any information in its possession that may tend to prove the defendant not guilty of the charges. That includes information that calls into question the prosecution's version of events, theory of guilt, and credibility.
In the indictment against Khatallah, the Justice Department alleges that nothing of consequence happened until the day of the Benghazi attack, when he is said to have complained aloud that "something" had to be done about "an American facility in Benghazi" that he believed was an illegal intelligence operation masquerading as a diplomatic post. Suddenly, at 9:45 that night, "twenty armed men," including "close associates of Khatallah" (not identified by prosecutors), "violently breached" the facility. In the ensuing violence, the Americans were killed. Khatallah is alleged to have participated in the mayhem and to have prevented "emergency responders" from stopping it.
Of course, there is far more to the story than the Justice Department has elected to tell.
In the months preceding September 11, the "diplomatic facility" and other Western compounds in Benghazi had been targeted in terrorist bombings and threats. September 11 would be the eleventh anniversary of the killing of nearly 3,000 Americans by al-Qaeda, which had every incentive to mark that occasion with a significant attack. American forces, moreover, had recently killed Abu Yahya al-Libi, al-Qaeda's top Libyan operative; that prompted Ayman al-Zawahiri, the terror network's leader, to call on fellow jihadists to avenge al-Libi - an incitement issued just a day before the Benghazi attack.
So al-Qaeda was very much on the offensive. Obama, however, was on the campaign trail falsely assuring Americans that the terror network had been "decimated." Obama's decision to back Libyan "rebels" against Moammar Qaddafi had resulted in the arming of anti-American jihadists and the teetering of Libya on the brink of collapse. Obama, however, was on the campaign trail pronouncing his Libya policy a boon for regional stability.
As Obama next called for the ouster of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and reports surfaced of covert American support for the Syrian "rebels," arms used by jihadists in Libya were shipped to jihadists in Syria by way of Turkey. Was that why we needed a "diplomatic facility" with a CIA annex in Benghazi, which was a transit point for some of these weapons? Was that why Ambassador Stevens was in Benghazi meeting with Turkey's ambassador on September 11 despite the obvious peril? The Obama administration refuses to say.
Throughout 2012, American personnel in Benghazi were under heightened terrorist threat. Despite their pleas for more protection, however, the State Department under Secretary Clinton actually reduced security.
Finally, when the September 11 siege occurred, the Obama administration knew from the first moments that it was a terrorist attack of the sort that any competent assessment of the red-blinking intelligence would have predicted. Obama and Hillary Clinton, however, colluded in an elaborate scheme to convince the public that the atrocity was not an al-Qaeda-connected terrorist attack but a spontaneous protest run amok, provoked by an anti-Muslim video.