Obama Administration Threatening Benghazi Survivors To Keep Them Quiet

This if nothing else ought to tell us that there's a lot about the Benghazi fiasco we're going to find out.

Rep. Darrel Issa of the House Oversight Committee is holding new hearings and specifically advised some of the survivors that they were going to be subpoenaed and to 'lawyer up' in his words.

The Administration's response has been to threaten the Benghazi aurvivors in an attempt to silence them and to deny their attorneys access to material needed to secure their rights as whistle blowers, something illegal under federal law.

Rep. Darrell Issa, the Republican from California who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, wrote to Secretary of State John Kerry on April 26 to complain that the department has not provided a process by which attorneys like Toensing can receive the security clearances necessary for them to review classified documents and other key evidence.

“It is unavoidable that Department employees identifying themselves as witnesses in the Committee’s investigation will apply for a security clearance to allow their personal attorneys to handle sensitive or classified material,” Issa wrote. “The Department’s unwillingness to make the process for clearing an attorney more transparent appears to be an effort to interfere with the rights of employees to furnish information to Congress.”

Victoria Toensing is an attorney representing one of the whistleblowers and said publicly that he and others have been threatened by members of the Obama Administration.

“I’m not talking generally, I’m talking specifically about Benghazi – that people have been threatened,” Toensing said in an interview Monday. “And not just the State Department. People have been threatened at the CIA.”

“It’s frightening and they’re doing some very despicable threats to people,” she said. “Not ‘We’re going to kill you,’ or not ‘We’re going to prosecute you tomorrow,’ but they’re taking career people and making them well aware that their careers will be over [if they cooperate with congressional investigators].”

Toensing has also complained about not being given access by the State Department to materials needed to adequately represent her client. Since she's a former Justice Department official and a former counsel to the Senate intelligence committee, she already has a top security clearance - but the State Department is still refusing to release the information she needs.

Odd, but in spite of what she's saying and in spite of Issa's letter to Secretary Kerry, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell still claims he's 'unaware' of any attorneys seeking security clearances...or even attorneys like Toensing who already have such clearances seeking access to classified materials.

So somebody's lying. Three guesses who...

But eventually we're going to get some answers, especially since some of the government functionaries in State and the CIA appear ready to testify regardless of how they're pressured.

From what I'm hearing, a number of them are fairly disgusted over what happened in Benghazi and the subsequent coverup, and they're not going to stay silent.