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, senior State Department officials close to
Hillary Clinton ordered the removal of a mid-level 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 now 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.
Maxwell
was removed from his job on Dec. 18, the day after the ARB report was
released, and subsequently placed on administrative leave, which is
meant to give the State Department time to investigate whether Maxwell
should be fired or return to work. Five months later, that investigation
seems stalled and Maxwell sits at home, where he continues to be paid
but is not allowed to return to his job.
The
State Department declined to comment on the reasons that Maxwell and
the other officials were placed on administrative leave, or on what the
four were told about the reasons for the decision. It did confirm that
the ARB did not recommend direct disciplinary action because it didn’t
find misconduct or a direct breach of duty by the officials. “As a
matter of policy, we don’t speak to specific personnel matters,” said
State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki.
Since
the leave is not considered a formal disciplinary action, Maxwell has
no means to appeal the status, as he would if he had been outright
fired. To this day, he says, nobody from the State Department has ever
told him why he was singled out for discipline. He has never had access
to the classified portion of the ARB report, where all of the details
regarding personnel failures leading up to Benghazi are confined. He
also says he has never been shown any evidence or witness testimony
linking him to the Benghazi incident.
Maxwell
says he had planned to retire last September, but extended his time
voluntarily after the Sept. 11 attack to help the bureau in its time of
need. Now, he is refusing to retire until his situation is clarified. He
is seeking a restoration of his previous position, a public statement
of apology from State, reimbursement for his legal fees, and an
extension of his time in service to equal the time he has spent at home
on administrative leave.
“For any FSO being at work is the essence of everything and being deprived of that and being cast out was devastating,” he said.
Soon
after being removed from his job, Maxwell was visited at his home late
one evening and directed to sign a letter acknowledging his
administrative leave and forfeiting his right to enter the State
Department. He refused to sign, responding in writing that it amounted
to an admission he had done something wrong.
“They just wanted me to go away but I wouldn’t just go away,” he said. “I knew Chris [Stevens]. Chris was a friend of mine.”
“Behind Beth’s back, Maxwell ended up being put on administrative leave.”
The
decision to place Maxwell on administrative leave was made by Clinton’s
chief of staff Cheryl Mills, according to three State Department
officials with direct knowledge of the events. On the day after the
unclassified version of the ARB’s report was released in December, Mills
called Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs
Beth Jones and directed her to have Maxwell leave his job immediately.
"Cheryl
Mills directed me to remove you immediately from the [deputy assistant
secretary] position," Jones told Maxwell, according to Maxwell.
The
decision to remove Maxwell and not Jones seems to conflict with the
finding of the ARB that responsibility for the security failures leading
up to the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi should
fall on more senior officials.
“We
fixed [the responsibility] at the assistant secretary level, which is
in our view the appropriate place to look, where the decision-making in
fact takes place, where, if you like, the rubber hits the road," Pickering said when releasing the ARB report.
The
report found “systemic failures and leadership and management
deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus of the State
Department,” namely the Diplomatic Security (DS) and Near East bureaus.
Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns testified in December
that requests for more security in Libya, denied by the State
Department, did reach the assistant secretaries and “it may be that some
of my colleagues on the 7th floor saw them as well."
But
Jones was not disciplined in any way following the release of the
report, nor was the principal deputy assistant secretary of State at
NEA, Liz Dibble, who is slated to receive a plush post as the deputy
chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in London this summer. In the DS
bureau, the assistant secretary, principal deputy, and deputy assistant
all lost their jobs. In the NEA bureau, only Maxwell was asked to leave.
Jones
and Dibble were responsible for security in Libya, Maxwell and three
State Department officials said. What’s more, when Maxwell was promoted
to his DAS position in August 2011, most responsibility for Libya was
carved out of his portfolio, which also included Algeria, Morocco, and
Tunisia. Although Maxwell did some work on Libya, all security related
decisions were handled by Dibble and Jones, according to the three
officials.
One
State Department official close to the issue told The Daily Beast that
Clinton’s people told the leadership of the NEA bureau that Maxwell
would be given another job at State when the Benghazi scandal blew over.
Maxwell said Jones assured him he would eventually be brought back to
NEA as a “senior advisor,” but that Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff,
reneged.
“The
deal that NEA made with Cheryl Mills and the 7th floor was to keep Ray
within NEA and just give him another portfolio. For whatever reason, it
didn’t go down like that and that was a complete shock to Beth [Jones],
because that was the deal that Beth made with Cheryl,” the official
said. “Behind Beth’s back, Maxwell ended up being put on administrative
leave.”
Jones
and Mills both declined to comment for this article, but a source close
to Mills denied that any kind of deal was made or reneged on regarding
Maxwell’s future employment. The decision to place Maxwell on
administrative leave was based on the classified portion of the ARB’s
report, which named Maxwell specifically, the source said, but since the
ARB didn’t say that Maxwell had committed a “breach of duty,” he
couldn’t be outright fired.
“Administrative
leave was the best option available within the very narrow authority
that anyone had. That was the harshest discipline the department could
mete out,” a State Department official involved in the decision making
process said. “There really weren’t any other options available. If they
could have been fired they would have been.”
One
person who reviewed the classified portion of the ARB report told The
Daily Beast that it called out Maxwell for the specific infraction of
not reading his daily classified briefings, something that person said
Maxwell admitted to the ARB panel during his interview.
“The
crime that he is being punished for is not reading his intel. That
explains why Jones and Dibble were not disciplined,” this person said.
Maxwell
had no response to this allegation other than to say he has not been
officially counseled on what he did wrong and has not been allowed to
read the classified report. Also, he believes that Clinton’s staff, not
the ARB, was in charge of the review of the attack that took place
during her watch.
“The
flaws in the process were perpetrated by the political leadership at
State with the complicity of the senior career leadership,” he said.
“They should be called to account.”
“There are people who seem to have responsibility who have yet to be held accountable.”
Eight
months after the attack, Congressional investigators and outside groups
are still pressing the State Department to explain how the ARB came to
the conclusion that four mid-level officials were the only ones with
responsibility for the failures that led up to the attack.
The
Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Darryl Issa (R-CA), has
announced that he will subpoena Pickering in order to compel him to
submit to a deposition. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), the chairman of the
subcommittee on national security, told The Daily Beast in an interview
that he wants to know exactly why Maxwell and the three other officials
were placed on administrative leave, and have not been granted due
process to defend themselves.
“I
certainly would like to hear their side of the story. It seems fair
that they should be given that opportunity. If they can’t get it within
the administration, I think Congress would love to hear their story,” he
said. “Secretary Clinton says she takes responsibility, but that seems
like lip service rather than the reality because there are people who
seem to have responsibility who have yet to be held accountable and I
don’t understand that.”
Chaffetz and Issa sent a letter
in January to State asking why Clinton, Deputy Secretary Tom Nides, and
Deputy Secretary Bill Burns were not interviewed by the ARB.
Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy admitted in Oct.
10 congressional testimony that he was in the loop on decisions
regarding security requests in Libya before the attack. He was
interviewed by the ARB but not identified as having done anything wrong.
“The
ARB tried to blame everyone but hold no one responsible, except for
some of the lower level people who were not in control of the
situation,” said Chaffetz. “You have a report that seems incomplete at
best.”
Susan
Johnson, the president of the American Foreign Service Association
(AFSA), told The Daily Beast that administrative leave does damage to a
foreign service officer’s reputation and career if it goes on for more
than a couple of weeks, much less several months. The treatment amounts
to a de facto disciplinary action, she said.
“There’s
a feeling that foreign service officers often end up as scapegoats when
scandals rise to congressional or public attention,” she said. “Our
broader concern is to ensure some measure of fairness and transparency,
ensure some reasonable process that meets some kind of minimal standard
here.”
AFSA
sent a letter to Burns in January asking a number of questions about
the review process and the criteria senior department leaders used in
choosing to discipline the four individuals removed from their jobs in
relation to the Benghazi attack.
“The State Department began an administrative process to review the
status of the four individuals placed on administrative leave. That
review process continues and Secretary Kerry will be briefed with an
update, and decisions will be made about the status of these employees,”
Psaki told the Beast. “This internal administrative process can take
some time.”
She
added: “It is also important to remember that the four people discussed
are all long-serving government officials who over the years have
provided dedicated service to the U.S. Government in challenging
assignments.”
Maxwell just wants his day in court. He wrote a poem
on his personal blog in April which referred to the State Department’s
treatment of the four officials removed from their jobs after Benghazi
as a “lynching.”
Last week, he posted another poem about the growing Benghazi scandal.
“The
web of lies they weave gets tighter and tighter in its deceit until it
bottoms out -at a very low frequency – and implodes,” he wrote. “Yet all
the while, the more they talk, the more they lie, and the deeper down
the hole they go.”
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