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All right, introducing Kenneth Vogel from Politico.
Huge story from last week.
Obama DOJ drops charges against alleged broker of Libyan weapons.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Hey, great to be with you.
Good to have you here.
So, well, go ahead.
Tell us, who is Mark Turry?
So Mark Turry is an arms dealer who had done extensive work with the U.S. government.
It's important to note that the U.S. government had been a client of his, or he had made deals at the behest of the U.S. government.
He believed that he had permission, in fact, one of the permission encouragements from the U.S. government, the CIA, actually, to broker a deal that would send weapons to Libya to arm the Libyan rebels, who at the time were seeking to overthrow Gaddafi, which was a goal of the U.S. foreign policy community, including the Clinton State Department.
And he went through all the paperwork necessary to make this happen.
And eventually, the State Department, through the Department of Justice, actually brought a case against him, alleging that he was doing something that was prohibited.
Well, he said, no, in fact, in the various filings in his court case, he said that we were doing this at the behest of the CIA and, he believes, at the behest of the Clinton State Department.
And so this case proceeded for a couple of years and cost him a whole lot of money in attorney's fees, and suddenly, with a disclosure deadline looming for the government, where the government would have had to have produced some information, including classified depositions of CIA, active CIA personnel, who apparently testified about the role of the State Department in this.
Suddenly, rather than produce that information, the case was dropped, and dropped sort of mysteriously.
And tourist people say, it was dropped because we essentially had the goods, and the State Department was going to have to produce the goods, showing that this went all the way up to the top in the State Department, and that would be very damaging for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, as well as for the Obama administration, because, if you remember, Hillary Clinton was asked specifically about this, whether she had any knowledge of or role in providing arms to these Libyan rebels during the Benghazi hearings before the Senate in 2013.
And she said, no, well, if there's information that shows that, in fact, she did have knowledge of this, and it was done at her behest, that would be catching her in a really tough spot.
Right.
When, yeah, the proper answer there is either, I don't remember, or I can't talk about that in a public hearing, or whatever, if it's a classified thing, I can neither confirm nor deny.
But not, no, the answer, Senator, is absolutely, I have no idea what you're talking about.
That's perjury.
Yeah, I mean, that was the allegation, and it's been made since then.
The questioning was done by Senator Rand Paul, who, at that time, 2013, was gearing up for his own potential presidential bid for the Republican Party presidential nomination.
And at the time, he kind of dropped it, but you could tell from his questioning, if you go back and read the transcript, he knew that there was something there, and kind of asked an open-ended question, and she said that she wasn't aware of it.
And since then, we have had some argument, and I don't know if it was related to this case, but certainly the timing seems to be coincidental.
There was a suggestion that maybe WikiLeaks and Julian Assange might have some emails that would shed light on Hillary Clinton's knowledge of or role in providing arms for these rebels.
And so you have these two tracks happening at once, the WikiLeaks sort of looming disclosure, as well as the U.S. government being required to produce documents and testimony in this case, that all of a sudden, instead of pursuing it, the government just sort of rolled up its case, dismissed the charges.
And it's interesting to note, these are not, Scott, just like, okay, we're gonna, you know, the defendant in this case admits that there was, you know, some error on his part, but that, you know, they were dropping the case, but these charges are dropped with prejudice.
That's a big deal.
And they were dropped without a fine, usually in a settlement like this, if the government thinks they have a strong case, first of all, they wouldn't bring the case if they didn't think they would have a strong case, second of all, if they're gonna spend this much resources pursuing the case, they would at least get something, get some concession out of it, get a fine, or, you know, get an admission of guilt, but a settlement or a partial admission of guilt.
They got nothing out of this, and Torrey's people suggest that it's because they knew that if they continued to pursue this case, there could be some very damaging disclosures.
Yeah.
Well, and listen, I mean, we already know from so many other sources, the Judicial Watch, emails that Judicial Watch got, that Judge Napolitano has written about, and plus, just contemporaneous, I think Rand Paul was even referencing the Sunday Times, which had, you know, done reporting about ships full of guns landing in Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood and other jihadis fighting over who was gonna get them and all this kind of thing, and that was back at the time.
Yeah, and there's no dispute that, in fact, the U.S. government did play a role in arming these rebels, though they haven't, like, officially come out and said, this is U.S. government policy, but rather have suggested, the suggestion has been that it was sort of a covert operation through the CIA.
Well, the information that Torrey allegedly has would seem to suggest otherwise, that it was official policy in Clinton's State Department, not the CIA.
Well, why do you think they indicted him?
Because, yeah, I mean, I think that's beyond question.
We all know the CIA and the State Department were running guns to the jihadis to fight in that thing.
Right.
But, so, why would the Department of Justice try to do something about this?
That's the part that doesn't make any sense, or, I guess, maybe, why would somebody at the State Department not give them a call and say, hey, this is one of our covert jigs, and so you guys should back off?
Well, the suggestion from Torrey's people is that this was an effort to scapegoat him for a policy that was not successful.
You know, there's no suggestion here.
I mean, the big so what here, I think, is, like, what happened to these guns?
Like, if it was a, you know, if there was an arming of these rebels and then the guns, you know, were used, for instance, in the 2012 terrorist attack on the consulate that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and security personnel, U.S. security personnel, then that would be a huge, or even a bigger problem than just a policy question.
There is no evidence of that, but, nor is there a really, like, a bright line that can be traced.
I mean, once these weapons are in the hands of these rebels, it's very difficult to determine sort of where they ended up, and there has, in fact, been reporting that suggests that some of the weapons that were in the hands of some of these rebels in Libya, not necessarily these weapons, but some weapons, fell into Isis's hands.
So, you know, there's a chain of custody issue here, and, in fact, with the guy, with the Torrey weapons in particular, the State Department says, these weapons never made it to Libya.
He was trying to circumvent our, you know, authority, our prohibition on shipping arms to Libya by going through Qatar, or the UAE, but that these arms never made it to Libya.
So, again, raising the question that you raised, why bring the case in the first place?
Yeah.
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And by the way, just to, for, on point of fact there, when you say ended up in the hands of the Islamic State, are you talking about after they were transferred to Syria, or you're talking about the Libyan branch of the Islamic State, which is also now a thing?
Right.
Well, I mean, I guess I'm talking about that it's impossible to say definitively, but there has been reporting that suggests that, you know, that once they make it into the hands of these rebels, it's sort of impossible to know where they would end up until you see the Islamic State being active in Libya, as well as, obviously, in Syria, and the civil war raging there.
Well, and of course, there's been plenty of reports of these guns ending up in the Sinai Peninsula, in the hands of Egyptian rebels against the police state there, so.
Yeah.
Well, I'll tell you, I mean, there is potentially, we could potentially have some clarity on this, but, you know, if the proceedings in the Tariq case were made public, I mean, there had already been depositions of CIA personnel that are classified in that case, and I know that we, as well as other media outlets, are seeking, through the Freedom of Information Act, to get a hold of those through the State Department.
I think the chances are extremely slim that we would get them, but we are aware that the CIA told some of the people who did testify in this case that if they chose to testify, you know, it was their decision, but the CIA would go through their testimony after the fact to determine if it involved the disclosure of any classified information, and they would redact that from the testimony, so you see how this could be a very sensitive issue for the State Department, for the Department of Justice, for Hillary Clinton, and her presidential campaign, as well as for the Obama administration.
I'll just add one more wrinkle, Scott, that I think was interesting to us that we didn't really get to report out, you know, that Mark Torrey actually had, initially, had a lawyer who he paid a lot of money to, and he just ran out of money, because it's expensive when the government is trying to prosecute a case like this against you.
The court appointed an attorney for Torrey who lasted just a short amount of time.
Unfortunately, the representation was seen as unsatisfactory, and so Torrey went back to the court and said, you know, we'd like a different court-appointed attorney, so they appointed an extremely expensive, top-notch lawyer who ended up getting him out of it, you know, essentially brokering the settlement.
Well, this lawyer works for the same firm that represents Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, the Democratic National Committee, Barack Obama and his family personally, the Obama campaign, so yet another wrinkle there.
I asked them.
I asked the firm, as well as the lead lawyer on Torrey's case and Hillary Clinton's lead lawyer from the firm, hey, how'd you guys manage to, you know, what kind of firewalls did you have in here that would sort of inoculate you against potential conflict, representing two clients who could end up on, you know, very opposite sides of the same case, and I didn't get any response, so yet another unanswered question in this story.
Well, and also, how is it that they ended up just being the lucky firm that has both of these people for clients in the first place, if it was supposedly, they were supposedly picked by the judge, you said, right?
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, the judge is the Republican appointee.
It's always tough to know in these cases when you have a court-appointed attorney, you know.
I'm always reluctant.
My mother-in-law is a federal- That could be a coincidence.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Is a federal public defender.
We have public, you know, public defenders of the family, so I'm always reluctant to get versions on the motives for taking a case, but, you know, then they cannot, you know, they only have my understanding is if you're in that rotation of being like a court-appointed attorney, you only have like a few sort of like flags that you can raise, you know, challenge flags to use a football analogy, you could say, I don't want to take this client because of this or because of that, so it's tough to know, but it does seem coincidental, and I don't know why they wouldn't answer the question that I posed to both of them about what they did to sort of prevent potential conflict in the case.
All right, now, real quick before I let you go, you mentioned that right before we went on that there was a brand-new WikiLeaks dump, and what's the origin of what they've just dumped this morning?
It's emails?
Yeah, so it's also coming, it's also emails, and it's mostly, it appears, through John Podesta's account, but a lot of interesting communications with the Clinton Foundation about fundraising, including fundraising from Tom Steyer, the San Francisco hedge fund billionaire.
We see a progression of emails mentioning him.
I tweeted a couple, one was in 2008, where this guy is sort of just emerging as a mega-donor, and John Podesta, whose organization, Center for American Progress, had gotten a lot of money from Tom Steyer, John Podesta recommends Tom Steyer to be Obama's first energy secretary, but I thought that was interesting, and then a few years later, 2011, there are emails in which John Podesta's emailing with the Clinton Foundation fundraiser guy by the name of Dennis Chang, who is now the lead fundraiser for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, trying to, quote, steer, I'll give you the exact wording, but he's basically trying to get Tom Steyer to give money to the Clinton Foundation, the wording is, so he recommended Tom Steyer for energy secretary, then worked to, quote, try to push for Clinton Foundation support from Tom Steyer, so you see an interesting nexus there between the Clinton Foundation, Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, John Podesta's group, the Center for American Progress, and the Obama administration.
Yeah.
Hey, by the way, you're obviously very up on this, is it, I'm almost positive it was reported that the FBI said that they had recovered the missing 30,000 emails, the ones that were supposedly all about Chelsea Clinton's upcoming wedding and yoga exercises and this kind of thing, but is that really right, and is there any indication that anybody's ever going to release those?
I mean, I've seen conflicting reporting on that, I don't, I mean, the State Department is still doing a schedule of releases, but as they've gone on, you know, we saw one- Those aren't from the missing 30,000, though, right?
Right.
They're not, A, and B, they've sort of like trickled down to just a little drip, as opposed to the sort of interesting, I actually think, duplicative releases of emails that have already been out there, but I think that, you know, the Trump folks were hoping that WikiLeaks might have some of those.
There's been no indication that WikiLeaks has anything from the State Department.
What they're getting now is through private servers.
That said, Hillary Clinton did have a private server, so who knows?
All right, well, listen, thanks very much for your time, I appreciate it.
Yep, it was a pleasure.
Good work.
All right, so that is Kenneth Vogel, he's at Politico.
This one is, Obama DOJ Drops Charges Against Alleged Broker of Libyan Weapons.
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