By Ben Barrack

A legal watchdog group has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Departments of State and Defense. Essentially, the suit demands information about the U.S. operation in Benghazi before the attacks. In particular, the information will reveal much of what eight members of Congress knew and when they knew it.

Ruppersberger (D-MD), Feinstein (D-CA), Rogers (R-MI), and Chambliss (R-GA) ALL know something big about Benghazi and aren’t talking.

I identified these same eight members of Congress on my April 13th radio show as being persons of very specific interest. Thanks to a bombshell report earlier that month by Seymour Hersh entitled, The Red Line and the Rat Line, the names were fairly easy to determine. Four of them are seen in the photo above.

The FOIA lawsuit only further bolsters the credibility of Hersh’s report.

In short, a “Rat Line” was set up in early 2012 in a deal between Barack Obama and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It was a weapons trafficking operation run out of the CIA Annex and Special Mission Compound in Benghazi; the operation began in early 2012 and was run by then CIA Director David Petraeus. Earlier this year, a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) issued an unclassified report that also included a highly classified annex report that detailed all of the specifics of the operation:

Distribution of the annex was limited to the staff aides who wrote the report and to the eight ranking members of Congress – the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate, and the Democratic and Republicans leaders on the House and Senate intelligence committees. This hardly constituted a genuine attempt at oversight: the eight leaders are not known to gather together to raise questions or discuss the secret information they receive.

The eight members of Congress (two of the most important are in bold below) who received that annex are the same eight members named in the FOIA suit, which seeks, in part:

Any and all records detailing the dates on which any official of the [Departments of Defense and State] briefed any of the following members of Congress on matters related to the activities of any agency or department of the U.S. government at the Special Mission Compound and/or classified annex in Benghazi, Libya:

• Rep. John Boehner [Speaker of the House]
• Rep. Mike Rogers [Chairman, House Select Permanent Committee on Intelligence]
• Rep. Charles “Dutch” Ruppersberger [Ranking Member, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence]
• Rep. Nancy Pelosi [Minority Leader of the House]
• Sen. Dianne Feinstein [Chairman, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence]
• Sen. Saxby Chambliss [Vice Chairman, Senate Select Committee in Intelligence]
• Sen. Harry Reid [Senate Majority Leader]
• Sen. Mitch McConnell [Senate Minority Leader]

If you look closely, the two Congressmen in bold – Boehner and Rogers – have big red flags waving over their heads. Of those two, Rogers in particular, should be very concerned. He has exhibited a pattern of behavior that is HIGHLY suspect, to include announcing that he will be resigning from Congress to become a radio talk show host who will almost assuredly fail (he’ll be getting in front of a microphone at a time when he may want to consider pleading the fifth). These myriad issues were chronicled in great detail at Shoebat.com back on May 8th.

Rogers: Not Running in attempt to Hide?

Based on the SSCI report’s annex, all eight members of Congress who received it, learned about the Benghazi operation no later than the report’s release on January 15th of this year. Memo to those eight: The clock is ticking…

…but I digress.

Back to Boehner. As Shoebat.com reported, Boehner demonstrated that he knew about the operation a year earlier, just one day after Hillary Clinton’s testimony in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. During a radio interview, Boehner said he was “familiar” with the claims that “(weapons) were moving toward Turkey” but that “most of what I know about this came from a classified source”.

Sounds like an admission by Boehner that he knew about “the Rat Line” at least a year prior to it being revealed in the SSCI annex report. THAT is a problem:

Don’t be surprised if Boehner follows Rogers out the door. The evidence of the complicity of both men in various aspects of Benghazi – whether operational knowledge or coverup – is quickly reaching the point of critical mass.

It is noteworthy that neither Boehner nor Rogers wanted a House Select Committee on Benghazi. Boehner ultimately relented soon after Judicial Watch released what’s become known as the “Smoking Gun” Benghazi email from White House Deputy Ben Rhodes on September 14, 2012 that instructed then UN Ambassador Susan Rice to blame a video for the attacks. As Shoebat.com reported, the distribution list also included a highly questionable figure named Mehdi K. Alhassani, who has a history with the Muslim Students Association, a Muslim Brotherhood front group.

Last month, another one of the eight – Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) – had the gall to liken herself to a terrorist victim and the House Select Committee as the terrorists, as Shoebat.com reported. In light of what we’re learning about what Feinstein, Boehner, Rogers, et. al. knew and when they knew it, in a twisted sort of way, one can understand why Feinstein might feel that way.

A big difference is that terrorist victims are usually innocent of wrongdoing. At minimum, Feinstein is guilty of covering something up, which would explain her use of such a misplaced metaphor.