Maxwell needs backup

In response to Rep. Cummings: Maxwell Never Mentioned Sifting by State Dept. (Update: Sharyl Attkisson on Rep. Cummings’ Denial):

I’ve been somewhat lukewarm towards the Ray Maxwell revelation about Hillary Clinton’s operatives scrubbing the Benghazi documents, not because I doubt it’s true – the Clintons have a long history of doing such things, culminating with the astounding spectacle of their droogie Sandy Berger shoving damaging material down his pants – but because it’s got to be corroborated, or it won’t make much difference.

As you’ve chronicled here, it’s all too easy for corrupt stonewall artists like Elijah Cummings to impugn Maxwell and turn this into the story of one disgruntled ex-State employee trying to get even with his old boss.  The media will be happy to report that story, assuming this even reaches the point that they feel obliged to report on Maxwell at all.  It might be within Trey Gowdy’s power to force a smidgen of coverage by putting Maxwell front and center at the Select Committee hearings – which the Democrat-media complex is already trying to paint as a waste of time – but if the whole thing ends up as one man telling a story, it’s not going to have much of a half-life.  They’ll make Maxwell out to be a nut – you’ll hear a lot about that poetry he wrote – and that’ll be the end of it.

You would think the media would get angry about Cummings making fools of them with his carefully constructed half-truth about Maxwell never mentioning the document-sifting session before, goading them into the kind of coverage Sharyl Attkisson punctured with one phone call and a couple of Tweets, but of course they won’t.  They’ll be happy to help Cummings and his crew add more bricks to that stone wall.  It will never occur to the media that they’re being tricked out of covering a potentially explosive story.  The Benghazi story ended with Obama’s re-election for most of our “journalists.”  They certainly don’t think it has any relevance to Hillary Clinton’s ascension to the throne.

That all changes if Maxwell has backup.  If someone else corroborates his story, or if Gowdy’s committee has hard evidence of some sort, this will become a scandal that cannot be ignored or waved away.  It could conceivably end with the prosecution of Clinton’s operatives, and maybe Hillary Clinton herself.  The mega-tonnage of the scandal will depend heavily on exactly what documents were “sifted” – if Maxwell’s story proves out, but Clinton’s people scrubbed things that don’t seem very explosive now, following years of slow-motion revelations, it’ll be a minor Sunday-show dust-up that probably doesn’t affect the Clinton 2016 campaign much.  

So that’s what I need to see before I assign this story “bombshell” status: supporting evidence that makes it something more than Hillary and Obama’s word vs. Some Guy From the State Department, and some idea of exactly what Clinton concealed.