Marc Turi’s charges dropped in Libya weapons scheme

Whether there is another chapter to tell in the Hillary Clinton-Benghazi chronicles vanished this week in a U.S. District Court in Arizona.

The Justice Department suddenly moved to drop federal charges against weapons broker Marc Turi, who charges that the Obama administration was aware of his maneuvers to inject Eastern European arms into Libya. His U.S.-licensed Turi Defense Group looked to the turmoil there in 2011 as a potential $267 million bonanza.

In 2014, the Justice Department said the scheme was illegal. It charged Mr. Turi with falsifying a license application to the State Department to sell arms to the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar when, in fact, the recipient would be Libyan rebels under the Transitional National Council. A U.N. resolution banned all arms shipments to Libya, making such a sale against federal law. A supposed sale to Qatar potentially was legal.

But the case against Mr. Turi became less appealing from a prosecutor’s perspective, as the defense team won rulings from the judge for extensive discovery of government classified documents — materials that could touch on Mrs. Clinton’s missteps in Libya. Rather than comply, Justice dropped the charges.

Mr. Turi has said the Obama administration, and thus Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee and the prime mover of NATO intervention in Libya, blessed the moves he made to get rifles, anti-tank rockets, explosives and machine guns into the hands of anti-Moammar Gadhafi fighters.

Rebels, backed by NATO airstrikes, eventually deposed and killed Gadhafi.

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The backdrop to Gadhafi’s fall is Benghazi, where four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador, were killed by terrorists on Sept. 11, 2012.

Republicans charge that Mrs. Clinton botched the U.S. intervention by basically turning a segment of the country over to Islamic terrorists. They also charge that she played a role in covering up the fact that terrorists, not demonstrators as first asserted by the Obama administration, carried out the carnage.

Mr. Turi’s lawyer, Jean-Jacques Cabou of the Perkins Coie law firm, has argued in court that among the bounty of Clinton emails released by the government are discussions between the then-Secretary of State Clinton and others about arms for Libyan rebels.

“We’re entitled to tell the jury, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the secretary of state and her highest staff members were actively contemplating providing exactly the type of military assistance that Mr. Turi is here to answer for,” the defense attorney told the judge at one hearing, according to Politico, which reported the Oct. 3 motion to dismiss charges.

“If we armed the rebels, as publicly reported in many, many sources and as we strongly believe happened and as we believe at least one witness told the grand jury, then documents about that process relate to that effort,” Mr. Cabou said, according to Politico.

There have been two allegations of arms dealing in President Obama’s Libya policy. He recently said he should have paid more attention to the country’s reconciliation post-war. Libya is now home to a substantial number of terrorists for the Islamic State, the army controlling parts of Syria and dwindling territory in Iraq.

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First, there was an allegation that the CIA shipped arms from Libya into Syria to back anti-regime rebels. A House Intelligence Committee investigation found no evidence of such activity.

Mrs. Clinton said at a 2013 Senate hearing that she had no knowledge of any CIA arms shipments.

“Libya was awash in weapons before the revolution,” Mrs. Clinton said. “Obviously, there were additional weapons introduced. But the vast, vast majority came out of Gaddafi warehouses and were then went on the black market, were seized by militia, seized by other groups, and have made their way out of Libya into other countries in the region, and have made their way to Syria, we believe.”

Second, there is Mr. Turi’s allegation that the administration wanted his arms deal to go through, a charge not proven, but still dangling out there.

“If you want to limit the exposure to the U.S. government, what you simply do is outsource it to your allies,” Mr. Turi told Fox News.