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Arms dealer says Obama admin used him as a scapegoat |
EXCLUSIVE: American arms
dealer Marc Turi, in his first television interview since criminal
charges against him were dropped, told Fox News that the Obama
administration -- with the cooperation of Hillary Clinton’s State
Department -- tried and failed to make him the scapegoat for a 2011
covert weapons program to arm Libyan rebels that spun out of control.
“I would say, 100 percent, I was victimized…to
somehow discredit me, to throw me under the bus, to do whatever it took
to protect their next presidential candidate,” he told Fox News chief
intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge.
The 48-year-old Arizona resident has been at the
epicenter of a failed federal investigation led by the Justice
Department spanning five years and costing the government an estimated
$10 million or more, Turi says.
Turi says the Justice Department abruptly dropped the
case to avoid public disclosure of the weapons program, that was
designed to force the ouster of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi during
the 2011 Arab Spring.
"Those transcripts from current as well as former CIA
officers were classified," Turi said of the evidence. "If any of these
relationships [had] been revealed it would have opened up a can of
worms. There wouldn't have been any good answer for the U.S. government
especially in this election year." The Justice Department faced a
deadline last week to produce records to the defense.
Turi says he was specifically “targeted by the Obama
administration “and “lost everything--my family, my friends, my
business, my reputation.”
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As Fox News has reported extensively, in 2011, the
Obama administration with support from some Republican and Democratic
lawmakers explored options to arm the so-called “Libyan rebels” during
the chaotic Arab Spring but United Nations sanctions prohibited direct
sales.
Turi's plan was to have the U.S. government supply
conventional weapons to the Gulf nations Qatar and UAE, which would then
in turn supply them to Libya. But Turi says he never sold any weapons,
and he was cut out of the plan. Working with CIA, Turi said Clinton's
State Department had the lead and used its own people, with weapons
flowing to Libya and Syria.
"Some (weapons) may have went out under control that
we had with our personnel over there and the others went to these
militia. That's how they lost control over it," Turi said. "I can assure
you that these operations did take place and those weapons did go in
different directions."
Asked by Fox News who got the weapons -- Al Qaeda,
Ansar al-Sharia, or ISIS -- Turi said: "All of them, all of them, all of
them."
Turi exchanged emails in 2011 with then U.S. envoy to
the Libyan opposition Chris Stevens. A day after the exchange about
Turi's State Department application to sell weapons, Clinton wrote on
April 8, 2011 to aide Jake Sullivan, "fyi. the idea of using private
security experts to arm the opposition should be considered."
Asked if the email exchanges are connected or a
coincidence, Turi said, "When you look at this timeline, none of it was a
coincidence. It was all strategically managed and it had to come from
her own internal circle."
Turi also told Fox News that he believes emails sent
about the weapons programs were deleted by Hillary Clinton and her team
because that “it would have gone to an organization within the Bureau of
Political Military affairs within the State Department known as PM/RSAT
(Office of Regional Security and Arms Transfers.) That’s where you
would find Jake Sullivan, Andrew Shapiro and a number of political
operatives that would have been intimately involved with this foreign
policy."
The four felony counts -- which included two of arms
dealing in violation of the Arms Export Control Act and two of lying on
his State Department weapons application -- were dismissed last week
against Turi “with prejudice,” meaning the government cannot come after
him again on this matter.
The Justice Department decision, weeks before the
election, coupled with the now public emails, cast a new light on
Clinton's 2013 Benghazi testimony where she was asked about the movement
of weapons by Sen. Rand Paul.
Paul: Were any of these weapons transferred to other countries. Any countries. Turkey included?
Clinton: Well, senator you'll have to direct that
question to the agency that ran the annex and I will see what
information is available.
Paul: You're saying you don't know?
Clinton: I don't know.
Turi first told his story to Fox News senior
executive producer Pamela Browne in 2014, and since, Turi says he's lost
everything to fight the Justice Department, which had no further
comment beyond the publicly available court records.
"With all the resources that they were throwing at
me, I knew there would have to be some type of explanation of the
operation that was going terribly wrong in Libya," Turi said. "It is
completely un-American...I was a contractor for the Central Intelligence
Agency."
Turi said he is grateful the case is over. "It really
is ungodly, and unjust and unconscionable, that the entire force of the
United States government came after me for a simple application. I was
working for the U.S. government."
Turi added, "I never shipped anything. I never even
received the contract. So all I received was an approval for $534
million to support our interests overseas. And it would have been the
United States government that facilitated that operation from Qatar and
UAE by way of allowing those countries to land their planes and land
their ships in Libya."
Close friend and Turi adviser Robert Stryk described Turi this way to Fox News in a statement:
“Marc Turi is a true patriot who served his country
in the fight against Islamofascist terrorists in the Middle East. His
fraudulent prosecution by Hillary Clinton’s associates in the Justice
Department is deplorable as is the fate of the American heroes murdered
in Benghazi. Our most loyal citizens deserve better."
And Turi hinted there is more to emerge on the 2012 Benghazi attacks which killed four Americans including Stevens.
"Now there’s a flip side to this. Some of the
operations that I was involved in, in another country for the agency has
a linkage and there’s a backstory to the actual buy-back program of the
surface to air missiles that were shipped and mysteriously disappeared
out of Benghazi," Turi said. "So we can save that for another time, but
the reality is a lot of this could have exposed a number of covert
operations that I don’t think the American public would really want to
know at this point in time.”
Fox News asked the State Department about Turi’s
allegations, and whether no weapons reached extremists groups on
Clinton’s watch. A spokesperson said they would check.