Donald Trump’s Niger scandal just turned into a (real) Benghazi scandal

| 12:55 am EDT October 19, 2017
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When it comes to fake political scandals, none has been as notoriously long running as Benghazi. Four Americans lost their lives in an incident which was thoroughly tragic but not the least bit scandalous. Yet the Republicans disrespected the memory of those four Americans by falsely trying to spin Benghazi into a Barack Obama scandal, and then later into a Hillary Clinton scandal. That’s about to become a problem for them, because Donald Trump’s Niger scandal closely mirrors what the Republicans were merely pretending Benghazi was.

Four U.S. soldiers were killed in Niger two weeks ago, and no one knows what they were doing there – except that it came shortly after Niger curiously signed a military cooperation agreement with Russia. Donald Trump and his administration have been so desperate to keep the media and the public from paying attention to the Niger military op, he’s done everything from nixing a prepared statement acknowledging the deaths of the soldiers, to avoiding calling their families.

It’s now abundantly clear that Trump doesn’t want the American people to know what the military operation in Niger was about, or how those four U.S. soldiers were killed, or what they were doing when they died. Trump lost a U.S. soldier earlier this year when he ordered an ill advised raid in Yemen, yet he didn’t seek to cover it up. So it’s not as if this is merely his modus operandi for his military failures. No, there’s something specifically scandalous about this that he’s trying to hide – and considering that his entire presidency has been based around kissing Russia’s ass, the Niger-Russia connection cannot be overlooked.

Donald Trump’s Niger scandal is now everything that Benghazi never was, but was long falsely accused of being: a needless loss of four American lives caused by some combination of incompetence and underhanded motive on the part of the White House. It took five minutes to get the real truth about Benghazi, before the Republicans shamefully spent five years lying about it. We must have answers on what really happened in Niger. Benghazi was the ultimate fake scandal. This is the real thing.