http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/18/us/holder-decision-on-benghazi-case-reverberates.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpHeadline&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-newsHolder Decision on Benghazi Case Reverberates
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDTOCT. 17, 2014
Marshals outside a Washington court for a hearing by Ahmed Abu Khattala, a suspect in the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya. Credit Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images WASHINGTON — Hours after learning that the United States ambassador to Libya and three others had been killed in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012, senior American officials held a secure videoconference call to discuss how to proceed in investigating the attack.
The prosecutor on the call for the Justice Department was Zainab N. Ahmad, one of the department’s most respected national security lawyers. In less than a decade in the United States attorney’s office in Brooklyn, Ms. Ahmad had successfully overseen several high-profile prosecutions, working alongside the New York-based F.B.I. agents who were going to take the lead in investigating Benghazi.
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But as Ms. Ahmad began to build the case with the agents, other prosecutors in the Justice Department began quietly lobbying Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to take it over. Neil H. MacBride, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, which covers Northern Virginia, called a senior F.B.I. official in Washington to strategize about how they could land the case.
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