Seventeen years ago yesterday, Hillary Clinton got her first practice in publicly blowing off the death of a government official...

Ron Brown was Hillary's 1st Chris Stevens

By Jack Cashill

Seventeen years ago yesterday, Hillary Clinton got her first practice in publicly blowing off the death of a government official she had dispatched on a dubious mission to a war-torn corner of the world.
In the weeks and months that followed, Hillary honed her arts of deception, delay and double-dealing and tested the media’s tolerance for the same.
What she and Bill had to conclude was that in a year in which a Democrat was running for re-election, a sycophantic media could be very tolerant indeed.
Some background: On April 3, 1996, then-Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and 34 others died when their Air Force plane crashed into a Croatian mountainside.
Brown’s flight left the Tuzla airport in Bosnia, a Muslim country. As in Libya, not everyone in Bosnia was thrilled by America’s intervention, and some were downright hostile to the American presence.
For no good reason, Hillary had made an unanticipated stop in Tuzla – without Bill – just a few days before Brown’s fatal flight.
Unlike with the case of the late U.S ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, however, there is no evidence Islamic terrorists killed Brown. Here is what we know for sure about Ron Brown’s last days.
To protect his son Michael from prison, Ron Brown threatened to expose the White House’s yet unrevealed Asian fundraising scheme, in which Brown played a major role.
Just weeks before his death, Brown started going to church for the first time in ages. He was scared for his life and that of his confidante, Nolanda Hill.
The Croatian government insisted on a Dubrovnik stop an unprecedented 36 hours before Brown’s scheduled landing.
The Air Force called the pilot’s nearly two-mile deviation into a Croatian hillside “inexplicable.” No aircraft had ever drifted inland before at that airport. The AWACS data suggest sabotage of the ground-based navigation system, a line of inquiry the Air Force was not allowed to pursue.
For the first time ever on friendly soil, the White House ordered the Air Force to skip the “safety” phase of the investigation and move directly to the “accident” phase. 
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