Yesterday, the House Democrats had their turn. They released a 339-page report on the events in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012 that mention the name Donald Trump 23 times.
This morning at 5 a.m., the embargo was lifted on the full report from the adults on the House Select Committee on Benghazi shows beyond a doubt that the Obama administration, including then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, engaged in a cover-up of the terrorist attack that was aimed at aiding the president’s reelection.
Claims that the attack was sparked by an obscure anti-Muslim YouTube video were demonstrably false from the get-go, yet the administration continued to run with that narrative on multiple occasions.
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The report affirms that the narrative was crafted by Obama appointees even as Ambassador Christopher Stevens remained missing and did not vaguely reflect eyewitness reports on the ground or real-time updates being provided by Americans under attack.
Eyewitnesses reported hearing “some kind of chanting” before dozens of people rushed the compound armed with an assortment of “AK-47s, grenades, RPG’s … a couple of different assault rifles,” suggesting a coordinated attack.
Fox News notes that give days after the attack, which claimed the lives of Stevens, Ty Woods, Glen Doherty, and Sean Smith:
then-United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice went on every national Sunday talk show. She told Fox News Sunday, “What sparked the recent violence was the airing on the Internet of a very hateful, very offensive video that has offended many people around the world.”
The GOP committee report also identified for the first time a White House meeting that was convened roughly three hours into the attack and included deputies to senior Cabinet members and Clinton.
Stevens was missing at the time. But the report found “much of the conversation focused on the video (which) is surprising given no direct link or solid evidence existed connecting the attacks in Benghazi and the video at the time ….”
The report found that “five of the 10 action items from the rough notes of the 7:30pm meeting reference the video.”
Obama administration officials were concocting their YouTube narrative while the attack was in progress, then relaying those lies to the public several days later.
Clinton was the first to do so, issuing the administration’s lone statement that night, which read in part “some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet.”
That same night she sent an email to her daughter that told the truth: “Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an Al Queda-like [sic] group.”
Clinton’s lies to the public didn’t end there, especially when it came to updating the families of the victims.
Reminder: Hillary Clinton & Barack Obama stood in front of the flag draped coffins of four dead Americans and lied to their families.
— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) June 28, 2016
Four separate family members have corroborated the account that Clinton blamed the video. Upon meeting those family members at Andrews Air Force Base on Sept 14, 2012, Clinton made the following statement to Patricia Smith (Sean Smith’s mother), Michael Ingmire (Sean Smith’s uncle), Kate Quigley (Glen Doherty’s sister), and Charles Woods (Tyrone Woods’ father):
We are going to have the filmmaker arrested who was responsible for the death of your son.
When the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes spoke with the elder Woods, he said:
I remember those words: ‘who was responsible for the death of your son.’ She was blaming him and blaming the movie.
Rep. [score]Jim Jordan [/score]accused the administration of orchestrating an elaborate lie to the American people because of his desire to hold onto power, telling CNN:
The evidence shows, and shows rather strongly, that they mislead the American people and said, ‘we can’t tell the truth. We can’t talk about how the security situation was. We can’t talk about the fact that this was a terrorist attack. We have to mislead the American people because we are just eight weeks before an election, this was supposed to be our legacy.’
Will the findings have any impact on Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions or on Obama’s legacy? Not if Americans accept the Democrat-only version of what went down. Their report absolves Clinton of any blame and optimistically concludes:
We hope our report will put to rest the conspiracy theories about Benghazi once and for all and return the focus to where it belongs – on the goal of improving the security of Americans serving abroad.
The next move in this ugly chess match should be interesting.
Cross-posted in somewhat altered form at the Mental Recession
