For those who missed it over the weekend, the House Select Committee on Benghazi released a significant email on Saturday by an unknown official at the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, Libya. The email was dated September 14th, 2012, three days after the attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi. In the email, the official warned the U.S. State Department, headed at the time by Secretary Hillary Clinton, not to blame the deaths of Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods, and Glen Doherty on the “Innocence of Muslims” YouTube video. The person who wrote the email stated that bringing up the video would “draw unwanted attention to it” and believed that the Benghazi terrorist attack should have been differentiated from, not lumped together with, the violent protests at the other American embassies that were taking place around the same time.
The text of the September 14th, 2012, message reads:
Colleagues, I mentioned to [redacted] this morning, and want to share with all of you, our view at Embassy Tripoli that we must be cautious in our local messaging with regard to the inflammatory film trailer, adapting it to Libyan conditions. Our monitoring of the Libyan media and conversations with Libyans suggest that the films [sic] not as explosive of an issue here as it appears to be in other countries in the region. The overwhelming majority of the FB comments and tweets we’ve received from Libyans since the Ambassador’s death have expressed deep sympathy, sorrow, and regret. They have expressed anger at the attackers, and emphasized that this attack does not represent Libyans or Islam. Relatively few have even mentioned the inflammatory video. So if we post messaging about the video specifically, we may draw unwanted attention to it. And it is becoming increasingly clear that the series of events in Benghazi was much more terrorist attack than a protest which escalated into violence,” the official continued. It is our opinion that in our messaging, we want to distinguish, not conflate, the events in other countries with this well-planned attack by militant extremists. I have discussed this with [redacted] and he shares PAS’s view.
Yet that same day, Hillary Clinton said what the official in Tripoli warned her not to say, and she said it at the remains ceremony for those four men:
This has been a difficult week for the State Department and for our country. We’ve seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men. We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful internet video that we had nothing to do with. It is hard for the American people to make sense of that because it is senseless, and it is totally unacceptable.
It was at this ceremony where Clinton told Charles Woods, the father of Tyrone Woods, “We’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video,” according to Mr. Woods, though he had no clue what video she was talking about.
Also that day, then-White House Spokesman Jay Carney stated that the “volatile situation” (in other words the attacks, including the one in Benghazi) was “in response not to United States policy, not to, obviously, the Administration, not to the American people. It is in response to a video, a film, that we have judged to be reprehensible and disgusting…this is in response to a video that is offensive to Muslims…”
These are the same talking points that the White House Deputy Strategic Communications Adviser at the time, Ben Rhodes, stressed the White House should use, according to documents acquired by Judicial Watch last year.
The Tripoli email was dated at 6:43:39 AM that day. The Rhoades email was sent out later, at 8:09 PM. No one cared to listen to what the people who were in Libya had to say, it seems.
Administration officials such as Ambassador Susan Rice continued to blame the video well after September 14th of 2012. A montage compiling a few of these instances can be seen here on The Blaze if a refresher is necessary.
Proggers have been saying all along that this Benghazi business is totally political. Damn straight it is. Let’s not forget that this took place two months before Obama’s re-election. The Administration knew this made him look like a horrible leader when it came to foreign relations. Ergo, something other than the Administration’s ineptitude needed to be blamed for the events that took place that horrible day and night in Benghazi, eleven years after the attacks on our country by radical Muslims that killed 3,000 innocent people. Why not blame some cheap video with only a few hundred views?
As noted by The Hill, the former head of the State Department who kept her government-related emails on private servers testified just over a week ago that the video affected the events of September 11th, 2012, in Benghazi:
“I still believe to this day that the video played a role,” she told the House Select Committee on Benghazi during her testimony that evening.
“I have been consistent about speaking out about the video from the very first day,” Clinton said. “I think it is important to look at the totality of what is going on.”
The totality of what was going on was that Hillary in private was resolute in knowing that the video was irrelevant when it came to Benghazi. Her talk with Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Qandil the day after the Benghazi attack confirms this, in which she told him, “We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack–not a protest.” She told him, “[W]e believe the group that claimed responsibility for this was affiliated with Al Qaeda.”
And on the night of September 11th, 2012, Hillary sent her daughter Chelsea (referring to her under the pseudonym “Diane Reynolds”) an email in which she wrote, “Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an Al Qaeda-like group.”
So four Americans died, Hillary Clinton still lies, and Democrats are laughing all the way to November, 2016.
Why does this woman still deserve to see the sun, let alone have the slightest chance in the universe of becoming our next U.S. President?
(Thanks to FreedomRecon for her valuable assist with this post.)
