Hillary Starts Spinning Benghazi

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday began to pre-spin her Benghazi Committee testimony, but both of the surrogate defenders trotted out on Monday passed on the question of whether her private email setup, unearthed by the committee, was legitimate.

The two former high-ranking Obama administration officials said they didn’t know about Clinton’s secret server at her New York home, and they dodged questions on whether such a server was approved.

Derek Chollet, former assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, and Matthew Olsen, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said they didn’t know Clinton had her own server. Chollet, asked if such a server was approved, said he’d “pass” on the question.

“It’s not really for me to say,” he said in a conference call with reporters set up by the liberal National Security Network.

Chollet did, however, blame Congress for the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks at Benghazi, Libya, which left four Americans dead, including the ambassador.

“Frequently, we sought additional funding for these critical and timely programs inside Libya,” he said. “Unfortunately, Congress refused the request for additional funding.”

Clinton, who will testify Thursday, believes she has already rebutted Benghazi-related accusations. The panel, she said Sunday, has become “a partisan arm of the Republican National Committee.”

Benghazi Committee Chairman Rep. Trey Gowdy, though, denies she is the focus of his probe, unlike what Rep. Kevin McCarthy claimed before his run for the speakership imploded. Nevertheless, Clinton has much to answer for, and even the defenders dispatched Monday had damaging things to say — or more accurately, to not say. And they often reverted to old storylines disproved by comprehensive reporting.

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Several reviews of the attacks that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three others in Benghazi, Libya, have blamed management failures — not insufficient funding.

Olsen said the initial attack on the consulate appeared to be “haphazard and opportunistic,” and that it was “plausible” that a YouTube video critical of Islam played a role given a similar disturbance that had occurred earlier in Egypt. Those claims have been widely discredited. But he also said that a follow-up mortar attack on a nearby CIA station hours later was “coordinated and proficient.”

And, he acknowledged that intelligence officials quickly concluded that reports of a protest at the embassy compound were false. President Obama, who slept through the attacks before a fund-raising trip to Las Vegas, took days to say so.

“It certainly was my assessment, and I think shared, essentially, by everyone that I was working with on the night of the attacks and the days after that this was terrorism,” Olsen said. “And that never changed.”

That’s not what Clinton, or Obama, said in the days following. Both refused to call the Sept. 11, 2012, attack terrorism.

Several reviews of the attacks that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three others in Benghazi have blamed management failures, not insufficient funding — and not a YouTube video. Stevens, himself, called Deputy Chief of Mission Gregory Hicks in Tripoli saying, “Greg, we’re under attack.” Hicks relayed the request for help, but none arrived.

Yet Clinton stuck to her story three days after the attack when the bodies of the victims arrived in the United States. She told the father of Tyrone Woods that the administration would work to punish the man who made “Innocence of Muslims,” a movie that supposedly sparked the protest.

A full month after the attack, the State Department finally acknowledged that there had been no protest outside the consulate.

From the start, Democrats have argued strenuously that the work of the House Select Committee on Benghazi led by Gowdy has been politically motivated. She has joined the attacks, and those claims received a fresh boost in the past several weeks with a pair of GOP lawmakers suggesting the committee has aimed to hurt Clinton’s poll numbers.

But the evidence uncovered by the committee has turned up important information about how Stevens and the other diplomats died. The committee, and Clinton’s responses, also have spotlighted a number of questionable statements from her.

Clilnton’s campaign tweeted that this congressional probe has been the longest. But at least three other congressional probes have exceeded the 17 months the Gowdy has spent on Benghazi. And in July, Gowdy disputed Clinton’s claim she had turned over her emails to the committee voluntarily, without a subpoena.

The attack on Sept. 11, 2012, was not even over before Clinton blamed an obscure movie that offended Muslims.

The attack on Sept. 11, 2012, was not even over before Clinton blamed an obscure movie that offended Muslims. At 10:32 p.m., she issued a statement attributed the violence to “inflammatory material posted on the Internet.”

Evidence gathered since refutes that. Cheryl Mills, who was Clinton’s chief of staff, and Joseph McManus, her executive assistant, received an email from the State Department’s operations center minutes after the attack began. It contained a report titled, “U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi is Under Attack,” and explained that 20 armed people had fired shots into the compound and that explosions could be heard.

Two other emails — one from the director of diplomatic security and another explaining that a local al-Qaeda affiliate had claimed responsibility — contained similar information.

Clinton repeatedly has said nobody did anything wrong in connection to the Benghazi attack.

But the Senate Homeland Committee report in December 2012 cited a number of security shortcomings at the consulate. The bipartisan report found that State Department officials ignored “increasingly dangerous threat assessments” that the Benghazi facility was “particularly vulnerable.”

That report concluded the State Department should have increased security or “closed or temporarily shut down” the consulate. Other nations bailed. Leaving the facility open was “a grievous mistake.”

Earlier that same month, the State Department’s Accountability Review Board faulted “systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus of the State Department.” It stated that the compound’s security “was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place.”

Immediately after the report, the State Department placed four employees on administrative leave and later reassigned them.