Most of all, Clinton suggested that Stevens had been responsible for his own murder. She said that he "felt comfortable" on the ground, and that he was merely joking when he emailed about whether the Benghazi compound would be closed. "Chris Stevens had ... a really good sense of humor," Clinton laughed. "And I just see him smiling as he's typing this." Stevens' State Department team in Libya sent requests for additional security 600 times. They were rejected.
After Clinton finished lying, she went home and hung out with her entire team. She partied. "I had my whole team come over to my house and we sat around eating Indian food and drinking wine and beer," Clinton told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow. "That's what we did. It was great. ... They did a terrific job, you know, kind of being there behind me and getting me ready, and then, you know, just talk about what we're going to do next."
As an apparent afterthought, she added to Maddow, "The point is, what are we going to do both honor and the people that we lost, and try to make sure this doesn't happen again."
Chris Stevens was always an afterthought to Clinton, despite her crocodile tears at the hearing, where she complained, "I would imagine I've thought more about what happened than all of you put together. I've lost more sleep than all of you put together." She didn't give Stevens her private email address, though Blumenthal had it. She couldn't remember holding a single conversation with Stevens after he was appointed ambassador to Libya. The night of his death she sent an email with the subject line "Chris Smith," mixing up his name with that of fellow diplomat Sean Smith. She spoke to survivors only days later. The night of the attack, she didn't speak with the Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta or the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey.
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Clinton's aggressive case for the invasion of Libya led to the overthrow and killing of dictator Moammar Gadhafi -- an event for which Clinton was happy to take credit, laughing, "We came, we saw, he died." She then completely ignored Libya as it turned into a terrorist hellhole, because that inconvenient fact undercut her narrative of strength and purpose. Her State Department refused to grant additional security requests because doing so would have implicitly recognized the failure of her war. Then, after Stevens died, Clinton and her team lied to the American people and the families of the slain, pinning the murders on an unforeseeable YouTube video-driven attack, rather than an utterly foreseeable terrorist attack.
Clinton is a coldly manipulative, deeply ambitious politician willing to say and do anything to achieve power. She was always that person, which is why she lied to Americans from in front of the flag-draped caskets of the murdered men in Benghazi. And she is that person now, too, as she laughs and eats Indian food hours after maintaining her lies once again before the American people.
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