Tipsheet

CBS Anchor to Rubio: What Do You Mean Hillary 'Lied' About Benghazi?

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  October 29, 2015 3:46 PM

Marco Rubio embarked on something of a post-debate victory tour today, visiting six national morning shows to reflect on last night's proceedings. One of his stops was CBS This Morning, where puzzled host Charlie Rose pressed Rubio about what he meant when he said that last week's Benghazi hearings proved that Hillary Clinton had lied.  The Florida Senator basically reiterated his explanation from last night (via the Weekly Standard):


Rose counters with Clinton talking points, muddying the waters by blaming confusing and conflicting intelligence offered by the CIA -- but as they say, that dog don't hunt:


Hillary's email to Chelsea on the night of Benghazi unequivocally blamed an Al Qaeda offshoot (Ansar Al-Sharia) for the attack; her discussion with an Egyptian official the next day made her position even more explicit:


The deadly "planned attack" had "nothing to do with the film," and was "not a protest." Her words. Yet days later, the administration was telling the public precisely the opposite, with Hillary Clinton repeating the protest/video lie to grieving family members' faces. It's almost as if the Obama-Clinton team was worried about how voters might perceive a preventable, pre-planned terrorist attack on the anniversary on 9/11, especially after Democrats had been pushing the "Bin Laden is dead" theme so hard on the campaign trail. These political concerns were evident in Hillary Clinton's emails with henchman Sidney Blumenthal, as well as in a belatedly-released memo from a senior White House advisor that finally became public last year.  Let's be perfectly clear: The former acting CIA chief said the video protest fable did not originate from the intelligence community.  David Petraeus testified that the US government knew Benghazi was a premeditated attack "almost immediately."   State Department documents confirm this. And Amb. Chris Stevens' second-in-command testified that the obscure online film was a "non event" on the ground in Libya.  Clinton's duplicity was also on display at the Benghazi hearings regarding the "unsolicited" nature of the off-the-books intelligence from Blumenthal, as well as her shifting definition of "work-related" emails that she withheld while swearing she withheld nothing.  While we're on the subject of Hillary's dishonesty and the agency she used to lead, Politico has reported on "new inconsistencies" arising from her testimony:

One of Clinton's assertions fell into doubt Friday as the State Department said it was unaware of any basis for her claim that the agency "had between 90 and 95 percent of all [her] work-related emails" even before she turned over 54,000 pages of records last December. "I'm not aware that we have given that figure," State spokesman Mark Toner told reporters on Friday. "We've not been able to confirm that. I not sure where that information comes from"...Asked about Clinton's assertion at the hearing, a Clinton campaign aide returned to the March statement and referenced new disclosures about weaknesses in State's recordkeeping system, but notably declined to repeat her new claim.

One more Benghazi-related note, breaking today:


Strange, isn't it?  We've endlessly been told that this select committee is a duplicative waste of money and time, and yet here they are unearthing additional relevant documents -- all of which were supposedly turned over years ago, according to the administration.