New Clinton emails appear to contradict her Benghazi testimony
The State Department released 7800 pages of emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday, and found among the mostly mundane communications were several Benghazi-related emails that appear to contradict Hillary Clinton's testimony before the Select Committee on Benghazi.
Although the newest batch contained emails that had been released in previous productions, it also contained a number of Benghazi-related records that had not been previously disclosed.
Several of those records contradictedtestimony Clinton delivered to the select committee on Oct. 22, during which Clinton attempted to downplay findings that emerged through the discovery of her private emails.
Clinton herself has come under firerecently for privately acknowledging the fact that the Sept. 11 raid was a premeditated attack while publicly speculating that the diplomatic compound could have simply been overrun during a protest over an inflammatory YouTube clip.
But at the time, Rice took the brunt of such criticism, with many wondering who in the administration instructed her to promote talking points that have since been debunked.
In her 2014 memoir Hard Choices, Clinton defended Rice's appearances by insisting the former UN ambassador had been acting on intelligence she had at the time.
"Critics accused [Rice] of trumping up tales of a protest that never happened in order to cover up the fact that this had been a successful terrorist attack on President Obama's watch," Clinton wrote in the book. "They obsessed over the question of who in the government prepared Susan's 'talking points' that morning and hoped to find evidence of heavy-handed political malfeasance by the White House."
An email released by the State Department through the Freedom of Information Act around the same time as the publication of Clinton's memoir showed the White House did indeed prepare Rice for her interviews. White House officials encouraged Rice "to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy."
Clinton argued in her memoir that Rice "stated what the intelligence community believed, rightly or wrongly, at the time."
"That was the best she or anyone could do," Clinton added.
It should be clear by now to all but the most self-deluded Clinton supporters that there was a major effort to change the focus of public attention on the attack from terrorism to an anti-Islamic video. This was a conscious, deliberate move by the Obama campaign to downplay the policy failure that led to the attacks and the death of our ambassador and 3 other Americans.
Clinton's denials of the facts in this matter and the continuing cover up of who was responsible for the promotion of this false narrative could become a danger to Hillary's campaign. The more emails that are released, the more some of them contradict what she said in her public testimony. In this case, why would a meeting with Rice be kept off the official schedule unless it was to hide the meeting's purpose? There aren't many other plausible explanations that would exonerate the former Secretary of State.
Of course, for this story to have legs, some reporter is going to have to get curious enough to ask her about it. This doesn't seem likely as the press has written off the entire email scandal - including the classified material - as old news and not worthy covering.
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