During Wednesday night’s democratic debate, Hillary Clinton said the mother of a Benghazi victim lied.
Patricia Smith, the mother of Sean Smith, one of the four Americans who were killed by terrorists in an attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi during Clinton’s tenure, said in a CNN interview last October that Clinton lied to her about the circumstances surrounding her son’s death.
Instead of stating that her son’s death had been caused by an act of terrorism, Clinton blamed an inflammatory video that had been circulating online in the weeks leading up to the attack — a narrative she knew at the time to be false.
When asked about this on Wednesday, Clinton pushed back at Smith’s claim, saying the mother of the Benghazi victim was “absolutely wrong.”
“I can’t imagine the grief she has about losing her son,” Clinton said. “But she’s wrong. She’s absolutely wrong!”
“I and everybody in the [Obama] administration, all the people she named — the president, the vice president, Susan Rice — we were scrambling to get information that was changing literally by the hour,” she said. “When we had information, we made it public, but then sometimes we had to go back and say we had new information that contradicts it.”
During Clinton’s tenure as secretary of State, a U.S. consulate in Benghazi was attacked on Sept. 11, 2012. In the aftermath of the attack, Clinton and other members of the Obama administration blamed the attack on an inflammatory video that had been circulating at the time.
At the casket ceremony for the Benghazi victims, Clinton repeated this line of rhetoric, saying:
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.
But in an email she sent to her daughter Chelsea just hours after the attack, Hillary Clinton said the terrorist attack had been carried out by an “Al Queda-like group,” implying she knew it had been premeditated terrorism.
As The Federalist reported in October, Hillary’s own e-mail correspondence shows that from day one Clinton had two different stories surrounding the cause of the Benghazi attack. Under her leadership, the State Department pushed out a false, and politically advantageous, narrative to the American people blaming an Internet video, while privately acknowledging that the events in Benghazi were purely motivated by organized Islamic terrorism.
