Killing the Messenger

by David Brock

  “Get the transcript,” said Obama. But someone already had.

  “He did in fact, sir.” It was Candy Crowley, the CNN moderator. “So let me—let me call it an act of terror…”

  Obama decided to ice the cake, raising his voice to ask, “Can you say that a little louder, Candy?”

  Crowley repeated: “He did call it an act of terror.”

  By rushing to attack the president on 9/11, Romney had done enormous damage to his credibility. And by relying on the conservative echo chamber for his talking points during the debate, without taking the simple step of verifying that what they were saying was true, he stepped in it once again on a big stage at a critical moment.

  While Romney and his allies were busy trying—and spectacularly failing—to score political points off dead Americans, the Obama administration was taking steps that showed just how seriously it took the terrorist attacks. Using a procedure established under a 1986 antiterrorism law, Secretary Clinton commissioned an Accountability Review Board (ARB), cochaired by Ambassador Thomas Pickering, who had served five Republican and Democratic presidents as a diplomat and State Department official, and Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under both President Bush and President Obama, and filled out with several other well-respected officials. ARBs had been commissioned after other attacks on State Department facilities, including the 1983 attacks on the Marine barracks in Beirut in the Reagan era and the 2004 attack on an American consulate in Saudi Arabia during George W. Bush’s tenure—neither of which were politicized by the Democratic Party in the way Benghazi would be by the Republicans.

  Under Hillary’s direction, the State Department took the rare step of releasing the results of the ARB to the public—an act of transparency that earned her no credit from critics. The Benghazi ARB interviewed more than one hundred parties at all levels of government, and ended up delivering a stark verdict, finding that “systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus of the State Deparment… resulted in a Special Mission security posture that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place.”

  Further, the ARB found that “certain senior State Department officials within two bureaus demonstrated a lack of proactive leadership and management ability in their responses to security concerns posed by Special Mission Benghazi, given the deteriorating threat environment and the lack of reliable host government protection.”

  The ARB’s report won modest praise from conservative senators (John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Kelly Ayotte wrote in a Washington Times article that it “sheds important light on some of the failings within the State Department”), and it got results: Four State Department staffers were placed on administrative leave, and the Obama administration was offered twenty-nine recommendations for policy changes that could help improve security at State Department facilities overseas, which it immediately set about implementing. By January, as Hillary left office, sixty-four action items had already been created, and most of them had already been taken or were in the process of being carried out.

  But Republicans persisted in producing episode after episode of Scandal Theater. The right-wing media grasped at straws, looking for any new angle, and Fox News hosts stood by, ready to fill the broadcast day with innuendo. Mainstream journalists tried to sift through the details in order to evaluate the partisan claims, thereby giving them oxygen. And, most of all, Republican politicians eager for the face time, adulation, and fund-raising bumps demanded hearing after hearing, hoping to keep asking questions until they heard an answer they thought they could pounce on.

  At the front of that line were two House Republicans. Darrell Issa of California, one of the wealthiest members of Congress, had been in the House for a decade after getting rich from his car alarm company. Now, as chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, he was the House’s king of pseudoscandal, holding the same position that Representative Dan Burton of Indiana had during the Clinton years, when Burton shot a bullet into a watermelon while trying to validate conspiracy theories about Vincent Foster’s suicide. Issa’s colleague, a telegenic Utahan Tea Partier named Jason Chaffetz, led the committee’s Subcommittee on National Security. With their subpoena power, the two were in a position to hold hearings on any subject they wanted—and they wanted to talk about Benghazi.

  Anyone who believed that Issa and Chaffetz were planning to improve on the ARB’s investigation must not have been paying attention during the 1990s, when Republican congressional investigators used the powers of their office not to find facts, but to harass and embarrass the Clintons.

  Indeed, the Republican investigations quickly revealed themselves to be nothing more than witch hunts. As Democratic minority staff on the House committee complained, “The Chairman and his staff failed to consult with Democratic Members prior to issuing public letters with unverified allegations, concealed witnesses and refused to make one hearing witness available to Democratic staff, withheld documents obtained by the Committee during the investigation, and effectively excluded Democratic Committee Members from joining a poorly-planned congressional delegation to Libya.”

  It was, as Oversight Committee ranking member Elijah Cummings of Maryland put it, “investigation by press release.” Chaffetz in particular was on his way to right-wing stardom, becoming a frequent guest on Fox News, which covered the proceedings almost nonstop. (At one hearing, Issa’s remarks were carried live, but when it was Cummings’s turn to speak, the network cut away to an interview with John Bolton, the former Bush U.N. ambassador.)

  Leaks were fed regularly to rouse the conservative base and titillate the press corps. In their fervor, Republicans repeatedly revealed classified information that put American lives in danger. Issa didn’t care, telling State Department officials, “Anything below ‘Secret’ is in fact just a name on a piece of paper.”

  And at the end of the day, Issa and Chaffetz found nothing. In fact, ten congressional committees would investigate Benghazi and find nothing. There would be more than fifty senior-level staff briefings, fourteen public hearings, multiple independent reviews, dozens of interviews, countless “accidental” disclosures, thousands of man-hours, and millions of taxpayer dollars, and not one piece of evidence to suggest wrongdoing by the Obama administration, or that anyone had attempted to cover up the facts or mislead the public. Nothing.

  At times, their attempts were downright laughable. For example: During one hearing, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey testified that, following an initial meeting with the president, neither had spoken directly to him again on the night of September 11.

  The right-wing media stoked faux outrage. Michael Barone of the Washington Examiner wrote, “Obama apparently wasn’t curious about what was happening in Benghazi. He wasn’t too concerned either the next morning, when after the first murder of a U.S. ambassador in 33 years, he jetted off on a four-hour ride to a campaign event in Las Vegas. I don’t think you have to be a Republican partisan to consider that unseemly”—but it helps.

  Fox’s Monica Crowley made sure to loop Hillary into the accusation when she said that “the two leaders of the U.S. government were unaccounted for that night. We have no narrative of where they were or what they were doing.”

  In fact, as Panetta and Dempsey had testified at that same hearing, the president had instructed them to respond immediately and deploy all available forces—and, as Dempsey testified, “his staff was engaged with the National Military Command Center… pretty constantly through the period, which is the way it would normally work.”

  The misinformation spread to false reports of Hillary’s role. Laura Ingraham asked Republican representative Peter King during an interview on her radio show, “We know that the secretary of state had not [had] a single conversation with the commander in chief. Not one during this attack. Not one conversation? That seems bizarre to me. I mean that’s j
ust one point, but that’s a pretty darn good question. Why?”

  “Absolutely,” King responded. “It’s an excellent question, and to me it’s one that, it’s unfortunate that it even has to be asked. I mean, you’d think they would have been on the phone or in contact continually.”

  “My God,” exclaimed Ingraham.

  Actually, as Hillary had testified months earlier, she spent the afternoon and evening at the State Department—coordinating with military, intelligence, and national security officials; working to get cooperation from Libyan officials; receiving situation updates; and participating in secure videoconferences. And, to answer Ingraham’s question, in addition to working closely with his top staff, Hillary did in fact speak with Obama that evening,

  Even the fondest hopes of the Republican base (and the slickest promises from scammy online fund-raising pitches) couldn’t turn Benghazi into an impeachable scandal—but with Hillary out of office and clearly lined up to be a formidable presidential candidate in 2016, she became a more inviting target for the Benghazi truthers.

  The would-be scandal became an endless pseudoscandal. “Privately,” as Politico reporter Mike Allen told Charlie Rose in 2013, “Republicans say that Benghazi probably wouldn’t be an issue if it weren’t for Hillary Clinton.”

  Meanwhile, as most Democrats saw it, Obama had been reelected, the Accountability Review Board had done its work, and the barrage of congressional investigations was seen as an annoying but ultimately harmless sideshow.

  But I was worried, because I saw Republicans gearing up to run another one of their time-tested favorite plays. After all, none of this was new. None of it ever is. I kept thinking about Whitewater.

  Much like Benghazi, the point of Whitewater wasn’t that the Clintons had done anything wrong (in fact, none of the Whitewater allegations against them ever withstood even the slightest scrutiny). The point, at least for conservatives, was that there was so much to investigate—so many pointed questions to ask, so many innuendos to spread, so many leaks to give to friendly reporters willing to put unsubstantiated allegations into print under the guise of revealing what was being looked into.

  And the longer the Whitewater investigations dragged on, the more Republicans could claim to investigate, simply by accusing the Clintons of obstructing the inquiry that kept finding nothing. The old saying is that the cover-up is worse than the crime. But if you’re an unscrupulous right-wing operative, you don’t even need to prove that a crime was ever committed to make it seem like there’s a cover-up. If a Democrat can’t prove a false negative, the game can go on forever.

  Thus, it’s no wonder that the first attempt to make Hillary the issue was the one I watched from afar while on vacation: accusing her of faking her concussion to get out of facing the music by testifying before Congress. Couldn’t she prove she hadn’t faked it?

  When, a few weeks later, Hillary recovered and testified, conservatives promptly accused her of faking her emotions at the loss of four Americans, relying on another Hillary stereotype, that of a coldhearted shrew whose emotions were never authentic.

  “For me,” she told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, tearing up as she spoke, “this is not just a matter of policy, it’s personal. I stood next to President Obama as the Marines carried those flag-draped caskets off the plane at Andrews. I put my arms around the mothers and fathers, the sisters and brothers, the sons and daughters, and the wives left alone to raise their children.”

  It was hard to watch that moment and square it with the right’s caricature of Hillary as uninterested in anything but her own political future. But they tried anyway, accusing her of putting on a show. Laura Ingraham tweeted a quote that Hillary was “lip-synching crying about Benghazi victims.” Rush Limbaugh called it “part of the script.” Sean Hannity claimed that her feelings were “staged, probably at the direction of” James Carville. And Republicans in office agreed: Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin echoed to BuzzFeed, “I think she just decided before she was going to describe emotionally the four dead Americans, the heroes, and use that as her trump card to get out of the questions.”

  You can decide for yourself whether Hillary Clinton—who clearly and repeatedly took responsibility as secretary of state, who fully and publicly answered questions under oath again and again, who authorized an independent investigation and immediately began implementing its recommendations so as to avoid future attacks—was only pretending to care about what happened in Benghazi, or whether Republican operatives bent on portraying Hillary as cold and uncaring were always going to paint whatever she said about the attack as, well, cold and uncaring.

  Either way, the focus on Hillary was no accident. Even as they have pretended to be interested only in the truth, Republicans haven’t been able to help themselves from revealing their true purpose in focusing on her role in the tragedy.

  Appearing on Fox News Sunday, RNC chair Reince Priebus made it clear: “If she’s even thinking about running for president, I think she has been disqualified because of her actions here.” Rand Paul called Benghazi “her main Achilles’ heel.” Benghazi remains a key fund-raising tool for the anti-Hillary SuperPACs, including America Rising (whose e-book Failed Choices featured a chapter on Benghazi), Stop Hillary PAC (which gathered more than 120,000 signatures on a list-building petition demanding that Hillary testify before yet another Republican committee), and even a new group called The Benghazi Truth PAC.

  But what, exactly, are they claiming? Here are three of the most notable falsehoods:

  The “critical cables”

  An April 2013 report by five Republican House chairmen (led by Darrell Issa) mentioned Hillary Clinton’s name thirty times and Barack Obama’s only eleven. Its very first bullet made it clear that Hillary was now the target of the investigation, and revealed their first substantive claim:

  Reductions of security levels prior to the attacks in Benghazi were approved at the highest levels of the State Department, up to and including Secretary Clinton. This fact contradicts her testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on January 23, 2013.

  Not only were Republicans accusing Hillary of personally leaving the Benghazi compound vulnerable, they were claiming she perjured herself when she testified that concerns about inadequate security “did not come to [her] attention or above the assistant secretary level where the ARB… placed responsibility.”

  As proof, the Republican report cited two documents described as “critical cables.” One was sent on March 28, 2012, from then ambassador Gene Cretz “to Secretary Clinton” asking for more security resources in Libya. The second was an April 19, 2012, response “bearing Secretary Clinton’s signature” acknowledging and denying the request.

  Issa ran to Fox News to boast, “She said she did not participate in this, and yet only a few months before the attack, she outright denied security in her signature in a cable, April 2012.” Host Brian Kilmeade helpfully explained that the cable “sharply contradicts her sworn testimony.” “Damning,” said Townhall. A “bombshell,” raved Fox Nation. HILLARY LIED, AND FOUR DIED IN BENGHAZI, read a headline in an Investor’s Business Daily editorial.

  Rand Paul trumpeted that, in light of the “critical cables,” “Mrs. Clinton should never hold high office again.” Karl Rove’s SuperPAC ran a ninety-second web ad that ignored Barack Obama and focused on Hillary as the main Benghazi villain.

  But the entire “critical cables” attack was based on a basic misunderstanding of how the State Department works. As fact-checker and longtime State Department reporter Glenn Kessler wrote in his Washington Post column, “Cables are in effect group e-mails, which are stored in a database and made available to people with the proper security clearances.” Moreover, “every single cable from Washington gets the secretary’s name at the bottom, even if the secretary happens to be on the other side of the world at the time.”

  As secretary of state, Hillary “signed” hundreds of thousands of cables during her tenure—which doesn�
�t mean she wrote, or even read, them all, a practice that dates back through previous administrations. The entire attack, Kessler found, “relies on an absurd understanding of the word ‘signature.’”

  Americans “left behind” / the stand-down order

  In May 2013, Fox News host Eric Bolling talked about the motto of the U.S. armed forces: “Leave no one behind. Leave no one under fire wanting or wondering if America was going to come back and help them. That’s what Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the administration did on September eleventh of 2012. They left four Americans to die because they said ‘Stand down, don’t go help,’ and that is a problem.”

  This was a shocking claim, even by Fox News standards, but it neatly captures the desperate tone of conservatives struggling to find a smoking gun. FrontPage Mag spelled it out: “The Obama administration undoubtedly understood that its decision to leave defenseless Americans, including our ambassador, to needlessly die at the hands of al-Qaeda-linked jihadists would not go over well for a commander-in-chief in the throes of a presidential election and a secretary of state angling for the Oval Office in 2016.”

  On Townhall, Katie Pavlich wrote, “The men in Libya were left to die as military forces were told to stand down.” And on Fox News, KT McFarland, who had run against Hillary for the Senate in 2006, attempted to square the circle: “I’ve got a guess that it’s something that was a political decision. And not only a political decision not to give them the kind of security they wanted, but it was probably a political decision not to rescue them.”

  Nobody has ever explained why Obama or Hillary would have thought leaving Americans to die in a terrorist attack was good politics. But the facts make the question irrelevant: No one was “left behind” in Benghazi. The survivors and the bodies of the deceased were evacuated within twelve hours of the attack.