As the Republicans and their propagandists at Fox "News" would have it, the release of Hillary Clinton's State Department emails is bound to reveal that she conspired to cover-up the truth about the murderous 2012 terrorist attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. According to this
consistently debunked example of
boilerplate right-wing
lunacy, the Obama administration in general, and Clinton in particular, deliberately promoted a false story attributing the attack to a spontaneous mass demonstration over an offensive YouTube video, because they didn't want it known that the attack was premeditated, and that the administration should have prevented it but was asleep at the wheel. Well, if Republicans are experts at anything, it's at being
asleep at the wheel despite clear warnings of an impending terrorist attack, but what they don't want anyone to remember about their own party's recent history of catastrophic failure is
not paralleled by the Democrats. And Hillary Clinton's just released emails
make that clear:
One of the most intriguing of the released emails, however, suggests that Clinton and the State Department might not have been kept fully informed on what was known to other government agencies, particularly the CIA, about the Sept. 11, 2012, attack, when armed men stormed the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi and set the main building on fire.
Which is what the administration has been saying all along. The administration has repeatedly explained that its initial claim that the Benghazi attack was a spontaneous mass reaction was mistaken, but it was made in good faith according to the best available evidence it had at the time.
The initial description of the events as a demonstration that had turned violent had been widely discredited within two weeks. But Clinton still seemed surprised on Oct. 19 when she wrote her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, asking about a news report she’d heard that morning on National Public Radio.
“I just heard on npr a report about the CIA station chief in Tripoli sending a cable on 9/12 saying there was no demo, etc. Do you know about this?” Clinton wrote at 6:57 a.m. Mills also seemed surprised. “Have not seen – will see if we can get,” she responded 28 minutes later.
A CIA spokesman said Friday he was unable to comment on whether Clinton had been informed of the station chief’s email.
In other words, Clinton and Mills were actually initially out of the loop on the real nature of the Benghazi attack. The administration's initial understanding of what had triggered the attack wasn't fully informed. There was, in fact, no cover-up, rather the administration was trying to report the information it had on hand. The administration's information initially was incomplete, and as more facts became known, the story inevitably evolved. The administration wasn't lying, it was reporting what it knew as it knew it. Not that such facts will in any way dissuade the Republicans and their propagandists at Fox "News" from continuing to project their own inveterate dishonesty onto others.
