Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blamed an internet video for the Benghazi attacks in her conversations with family members of those killed despite having told a foreign leader two days earlier that the video played no role and having emailed daughter Chelsea that a terrorist group had carried out the attack.
The summary of Clinton’s conversation on September 12, 2012, with Egyptian prime minister Hesham Kandil reported that Clinton told him that there had been no protest in Libya and that the attack was not related to a controversial internet video that would later become the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s public narrative on the Benghazi attacks.
“We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film,” Clinton explained, according to a memo prepared by a State Department note-taker to record the conversation. “It was a planned attack – not a protest.” She added later: “Based on the information we saw today we believe the group that claimed responsibility for this was affiliated with al Qaeda.”
Clinton said this in a phone call on September 12, 2012. One night earlier, she wrote an email at 11:12 pm to Chelsea Clinton reporting that two State Department officials had been killed in Benghazi by “an Al Queada-like group.”
The revelations of the documents, which came during Clinton’s testimony at the Benghazi Select Committee on Thursday, badly undercut administration claims made repeatedly several days later that the attack was a demonstration that had spun out of control and had not been preplanned.
And Clinton’s statements raise many questions about why, on September 14, 2012, she told family members of those killed in Benghazi that the administration was determined to bring to justice the filmmaker who made the video.
Charles Woods, father of Tyrone Woods, a Navy Seal killed in the attacks, says Clinton told him directly, at the memorial service, that the filmmaker was responsible.
“She said we’re going to have the person responsible for that video arrested. I knew she was lying. Her body language, the look in her eyes…I could tell she wasn’t telling the truth.”
Pat Smith, the mother of Sean Smith, information specialist at the State Department, said: “She blamed the video just like all the rest of them did and she also told me she was going to get back to me.”
The obvious question: Why did Hillary Clinton blame the video and the filmmaker in her conversations with family members when she had said previously that the video had nothing to do with the attacks?
