Hillary Benghazi Quotes

What difference does it really make?

Hillary, if you really want to know what happened, here’s a hint: he won, you lost! You lost because you were a lousy candidate, you didn’t have a message, and you lied just about every time you opened your mouth. You put our national security at risk with your email setup, and ran a foundation that was nothing more than an organized “pay to play” enterprise parading as a charity. Four men died in the attack in Benghazi under your watch as you lied about what caused it.

I will tell you what the real Benghazi scandal is. It's not that four Americans died and Hillary Clinton may have lied about it. It's that 30,000 Libyans died in a U.S.-NATO bombing campaign, and the whole country was ripped apart, and Hillary Clinton can still openly brag about it. The war was based on lies but the Republicans and the corporate media don't consider that a scandal because they helped her push those lies.

Between the Benghazi Committee, which would take depositions from Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, and Jake Sullivan among other Hillary aides, the drip-drip nature of evolving federal lawsuits, and judicial orders for the State Department to release Hillary’s e-mails on a rolling basis, the early months of the campaign became a private and public hell. It was only a matter of time before voters would know that Hillary had not told the truth about not sending or receiving classified information.

At issue was not just whether the United States properly protected its diplomats in a dangerous country, but also whether it had adequately planned for a peaceful postconflict society. Libya raised the most basic questions about the limits of liberal interventionism in the age of Obama. The paramount issue, in other words, was not what Clinton did or didn’t do in the days after Benghazi; it was what she and Obama did or didn’t do in the weeks and months after the president, at the urging of his secretary of state, fired Tomahawks into Tripoli. —

The problem is that her four years as secretary of State coincided with a collapse of U.S. foreign policy unseen since 1979-80. In a fair world, Hillary would be judged as the worst secretary of State since Cyrus Vance. Most of the disasters — Benghazi, the chaos in Libya, the failed reset with Russia, the bogus Syrian red lines, the phony Iranian deadlines to stop enrichment, the yanking of all peacekeepers out of Iraq that led to the ISIS ascendance, the surge and simultaneous withdrawal dates in Afghanistan, the disastrous Middle East pressures that have led to the eve of war, the flip-flop-flip in Egypt, the clumsy spying on allies, the lying about and jailing of a video maker [14], and on and on — came on her watch.

In a memoir of her tenure as secretary of state, published in June 2014, Hillary Clinton gave her most detailed account of her actions to date. She denounced what she called “misinformation, speculation, and flat-out deceit” about the attacks, and wrote that Obama “gave the order to do whatever was necessary to support our people in Libya.” She wrote: “Losing these fearless public servants in the line of duty was a crushing blow. As Secretary I was the one ultimately responsible for my people’s safety, and I never felt that responsibility more deeply than I did that day.” Addressing the controversy over what triggered the attack, and whether the administration misled the public, she maintained that the Innocence of Muslims video had played a role, though to what extent wasn’t clear. “There were scores of attackers that night, almost certainly with differing motives. It is inaccurate to state that every single one of them was influenced by this hateful video. It is equally inaccurate to state that none of them were.” Clinton’s account was greeted with praise and condemnation in equal measure. As Clinton promoted her book, a new investigation was being launched by the House Select Committee on the Events Surrounding the 2012 Terrorist Attack in Benghazi. Chaired by former federal prosecutor Rep. Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican, the committee’s creation promised to drive questions about Benghazi into the 2016 presidential campaign and beyond.

Hillary rode her husband’s success to become first lady of Arkansas, then first lady of the United States. Then she won an easy race in liberal New York to become its junior senator. As a senator she accomplished, well, nothing. Then she ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, losing to Barack Obama, who appointed her secretary of state. Despite extensive travels, Hillary’s achievements as secretary of state are essentially nil. As with Benghazi, most of her notable actions are screwups. In an apparent confirmation of the Peter Principle, however, Hillary is now back as the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for president in 2016. Hillary is fortunate, not merely in her career path, but also in being the surprise recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars that have been rained on her and her husband both directly and through the Clinton Foundation. The Clinton Foundation has raised more than $2 billion in contributions. A substantial portion of that came from foreign governments. Some sixteen nations together have given $130 million. In addition, through speeches and consulting fees, more than $100 million has ended up in the pockets of the Clintons themselves. The foundation, although ostensibly a charitable enterprise, gives only one dollar out of ten to charity. It has also been disclosed that the Clintons have developed a penchant for traveling in high style, and use a substantial amount of donation money on private planes and penthouse suites. The rest of the loot seems to have been accumulated into a war chest that is at the behest of the Clintons and the Hillary presidential campaign.

Hillary rode her husband’s success to become first lady of Arkansas, then first lady of the United States. Then she won an easy race in liberal New York to become its junior senator. As a senator she accomplished, well, nothing. Then she ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, losing to Barack Obama, who appointed her secretary of state. Despite extensive travels, Hillary’s achievements as secretary of state are essentially nil. As with Benghazi, most of her notable actions are screwups. In an apparent confirmation of the Peter Principle, however, Hillary is now back as the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for president in 2016. Hillary

People like Monica and the entire Clinton Machine should never have had access to classified national security–related intelligence or enjoyed leadership positions. Their irresponsibility had consequences. Good men died from it—both in Mogadishu and Benghazi. We had friends die from exhaustion or from falling asleep at the wheel while ensuring the Secret Service mission of protecting the president. To die for a man of character—I can live with that. Scott Giambattista got shot to protect the president. Everyone watched the Clinton scandal shit show play out in Congress, in the media, and in the Oval Office, and every night in America’s living rooms. All the Clintons’ successes can be credited to men and women of character like Leon Panetta, Nancy Hernreich, and Betty Currie. The Clintons’ failures all point to themselves.

As first lady, she claimed to know nothing about the Travelgate firings when the evidence showed she ordered them herself. Later, on the 2008 campaign trail, she repeatedly told a story about how she had been under sniper fire and ran for cover when her plane landed in Tuzla, Bosnia. Video footage, however, showed there was no sniper fire and in fact Hillary was greeted on the tarmac by a child who read her a poem. She blamed the Benghazi attacks on an Internet video when she knew that was a fable. This is a highly abbreviated list.

SCANDALS AND MISMANAGEMENT If Secretary Clinton’s political career had ended with her defeat for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, her skills as a manager would have been judged by her disorganized and drama-filled campaign for the presidency and her disastrous Health Care Task Force as First Lady. President Obama, who defeated her calamitously run campaign, should have been wary of nominating Clinton to a post that was responsible for tens of thousands of federal employees throughout the world. While her tenure in Foggy Bottom didn’t have the highly publicized backstabbing element that tarnished her presidential campaign, Secretary Clinton’s deficiencies as a manager were no less evident. There was one department within State that Secretary Clinton oversaw with great care: the Global Partnerships Initiative (GPI), which was run by long-time Clinton family aide Kris Balderston. Balderston was known in political circles for creating a “hit list” that ranked members of Congress based on loyalty to the Clintons during the 2008 presidential primaries.[434] Balderston was brought to Foggy Bottom to “keep the Clinton political network humming at State.”[435] He focused his efforts on connecting CEOs and business interests—all potential Clinton 2016 donors—to State Department public/private partnerships. Balderston worked alongside Clinton’s long-time aide Huma Abedin, who was given a “special government employee” waiver, allowing her to work both as Secretary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, and for other private sector clients. With the arrangement, Abedin would serve as a consultant to the top Clinton allied firm, Teneo, in a role in which, as the New York Times reported, “the lines were blurred between Ms. Abedin’s work in the high echelons of one of the government’s most sensitive executive departments and her role as a Clinton family insider.”[436] Secretary Clinton and her allies have placed great emphasis on the secretary of state’s historic role in promoting American business interests overseas, dubbing the effort “economic statecraft.”[437] The efforts of the GPI, Abedin, and Balderston ensured that Secretary Clinton’s “economic statecraft” agenda would be rife with the potential for conflicts of interest reminiscent of the favor-trading scandals that emanated from her husband’s White House. While the political office and donor maintenance program was managed with extreme meticulousness, Secretary Clinton ignored her role as manager of the rest of the sprawling government agency.[438] When it came to these more mundane tasks, Secretary Clinton was not on top of what was really going on in the department she ran. While Secretary Clinton was preoccupied with being filmed and photographed all around the world, the State Department was plagued by chronic management problems and scandals, from visa programs to security contractors. And when Secretary Clinton did weigh in on management issues, it was almost always after a raft of bad press forced her to, and not from any proactive steps she took. In fact, she and her department’s first reaction in certain instances was to silence critics or intimidate whistleblowers, rather than get to the bottom of what was actually going on. The events that unfolded in Benghazi were the worst example of Secretary Clinton neglecting her managerial responsibilities. This pattern of behavior, which led to the tragedy, was characteristic of her management style throughout her four years at Foggy Bottom. “Economic Statecraft” A big part of Secretary Clinton’s record-breaking travel—112 countries visited—was her work as a salesperson for select U.S. business interests.[439] Today, her supporters would have us believe her “economic statecraft” agenda was a major accomplishment.[440] Yet, as always seems to be the case with the Clintons, there was one family that benefited more than any other from all this economic statecraft—the Clinton family.

Tripp manipulated Monica, but Monica herself had manipulated her way to the president as much as the president schemed to ensnare her. I’d seen it all—or at least enough. But Monica was a pretty, spoiled girl; the president wasn’t. He knew damn well what he was doing to her emotionally and physically and to her reputation. He couldn’t have cared less. People like Monica and the entire Clinton Machine should never have had access to classified national security–related intelligence or enjoyed leadership positions. Their irresponsibility had consequences. Good men died from it—both in Mogadishu and Benghazi. We had friends die from exhaustion or from falling asleep at the wheel while ensuring the Secret Service mission of protecting the president. To die for a man of character—I can live with that. Scott Giambattista got shot to protect the president. Everyone watched the Clinton scandal shit show play out in Congress, in the media, and in the Oval Office, and every night in America’s living rooms. All the Clintons’ successes can be credited to men and women of character like Leon Panetta, Nancy Hernreich, and Betty Currie. The Clintons’ failures all point to themselves. The president and Mrs. Clinton were purely business partners. I believe from their movements and interactions that Mrs. Clinton knew of the affairs. But I do believe she was surprised by her partner’s stooping to romancing someone the age of their daughter and was furious that he besmirched the brand. Politically it was unthinkable. How could anyone excuse his womanizing and workplace conduct?

Let’s say it straight out: Hillary Clinton lied about the reason for the Benghazi attack. She lied about it to the nation as a whole and she lied right to the faces of the grieving family members of those who died there—and then lied about her lying. And she keeps telling Americans one huge, disgusting lie after another. As I wrap up writing this book, Hillary has claimed that we “didn’t lose a single person” in Libya. Really? Try telling that to the families of the four men we lost on September 11, 2012. Not too long before Mrs. Clinton committed that amazing, bizarre falsehood, the late Sean Smith’s mother, Pat, broke down on national television, exclaiming, “Hillary is a liar! I know what she told me.” Pat went on to say that she wanted to “see Hillary in jail” for her misdeeds at Benghazi. “She’s been lying. She’s turned the whole country into a bunch of liars.” Two decades ago the late New York Times columnist William Safire wrote: “Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our first lady—a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation—is a congenital liar.” The lies change. The liar doesn’t. I don’t know where the future will lead, but I know enough of history and I know my own personal experiences. I trust in the Constitution. I know who I am, what I do, and whom I’m doing it for. My God, my family, and my country are my riches. I’m not looking for a fight, but I don’t run from one, either: I walk softly and carry my standard-issue stick. I’m proud of my legacy, but it’s not over, not yet. No matter what, I never stop hearing Genny in my ear: “Just do the right thing.” That’s why I told you my story. Me, I’m not important. But what I learned about the Clintons firsthand—the hard way—is very important. It’s 2016, but with Hillary Clinton again running for president, it feels uncomfortably like the 1990s again—as if America were trapped in some great, cruel time machine hurtling us back to the land of Monica and Mogadishu and a thousand other Clinton-era nightmares. Fool me once, as the saying goes—your fault. Fool me twice… The bottom line: My job in the 1990s was to lay down my life for the presidency. My obligation today is to raise my voice, to help safeguard the presidency from Bill and Hillary Clinton—to remind readers like you of what happened back then. We all remember—or should remember—what a Clinton White House was like. If we board that time machine for a return trip—it’s our fault.

Imagine what Hillary would do with her power if she went from secretary of state to president of the United States! Previously she at least had to answer to Obama; now she would be a power unto herself. Hillary has already shown how indifferent she is to the interests of the United States, selling American influence to the highest bidder. I dread to think how much havoc—how many Benghazis—are in store if we elect this woman in November.

And here’s what everyone missed: Benghazi shattered military and federal law enforcement morale. We all wondered, Will they come for us if we’re attacked? Will they stand by us? Does “no man left behind” mean a damned thing? Will they even tell the truth after I’m gone?

Let’s say it straight out: Hillary Clinton lied about the reason for the Benghazi attack. She lied about it to the nation as a whole and she lied right to the faces of the grieving family members of those who died there—and then lied about her lying. And she keeps telling Americans one huge, disgusting lie after another.

In the many different scandals of the Obama administration, from Benghazi to Hillary Clinton’s emails, how has Judicial Watch succeeded so often in exposing the truth when Congress has failed? Part of it is the hard, focused, and dogged work of our investigators and the skill, professionalism, and tenacity of our lawyers, as well as our other staff who help support and run one of the most effective citizens’ groups in the country. But it is also because FOIA is a straightforward tool that quickly gives Judicial Watch access to the federal courts in order to ensure compliance with our record requests to ensure transparency. Congressional investigations, when committees bother to conduct them, are political by nature. Their effectiveness is often hindered by committee members of the political party whose president is in the White House in order to protect the president, their party, and their political allies. Congress today relies on the Justice Department to enforce subpoenas issued by committees that are intended to force executive branch compliance with requests for information and witnesses. With a politicized Justice Department, which has been the hallmark of the Obama administration, there is no effective enforcement of such congressional subpoenas. A sorry example of this is the refusal of the Obama Justice Department to enforce the contempt citation against Lois Lerner for refusing to comply with a subpoena for her testimony before the House Committee investigating the IRS scandal. The administration was not about to go to a judge for an order compelling Lerner to testify and reveal what she knew about the administration’s targeting of conservative organizations.

After all, if Congressional investigators seeking Hillary’s emails to discover what her actual role was in the Benghazi massacre — or even neutral third parties — were able to see the full body of those emails, the Clinton camp’s new contention that the emails would absolve her of any guilt emanating from the bribery allegations could gain some credibility. But since she destroyed the evidence no such exoneration is possible. When the accusation is made that Hillary failed to use the customary email system for a person holding the office she held so as to hide ill dealings from the public and conflate her perfidy at the Clinton Foundation with her day job at State, it’s going to stick.

Recent disclosures by some of the combatants about the night of the Benghazi attack remind us that almost everything Jay Carney, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, and President Obama swore in the aftermath of the debacle was knowingly false. A video did not cause the attack. The rioting was not spontaneous. A video-maker, an American resident, was soon jailed, while one of the suspected killers was giving taped interviews at a coffee house in Benghazi. There were ways of securing the consulate and the annex that were not explored, both before and during the assault. Talking points were altered. Again, the catalyst for untruth was reelection worries by an administration that believes its exalted ends of social justice allow any means necessary for reaching them.

It’s the great irony of our national security personnel, from the swords to the shields, that if we do our jobs right, no one hears about it. The best umpire in the league is one you never notice. But if we don’t do our jobs right, it’s the USS Cole, Beirut, Oklahoma City, or even Benghazi all over again. Today we’re doing a tremendous job, but we’re at a crossroads.

Hillary stopped. A cell phone vibrated in her pantsuit jacket pocket. She had earlier obtained a spare cell phone in case of an emergency, having left her BlackBerry back in Whitehaven to prevent it from being tracked. Somehow, she knew she wasn’t going to like what the other person on the line would say. “—llary,” The voice of President Obama came through as she pressed the spare cell phone to her ear. “I gave you express orders—

We still don’t have the full story on Benghazi, but thanks to the dogged efforts of Judicial Watch we know a lot more and are in a position to continue to crack open the Benghazi cover-up. Take the email that showed the military was prepared, indeed was in the process of launching timely assistance that could have made a difference, at least at the CIA annex where two Americans died. The Washington Examiner correctly noted that the email “casts doubt on previous testimony from high level officials, several of whom suggested there was never any kind of military unit that could have been in a position to mount a rescue mission during the hours-long attack on Benghazi.” All this goes to underscore the value of Judicial Watch’s independent watchdog activities and our leadership in forcing truth and accountability over the Benghazi scandal. The lies and inaction by President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Susan Rice (who is now Obama’s national security adviser) were monstrous. Rather than tell the truth, and risk political blowback for the Libya mess and the lack of security, the Obama administration abandoned those under fire and pretended that the attack had nothing to do with terrorism. Judicial Watch saw through the lies and began what has become the most nationally significant investigation ever by a non-governmental entity. Our Benghazi FOIA requests and subsequent lawsuits changed history. Our disclosure of White House records confirming that top political operatives at the White House concocted the talking points used by Susan Rice to mislead the American people in order save Obama’s reelection prospects rocked Washington. These smoking-gun documents embarrassed all of Congress and forced Speaker John Boehner to appoint the House Select Committee on Benghazi. And, as you’ll see, the pressure from our Benghazi litigation led to the disclosure of the Clinton email scandal, the historical ramifications of which we are now witnessing. If the American people had known the truth—that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and other top administration officials knew that the Benghazi attack was an al-Qaeda terrorist attack from the get-go—and yet lied and covered this fact up—Mitt Romney might very well be president. Our Benghazi disclosures also show connections between the collapse in Libya and the ISIS war—and confirm that the US knew remarkable details about the transfer of arms from Benghazi to Syrian jihadists.

Before Dibble was stationed in London, she was Hillary Clinton’s principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. Her tenure and area of concern intersected with the September 2012 Benghazi attack, when Clinton and other Obama officials misrepresented facts about the terror operation that killed four Americans in the Libyan city. Dibble was also helping frame Papadopoulos.

Abedin was a subject of interest for the House Benghazi Committee, and, separately, for Iowa senator Chuck Grassley. He was investigating the work she’d done for Teneo, an international consulting firm founded by Bill Clinton’s longtime consigliere, Doug Band, when she was on the State Department payroll. Grassley thought that was a major conflict of interest, and even some of Hillary’s advisers privately agreed. Having Abedin serve as Hillary’s traveling aide was one thing, but giving her the title of vice chair and allowing her to expand her portfolio into major campaign decisions made little sense.

I KNOW HOW THIS is going to sound, but Anthony Bourdain was the one who hooked me on Laos. Over the previous year, I had slipped further into insomnia—the accumulated effect of Benghazi stress and a hungry newborn keeping me awake for long stretches of each night. I’d fill that time lying on my couch in a darkened living room plowing through every episode of Bourdain’s various travel shows, over and over. I felt a sense of recognition in this guy wandering around the world, trying to find some temporary connection with other human beings living within their own histories. I’d been vaguely familiar with the story of Laos. Hillary had visited in 2012, and I remembered that we cobbled together some money for UXO clearance—a few numbers on a budget sheet. But the Bourdain episode that showed human beings on a television screen in the middle of the night, struggling in a place that was still a war zone, forty years after a war that I’d never learned about in school, woke my interest. I added two items to the bucket list for my final year in the job: Get more money for Laos, and get Obama to tape an episode of Parts Unknown with Anthony Bourdain.

The seeds of the scandal were sown in two places: on Capitol Hill and in federal court. In 2014 the House Benghazi Committee asked the State Department for e-mails related to the attacks that killed four Americans in Libya in September 2012. But State discovered it didn’t have the secretary’s records—because she hadn’t used an official government e-mail account. Hillary’s allies pushed for the department to ask all of the former secretaries of state for any official correspondence from private e-mail accounts, giving her the thin cover that she wasn’t the only official to use a nonpublic address. Then, in late 2014, Hillary’s lawyers handed over fifty-five thousand pages of messages that they deemed to have been connected to her official duties. Hillary’s aides separated out and attempted to destroy another trove of tens of thousands of e-mails judged to be of a purely personal nature.

Hillary wouldn’t launch her campaign for more than a month, and already she was neck-deep in a scandal that would overshadow almost everything she said and did for the next twenty months. For Republicans, the e-mails were a godsend because they revived a moribund Benghazi Committee that had the power to investigate, subpoena, and ultimately drag her into a hearing room. Benghazi was supposed to be the big scandal, but it was her exclusive use of private e-mail accounts, rather than the official State Department system, that would put her in the crosshairs of a Republican Congress and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.