Reporter Corners Trey Gowdy: Are the ‘Clinton Lied, People Died’ Bumper Stickers True?
by J.D. Durkin
MEDIAite.com
Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., turned the tables back on a reporter Tuesday who sought to entrap the Benghazi Committee chairman in a question about Hillary Clinton’s culpability in the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.
“There are bumper stickers and T-shirts all over this country that say ‘Hillary Clinton lied, people died’… is this true?” asked the reporter.
“You don’t see that T-shirt on me, and you don’t see that bumper sticker on any of my vehicles,” responded Gowdy. “And you’ve never heard me comment on that.”
The chairman then asked the reporter if he had read the report. The man replied that he had not. Gowdy encouraged him to do so before making any conclusions.
“I’m not gonna tell you what to be on the look out for,” Gowdy said. “I’m gonna tell you there’s new information, and it fundamentally changes the way I view what happened before, during and after.”
Among the major findings of the report are:
- The rapid response military team in the theater of operations was ready by never sent. “A Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team (FAST) sat on a plane in Rota, Spain, for three hours, and changed in and out of their uniforms four times.”
- No military assets were sent to Benghazi: “Despite President Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s clear orders to deploy military assets, nothing was sent to Benghazi, and nothing was en route to Libya at the time the last two Americans were killed almost 8 hours after the attacks began.”
- White House meeting while the attack was underway, which Hillary Clinton participated in, focused heavily on crafting the false video narrative: “With Ambassador Stevens missing, the White House convened a roughly two-hour meeting at 7:30 PM, which resulted in action items focused on a YouTube video, and others containing the phrases ‘[i]f any deployment is made,’ and “Libya must agree to any deployment,” and ‘[w]ill not deploy until order comes to go to either Tripoli or Benghazi.’”
As reported by Western Journalism, Stevens was missing at the time of the 7:30 p.m. meeting, but the report found “much of the conversation focused on the video [which] is surprising given no direct link or solid evidence existed connecting the attacks in Benghazi and the video at the time …”
The administration blamed the embassy attack on an anti-Islam YouTube video.
The report further noted that “five of the 10 action items from the rough notes of the 7:30 p.m. meeting reference the video.”
The Benghazi Committee also determined the Obama administration’s narrative about a spontaneous uprising based on the video did not reflect the real-time information coming in from Benghazi. Among this information was video coming in through surveillance drones, intercepted communications between the terrorists and reports from agents on the ground.
Clinton knew the account was false. She sent an email to the Egyptian prime minister on Sept. 12, 2012, in which she wrote: “We know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack — not a protest.”
The very night of the attack, she emailed Chelsea Clinton: “Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an al Qaeda-like group: The Ambassador, whom I handpicked and a young communications officer on temporary duty w a wife and two young children. Very hard day and I fear more of the same tomorrow.”
Despite knowing the contrary was true, Clinton told the victims’ family members and the public that the video was the cause of the attacks. Stevens, foreign service officer Sean Smith and former Navy Seals Ty Woods and Glen Doherty were killed in the attacks on the American consulate and CIA annex.
h/t: Mediaite