The overall report of the House Select Committee on Benghazi told the facts about what happened during the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks on the Libyan diplomatic outpost, said Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan Tuesday, but he and Kansas
Rep. Mike Pompeo felt it was important to write a supplemental report asking why the events happened.
"Why were we still in Benghazi when almost every other country left?" the Ohio Republican told
CNN's "New Day" host Chris Cuomo. "Why did we stay in Benghazi when the security situation was so dangerous?
"Why did the administration mislead us? Why did Secretary [Hillary] Clinton try to blame it publicly and mislead the American people and blame it on a video and not tell the truth, when it was a terrorist attack from the get go, and they knew it."
Cuomo told Jordan that much of the report and committee investigation is being dismissed as being too partisan and as being an effort to place blame on Clinton, and critics are saying that "now you have an 800 page report that by design doesn't draw conclusions."
Jordan replied that Clinton and the Obama administration were "so invested" and considered Libya as a "shining foreign policy success story," and therefore paid no attention to the facts.
"When [Libyan leader Muammar] Gadhafi was thrown out in August of 2011, in the next 13 months there were 200 security incidents," said Jordan. "An assassination attempt. One who went and came back said it's a suicide mission. That was a security posture."
Also, the Benghazi attack occurred just 56 days before the presidential election, and "the evidence shows strongly that they misled the American people," said Jordan. "They said 'we can't tell the truth, we can't talk about how bad the security situation was, we can't talk about the fact that this was a terrorist attack. We have to mislead the American people because we're eight weeks before an election, this was supposed to be our legacy. Let's say it was caused by the video.'"
The administration stuck to that story, Jordan continued, even to the point that Clinton sent her
daughter, Chelsea an email the night of the attack, saying the Benghazi attacks were conducted by terrorists.
"Clinton says that she was getting different reports on the intelligence and that was the reflex of the different statements," Cuomo replied. "Do you have anything to prove that she knew one thing but said something else, that it wasn't about changing intelligence?"
The intelligence changed, said Jordan, but Clinton's statements did not.
"Publicly they blamed the video and consistently privately they said it was a terrorist attack, because the people in Libya knew right from the start there was no protest," said Jordan.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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