Pete Hoekstra: GOP Should Have Known About Benghazi Email

House Republicans should have been the ones to uncover an email that proves White House officials prepared national security adviser Susan Rice on what to say about the deadly attack on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, says former Rep. Pete Hoekstra.

Judicial Watch, a conservative, educational foundation, bared an email that appears to describe a White House communications adviser and other administration public relations brass orchestrating a campaign to "reinforce" President Barack Obama's take on the attack.

"This revelation should not have come from Judicial Watch. I'm glad that it did, [but] . . .  this is the kind of information that Congress should've had, you know, a year and a half ago," Hoekstra, a Michigan Republican, told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV.

"They should've had it in the three or four weeks after the attack . . . In a year and a half they've never gotten close to this kind of information," he said Wednesday.

"This now says the storyline started in the White House, it didn't start with the CIA talking points. This is a direct connection back into the White House. House Republicans should've been all over this. They have not, why, where've they been? I don't know."

Hoekstra was part of a Newsmax panel discussing the revelation with C. Edmund Wright, author of "WTF?: How Karl Rove and the Establishment Lost … Again," out from Ross James Publishing.

"We saw Susan Rice and the five Sunday shows she did, [and she] was clearly just a talking point robot," Wright said.

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Wright pointed to the heated exchange White House Press Secrerary Jay Carney got into with ABC News' Jonathan Karl, who asked him about the revealing email.

"Carney's been caught . . . He was very jittery and stumbling around on that interview," Wright said.

Rice originally blamed the attack — in which four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens were brutally murdered — on an incendiary Internet video. That claim turned out to be false.

Hoekstra said he was impressed that the Obama administration had been able to keep the Benghazi cover-up a secret for so long.

"One thing you have to give the Obama administration credit for since [the attack], they have managed this story line masterfully," he said.

"They've kept it out of the media . . . it's never been about what else is going on in Benghazi, it never was about the failed policy in Libya, in Egypt, Iran. This whole foreign policy is in tatters."

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