Email to Hillary: Susan Rice Repeated "Our View" That Benghazi Happened "Spontaneously"

Several newsworthy bits in here, including the fact that Hillary emailed aides on their personal accounts as well, which means that she flat-out lied when she said she took pains to email people on official government accounts so that those emails would be automatically preserved.

I found this interesting:

The day that Ms. Rice appeared on the shows [the five Sunday shows in which Rice repeatedly misled the public about the origin of the Benghazi attacks-- ace], Mr. Sullivan, who served as Mrs. Clinton’s deputy chief of staff and is one of her most trusted advisers, emailed Mrs. Clinton a transcript of Ms. Rice’s remarks on ABC’s "This Week." Mr. Sullivan’s message was brief, but he appeared pleased by how it had gone. Ms. Rice, on the show, described it as a spontaneous eruption of violence, triggered by an offensive anti-Muslim video.

"She did make clear our view that this started spontaneously then evolved," Mr. Sullivan wrote to Mrs. Clinton.

But in the days that followed, the administration’s view of what occurred grew more complicated. Amid intense criticism from Republicans, who accused the White House of playing down the attack in an election year, administration officials began to call it "a terrorist attack." Ms. Rice's initial description of the attack as spontaneous came under intense scrutiny.

Two weeks after that first email assessing Ms. Rice’s appearance, Mr. Sullivan sent Mrs. Clinton a very different email. This time, he appeared to reassure the secretary of state that she had avoided the problems Ms. Rice was confronting. He told Mrs. Clinton that he had reviewed her public remarks since the attack and that she had avoided the language that had landed Ms. Rice in trouble.

"You never said 'spontaneous' or characterized their motivations," Mr. Sullivan wrote.

Hillary Clinton was always a prime driver of this YouTube video story. In her mind, it made her less responsible for the attack if she could claim it "evolved" "spontaneously" out of a right-winger's troublemaking.

There was never any reason to believe this, and a huge list of reasons to not believe it, and yet Clinton either straight-up lied about it or, and this is the possibility that gets discussed less, deceived herself into believing and propagating a silly fantasy that no clear-headed Future President would ever be conned into believing, simply because this particular fantasy better suited her ego and her political prospects.

Don't we need a president who interprets information correctly and dispassionately, rather than lying about that information, or willfully fantasizing about it?

Hillary Clinton either lied to America or lied to America after first lying to herself.

Neither recommends her much.

posted by Ace at 01:33 PM

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