According to Edward Klein’s new book on the tense relationship between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Hillary is shipping Obama under the bus on Benghazi.
In Klein’s telling, by 10 PM on the night of the Benghazi attack, then Secretary of State Clinton was fully briefed on the assault. She knew it was a pre-planned terrorist attack timed to the anniversary of 9-11. She knew that Ambassador Christopher Stevens was dead.
But in that famous yet under-reported phone call between Clinton and Obama that night, Obama didn’t want to hear the facts.
A “legal adviser” to Clinton tells Klein that Obama had a political storyline to tell. Obama wanted to blame the “Innocence of Muslims” YouTube movie, and say that Benghazi had been a spontaneous demonstration triggered by that video because it demeaned Mohammed.
The legal adviser tells Klein that Hillary pushed back, saying “‘Mr. President, that story isn’t credible. Among other things, it ignores the fact that the attack occurred on 9/11.’ But the president was adamant. He said, ‘Hillary, I need you to put out a State Department release as soon as possible.’”
In this telling, Hillary then called Bill Clinton. Bill agreed that the story wouldn’t hold up. They even discussed whether Hillary ought to resign rather than lie to the American people, but balked at that because they both believed that her resignation might cost Obama the election, and she would be poisoned by that for her run in 2016.
Obama had put Hillary in a corner, and she and Bill didn’t see a way out. And so, shortly after 10 o’clock on the night of September 11, she released an official statement that blamed the Benghazi attack on an “inflammatory (video) posted on the Internet.”
Wrap your mind around all that. If it’s true, Hillary Clinton knew that she was telling a lie the entire time, including when the dead were lying in coffins behind her. Yet she repeated that lie for weeks, just for the sake of preserving her own chances of winning in 2016.
Now, she’s chucking Obama under the bus for exactly the same reason. It has nothing to do with right or wrong or truth or lies or setting the record straight. It has everything to do with ambition. The Clintons are even tossing Obama under the bus in the most cowardly of ways, hiding behind an unnamed legal aide instead of just coming forward and blowing the whistle.
I’m in the camp that expects Hillary Clinton to win in 2016 at this point. She’s a craven mediocrity, but she’s a craven mediocrity whose time has come. Even some alleged conservatives are taken with Hillary.
“She’s a fiscal conservative.” – Margaret Hoover on Hillary Clinton
— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) June 23, 2014
Her election will signal many things, most notably that Americans no longer care to have honest leadership at all. We no longer care if our leaders lie to us, even about matters of life and death.
We’ll pay for that.
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