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Addressing the House hearing on Benghazi with three “whistleblowers,” Georgia Republican Rep. Tom Price told PJ Media that exercising oversight of the Obama administration has been “incredible, laborious, time-consuming work” for Congress.
“The next steps ought to be for the Obama administration to come clean on what happened. They have obfuscated at every single turn and there’s some people who believe it’s a significant cover-up. I think we’ll ultimately find out. The truth will come out but they need to come clean,” Price told PJ Media at the Capitol on May 8.
“I have great confidence and faith in Congressman Issa, Chairman Issa and his committee. They’ve done a great job on this but this just underscores the incredible, laborious, time-consuming work that oversight of this administration is. It takes months and months to put together just a single hearing to try to get to the truth when the administration is out there running all sorts of rules and regulations in the wrong direction.”
Texas Republican Rep. Blake Farenthold pushed back on the White House’s criticism of the hearing, telling PJ Media that the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is “trying to get to the truth of what happened” on Sept. 11, 2012.
“We’ve got people who saw what happened on the ground, saw how it was handled and spun back home and did the right thing and came forward with the truth about what happened on the ground,” said Farenthold, a member of the House Oversight committee, on Capitol Hill Wednesday.
Gregory Hicks, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Libya, was among those who testified.
“I was stunned, my jaw dropped and I was embarrassed,” said Hicks when asked for his reaction to UN Ambassador Susan Rice saying on Sept. 16 that the attack was caused by an anti-Islam YouTube video.
“This is a subject that has, from its beginning, been subject to attempts to politicize it by Republicans, when in fact what happened in Benghazi was a tragedy,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said on Wednesday in response to the “whistleblower” hearings taking place.
Farenthold disagrees with Carney.
“It’s trying to get to the truth of what happened so we can make sure it doesn’t happen again. Now, if that leads to some problems for the White House politically, that’s their problem,” he said.
“Now we need to go up the chain of command and say, ‘hey, why were these FEST teams stood down’? Why wasn’t there a military response and get, see if we can actually get real numbers about how long it would have taken to get military presence there, that’s the real problem.”
He continued, “Think about it as an American, you would think our military would be able to get to any hot spot in the world to help out Americans in a matter of hours and Benghazi proved that’s not the case and that’s not a very good feeling to have as an American.”
Farenthold offered his “personal theory” of why the Obama administration did not initially link the death of four Americans in Benghazi to terrorism.
“The Obama administration was campaigning on ‘we’ve got al-Qaeda on the run’. We got Bin Laden, the drone strikes are working, you should rest safely and a terrorist attack happening right in the middle of that narrative was an inconvenient truth,” he said.
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Tennessee Republican Rep. Phil Roe said Carney made the “crudest” remark he has heard about Benghazi on Wednesday.
“He also is the same guy that I thought rather crudely said that this was a long time ago. I mean think about families that had someone killed in September, I say this sort of tongue and cheek because I’m an obstetrician; 9 months is a long time if you’re pregnant but if you’ve lost a family member, that loss still burns in you. I mean, that’s a very short time,” Roe told PJ Media.
Carney said Susan Rice acknowledged that extremists were responsible for the death of four Americans on September 11. Roe said Carney has a “revisionist” view.
“If I had been Susan Rice and they gave me that cock-and-bull story I would have said, ‘think another cock-and-bull story up before I go out and face a camera and tell people that.’ I mean, the tooth fairy’s a better tale than that thing was and she repeated it over and over again with a straight face,” Roe said.
“How can the people in our country trust us if we go in front of a camera and knowingly lie? And that’s what the woman did. If she had worked for me, I would have fired her if she had gone out and said that. The problem with it was she was being a good soldier and doing what she was told to do.”
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