On Sunday, two days after White House press secretary Jay Carney took to the podium to dissemble on the September 11, 2012 Benghazi terrorist attacks that resulted in the deaths of four Americans including Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, even Congressional Democrats seemed unsure about how well they could defend the administration. Nonetheless, they went out of their way to defend former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) went out of her way to try to protect Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, calling Rand Paul’s attacks on Clinton’s malfeasance “nonsense” and blaming Republicans for a loss of American credibility for attacking the Obama administration. But even she admitted that criticism of the administration was warranted. “I think the talking points were wrong,” Feinstein said.
Meanwhile, Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) said on local NBC, “I think there are some unanswered questions about how they came to say what they did.”
Not all administration members went so quietly. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) tried to term the Benghazi hearings a “political show,” and accused Republicans of going “after Hillary Clinton” because of the likelihood that she would run for president in 2016. He termed the administration’s attempts to change the Benghazi talking points for political purposes “a squabble between two agencies, the CIA and the state department. He called the entire investigation a “witch hunt.”
Former Obama Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that he didn’t believe there was any cover-up at all by the State Department, despite an email from Hillary Clinton surrogate Victoria Nuland directly request edits to talking points to avoid Congressional blowback. “I wouldn’t want to try and be somebody…trying to convince her to say something she did not think was true,” he said on CBS.
Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).