Hearings are scheduled today before Darrell Issa’s committee.
I thought that Roger L. Simon was going a bit overboard late last week.
Even Simon acknowledged that his writing on the topic could be “overheated.”
New information is coming out. At Breitbart, John Sexton recounts some revelations of Greg Hicks, the second in command to Amb. Chris Stevens in Libya.
Hicks, who did not appear on the show but whose reactions were featured based on transcripts of interviews with Issa’s committee, said he was stunned by what UN Ambassador Susan Rice claimed on five different news shows on Sep. 16. When she appeared on Face the Nation, she followed an interview with the President of Libya who claimed he had “no doubt” it was a terror attack. Moments later, Amb. Rice contradicted him and claimed a spontaneous protest was more likely.Acting Ambassador Hicks watched the Sunday shows and said he found this contradiction shocking. “The net impact of what has transpired is the spokesperson of the most powerful country in the world has basically said that the President of Libya is either a liar or doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” he accused. Hicks added, “My jaw hit the floor as I watched this…I’ve never been as embarrassed in my life, in my career as on that day.”Hicks believes the stunning failure of diplomacy on the Sunday news shows explains why it took the FBI three weeks to gain access to the Benghazi site. The U.S. had effectively humiliated the Libyan President on national TV. That decision, he believed, probably compromised our ability to investigate and track down those responsible.
Hicks also told Bob Schieffer:
The deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Libya during a 2012 attack on a diplomatic outpost in Benghazi told investigators he thought the strike was “a terrorist attack from the get-go,” according to interview excerpts released Sunday on CBS News’s “Face The Nation.”“I thought it was a terrorist attack from the get-go. I think everybody in the mission thought it was a terrorist attack from the beginning,” Gregory Hicks said in an interview with investigators shared with “Face The Nation.” The excerpt was one of several host Bob Schieffer revealed on the program.
Interestingly, Schieffer seems skeptical of the administration.
Bob Schieffer: Again, what was going on here?Darrell Issa: Well clearly, there was a political decision to say something different than what was reasonable to say. And I think Bob that one of the tragedies of this is it took three weeks to get our FBI in. Well, when you tell the President of Libya, who by the way went to Benghazi at personal risk, did that broadcast from Benghazi, as a courageous act-if you tell him he’s wrong, that it’s not terrorism, what a surprise that you have a hard time getting FBI to the crime scene. If anything, we may have compromised our ability to know what really happened there as far as catching the culprits, because more weeks went by with no FBI on the ground.
If you follow the transcript, when Schieffer questions Dutch Ruppersberger, Ruppersberger is evasive and unspecific.
(Speaking of surprising performances news shows, Igor Volsky at Think Progress claims that Republicans “lost” Fox and Friends by its questioning of Jason Chaffetz. It’s true that the hosts ask questions that Chaffetz doesn’t answer satisfactorily. Watch the whole clip.
Does it sound like Chaffetz “lost” the hosts. In the end they asked why Democrats haven’t been involved and he answers that it’s been their choice not to be involved so far. via memeorandum)
In the end impeachment is as much a political process as it is a legal and constitutional process. There has to be popular outrage at the officeholder or the impeachers will find themselves vilified as overreaching usurpers who are playing politics. The MSM ensured that there was popular outrage against Nixon but protected Clinton. I have little doubt that they will treat President Obama with same deference. (Obama would never have been re-elected without the MSM running interference for him on Benghazi in the first place. They’re not going to throw away their hard won victory.)
Margaret Sullivan, the public editor of the New York Times writes in Is the Times really ignoring Benghazi?
Mr. Leonhardt made the case in an e-mail to me on Tuesday morning, after a phone conversation, that “we’ve written a lot about Benghazi, and we’ll be writing more.”It is important, he said, but he is not impressed by what has been reported in other news outlets so far this week.
David Leonhardt is the Washington bureau chief for the New York Times. He wasn’t impressed by Stephen Hayes’ reporting at the Weekly Standard?
Sullivan, though, describes the mindset at the New York Times.
Here’s my take: The angry criticism of The Times on Benghazi has been based largely on politics, not journalism, and fomented by Fox News. (The conspiracy narrative goes like this: The Times is a liberal newspaper unwilling to take on a liberal president and his administration.) In fact, what’s been written in The Times has been solid. But my sense is that, starting last fall, The Times has had a tendency to both play down the subject, which has significant news value, and to pursue it most aggressively as a story about political divisiveness rather than one about national security mistakes and the lack of government transparency. Many readers would like to see more on that front, and so would I.
The shorter Sullivan is this: if we don’t agree with the conclusions drawn from the facts, it’s politics not real news. Go back to Face the Nation and compare Issa’s responses to Ruppersberger’s. Who has the facts? Who is playing politics?
Sullivan acknowledges that the New York Times got some flack after the Washington Post, to its credit, ran a front page story on the testimony of Gregory Hicks.
She wrote that the Times would have a Benghazi story in the print edition today. If you scroll down far enough on the home page of the paper you will find this story. It’s classified as “Politics” and appeared on page A16.
That tells us how the New York Times views today’s hearings and it will be a guide to how much of the MSM will cover them.
A commenter, MazelD, at Contentions put it very well:
No matter how corrupt this administration maybe, no matter how many lies Mr. Obama and his aides may have uttered, the press will not cover this story. Sure, there will be comments here and articles at other conservative sites, maybe a story once in a while on television (Fox News?) but that’s it….If you don’t believe this, ask yourself: Bill Clinton perjured himself—there was incontrovertible evidence of his lies. What happened? Nothing. He served out his term, his wife was a senator, now past Secretary of State, and he even just addressed the Democratic national convention last year. Democrats love the guy! Just love him.Until the media sees fit to do its duty, our nation is doomed to be swindled and lied to by those favored politicians who are not held accountable. So, the question is: What can honest (not even conservative, but simply honest) citizen do about this situation?
So no, there will be no impeachment. Consequences are likely to be limited. A few more low level employees may well be disciplined for their superiors’ malfeasance. Today may be troublesome for the administration and its supporters, but it probably won’t be awful.
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