Face The Nation: Hillary Defends Emails and Benghazi

Face The Nation: Hillary Defends Emails and Benghazi

Hillary Clinton appeared on Face the Nation today and responded to questions from host John Dickerson on a wide range of issues, notably the Benghazi attack and her controversial email server.

On Benghazi, Clinton claimed that she felt no political pressure to blame the attack on a video.

On her email, she continued to insist everything was above board.

Here’s a partial transcript via CBS News:

DICKERSON: Benghazi.

CLINTON: Right.

DICKERSON: Was that your 3:00 a.m. phone call? And how well did you handle that crisis, by the standard you raised in that ad?

CLINTON: Well, of course it was a crisis. And we lost four brave Americans, including the person that I asked the president to send as ambassador, Chris Stevens.

But we live in a dangerous world. And even our diplomats are at threat. And that goes all the way back to, for goodness’ sake, taking over our embassy in Tehran or the bombings of our embassy in Beirut, when President Reagan was in charge.

This is a dangerous world. And I think what we had to do during that period of time, in trying to protect our people after the attack on the consulate, getting them evacuated, not only working on what was going on in Libya, because, remember, we had embassies that were under attack or threatened to attack by terrorist groups across North Africa, indeed, across a much larger swathe of the world.

So, I think it was terribly tragic, what happened. I immediately asked for an independent review, just like former secretaries of state did. And I made that public. And the only other person who did that was Secretary Albright after our embassies were bombed in Africa.

So, my view on this is, we have to learn things. And we are always learning. We learned after Beirut. We learned after Tanzania and Kenya. We have learned after Benghazi, but we’re not going to be able to represent the United States working out of hermetically sealed tanks. We are going to have to be out in the world.

DICKERSON: One more question on Benghazi. The charge is, in this campaign, that after it happened, there was a report inside the State Department and inside the government that this was a terrorist attack.

But in what we heard from the government at the time and from you was an emphasis on this video, that that had created the attack. And so the charge is that there was a political pressure to make the case more about the video than to talk about terrorism.

CLINTON: Well, I just don’t think that’s fair. And I’m going to testify about this at the end of October before the committee looking into this. I think it’s the eighth investigation that the Congress has conducted.

There were two things going on simultaneously. I and others said that we were attacked. There was no doubt about that. That video, which was still spinning through the world, was being mentioned on social media. We had people climbing the walls at our embassy in Cairo even before the attack in Benghazi.

And we had a lot of other attacks. I had to call the president of one of our neighboring countries, Tunis, to try to get — in Tunis — to get them to help protect our embassy. So, I was worried about everything that was going on and how people were responding to that from North Africa to Pakistan, all the way to Indonesia.

You can watch the video below:

The interview also contained a few fluff moments like Clinton laughing when asked to describe herself in three words. Via the Washington Free Beacon:

Of course, there was one segment of the interview that Hillary wanted people to remember:

“I cannot imagine anyone being more of an outsider than the first woman president.” https://t.co/ybAEte5WkO

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 20, 2015

Featured image via YouTube.

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