Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas (18 page)

However, Obama had to know that his boast was sheer humbug. Even while he was crowing about his victory over al-Qaeda, he was receiving the same alarming intelligence briefings as Hillary—namely, that al-Qaeda had metastasized and posed a growing threat to American interests in the Middle East. As much as
he wanted voters to believe the War on Terrorism was a thing of the past, he knew better, for he was told time and again by the intelligence community that the opposite was true.

“Top U.S. officials, including the president, were told in the summer and fall of 2012 that [al-Qaeda’s] African offshoots were gaining money, lethal knowledge and a mounting determination to strike U.S. and Western interests,” the
Washington Times
reported. “The gulf between the classified briefings and Mr. Obama’s [rosy] pronouncements on the campaign trail touched off a closed-door debate inside the intelligence community about whether the terrorist group’s demise was being overstated for political reasons.”

With less than two months to go to election day, the president was in the home stretch of the campaign, and David Plouffe, the campaign’s majordomo, was now in effective control of both domestic and foreign policy in the White House. Politics trumped all other factors weighing on the president. As far as Plouffe was concerned, two of Obama’s most powerful arguments for reelection were (1) by killing Osama bin Laden, he had won the War on Terror, and (2) by refusing to get involved in Syria, he had kept the United States out of another war in the Middle East.

If the truth about Benghazi became known, it would blow both of those arguments out of the water.

“Hillary was stunned when she heard the president talk about the Benghazi attack,” according to a member of her team of legal advisers who was interviewed for this book. “Obama wanted her to say that the attack had been a spontaneous demonstration
triggered by an obscure video on the internet that demeaned Mohammed, the prophet and founder of Islam. Hillary told Obama, ‘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.’”

After her conversation with the president, Hillary called Bill Clinton, who was at his penthouse apartment in the William J. Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, and told him what Obama wanted her to do.

“I’m sick about it,” she said, according to one of her legal advisers who was privy to the conversation.

“That story won’t hold up,” Bill said.

“I know,” Hillary said. “I told the president that.”

“It’s an impossible story,” Bill said. “I can’t believe the president is claiming it wasn’t terrorism. Then again, maybe I can. It looks like Obama isn’t going to allow anyone to say that terrorism has occurred on his watch. Remember when he denied that the Fort Hood massacre [by a radicalized Islamic army major] was an act of terrorism? What did he call it? Oh, I remember. He called it an act of workplace violence.”

Hillary’s legal adviser provided further detail: “During their phone call, Bill started playing with various doomsday scenarios, up to and including the idea that Hillary consider resigning over the issue. But both he and Hillary quickly agreed that resigning wasn’t a realistic option. For one thing, Hillary was up to her eyebrows in the CIA’s illegal arms shipment operation in Benghazi; she provided the CIA with its cover. She was complicit. For another,
Christopher Stevens was the first U.S. ambassador to be killed in the line of duty since the Carter administration in 1979, and Hillary could be held responsible for failing to provide him with the necessary protection. Perhaps most important of all, if her resignation destroyed Obama’s chances for reelection, Democrats would never forgive her. Her political future, as well as Obama’s, hung in the balance.”

Obama had put Hillary in a corner, and she and Bill didn’t see any way out. And so, at 10:30 on the night of September 11, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton released a “Statement on the Attack in Benghazi.” In it, she said:

          
Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet. The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation. But let me be clear: There is never any justification for violent acts of this kind.

The Benghazi Deception had now become official American policy.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

THE FULL GINSBURG

D
espite Hillary’s initial reluctance to go along with the White House’s fabricated story about Benghazi, she quickly fell in line and became an eager collaborator. In fact, Barack Obama could not have chosen a better advocate. As he knew, once Hillary made up her mind to do something, she put her head down and bulldozed her way through to her goal, whether or not it was morally defensible.

Lying had never bothered Hillary. It was
New York Times
columnist William Safire who first wrote about Hillary’s comfort with mendacity. In a withering 1996 essay, Safire called Hillary “a congenital liar.” He pointed out that as first lady, Hillary was “compelled to mislead, and ensnare her subordinates and friends in a web of deceit.” Among other things, he cited Hillary’s preposterous explanation for her 10,000 percent profit in commodities
trading; her denial that she ordered the firing of White House travel aides; and her concealment of documents following Vince Foster’s suicide. “She is in the longtime habit of lying,” wrote Safire, “and she has never been called to account for lying herself or in suborning lying in her aides and friends.”

Hillary’s habit of lying was on full display two days after the attack on the consulate, when the bodies of Ambassador Stevens and the three other Americans who were killed in Benghazi arrived at Andrews Air Force Base. Flanked by President Obama and Vice President Biden, Hillary declared: “We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful internet video that we had nothing to do with. It is hard for the American people to make sense of that, because it is senseless and totally unacceptable.”

Hillary lied even when she didn’t have to. After the ceremony, Hillary approached Charles Woods, whose son, former SEAL Tyrone Woods, died in Benghazi, and said with a straight face: “We’re gonna go out and we’re gonna prosecute that person that made the video.”

Less than a week later, she and Obama appeared in a commercial that aired on Pakistani television. In a series of clips of their joint press conferences in Washington, the president and secretary of state apologized for the anti-Muslim “video” that allegedly triggered the assault on the consulate. “We absolutely reject its content and message,” Clinton said in the advertisement, which cost the State Department $70,000, and which carried the caption: “Paid Content.”

By now it was clear that Hillary was willing to go to any length to prevent Benghazi from becoming a political embarrassment to the White House or State Department. When she heard
that Dutch Ruppersberger, the ranking Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, had asked the CIA to put together unclassified “talking points” on the Benghazi attack, she warned Cheryl Mills, her chief of staff, and Victoria Nuland, her press secretary, to be on the lookout for problems in the CIA draft that might damage the president or her.

Her concern turned out to be warranted. As Stephen F. Hayes of the
Weekly Standard
later reported, the initial draft put together by the CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis included the assertion that the U.S. government “know[s] that Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda participated in the attack.” In a classic case of the CIA covering its ass, the draft went on to state: “The Agency has produced numerous pieces on the threat of extremists linked to al Qaeda in Benghazi and Libya.”

Shortly after the CIA’s talking points were distributed to the State Department and other agencies of the government for review and comment, Victoria Nuland, with the blessing of Cheryl Mills, raised the first of several objections. Nuland objected to talking points that “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings.”

“In an attempt to address those concerns,” wrote Stephen Hayes, “CIA officials cut all references to Ansar al Sharia and made minor tweaks. But in a follow-up e-mail . . . Nuland wrote that the problem remained, and that her superiors—she did not say which ones—were unhappy. The changes, she wrote, did not ‘resolve all my issues or those of my building leadership.’”

In the following days, the “building leadership”—in other words, Hillary Clinton—pushed to make sure that there was nothing in the talking points that would cast the State Department
in a bad light. Ultimately, the talking points went through twelve revisions, and all references to “jihadists,” “al-Qaeda,” and “Ansar al-Sharia” were scrubbed. Instead, the talking points referred to spontaneous “demonstrations.” And administration spokesmen doubled down on their false claim that those demonstrations had been provoked by a YouTube video.

At this point in the presidential race, with fifty-two days left to go before election day, Obama’s campaign team was cautiously optimistic that the president would prevail over Mitt Romney on November 6. Nine statistical models predicted an Obama victory. However, according to Michael Nelson in the
Claremont Review of Books
, “five such models with roughly equal statistical rigor predicted a Romney victory.”

The race was that close.

From the point of view of David Plouffe in the West Wing and David Axelrod and Jim Messina at campaign headquarters in Chicago, Benghazi was a menace of the first order. The tragic loss of American lives combined with the terrorist attack’s vast national security implications created the kind of issue that could erase Obama’s hoped-for margin of victory.

On the day after the attack, Obama flew to Las Vegas for a fund-raiser. Before he left, he asked Valerie Jarrett to phone Hillary and ask her to go on the Sunday morning political talk shows and use the administration’s sanitized talking points. The president wanted Hillary to do “the Full Ginsburg,” Jarrett said—a reference to Monica Lewinsky’s lawyer, William H.
Ginsburg, who was the first person to appear on all five major American Sunday morning television shows on the same day.

Hillary had done the Full Ginsburg once before, back in 2007, when she was gearing up to run for president. Her performance had been judged less than stellar. Howard Kurtz, then the host of CNN’s
Reliable Sources
, pointed out that Hillary flip-flopped on the issue of whether she would be willing to torture a terrorist prisoner, and he noted that Hillary gave the “Clinton cackle” in response to a number of questions.
The Daily Show
’s Jon Stewart ran a hilarious montage of Hillary laughing during the interviews. Since then, Hillary had rarely appeared on any of the Sunday news shows, for the simple reason that she and Bill knew she didn’t come across as very likable in that question-and-answer format.

Nonetheless, Hillary hesitated to say no to the president. After all, she was counting on his endorsement when she ran for the White House in 2016. She didn’t want to cross him. But when she called Bill, who was still in Little Rock, and told him what Valerie Jarrett had asked her to do, Bill was appalled.

“Don’t decide anything until I see you,” Bill told her, according to Hillary’s recollection of the conversation, which she described in detail to a friend. “I’m getting on a plane and flying up to Washington right now. I’ll meet you at the house.”