Killing the Messenger

by David Brock

  The more serious charge, then, is that additional armed forces, prepared to respond to the attack and thus, perhaps, thwart it before it could claim lives, had been mysteriously ordered to stand down.

  Here’s where this claim began: In a private interview prior to his public testimony, diplomat Gregory Hicks told House staffers that an additional team of CIA and military personnel and contractors had been preparing to board a plane in Tripoli when its commander, Lieutenant Colonel S. E. Gibson, “got a phone call from SOCAFRICA which said, ‘you can’t go now, you don’t have the authority to go now.’ And so they missed the flight…. They were told not to board the flight, so they missed it.”

  Republicans quickly leaked partial excerpts of the private interview, and it became the basis for a dramatic moment in Hicks’s public testimony when Jason Chaffetz asked him how the team “react[ed] to being told to stand down.” Chaffetz used the term again on Fox: “We had people that were getting killed, we had people who are willing to risk their lives to go save them, and somebody told them to stand down.” Issa doubled down on the attack in a press release: “Who gave the order for special operations forces to stand down, preventing them from helping their compatriots under attack?”

  If this rhetoric makes you think of Jack Nicholson imploding on the witness stand in A Few Good Men, that’s no accident. It was an inflammatory charge, infused with mystery, encouraging people to imagine Obama (or, even better, Hillary) inexcusably denying life-saving assistance to Americans under fire. Republicans clearly expected the trail to lead straight to the upper reaches of the administration. “To a lot of people’s understanding,” Fox host Steve Doocy told his audience, providing the “Who’s there?” to Issa’s “Knock, knock” press release, “the only people who could say stand down would be the president of the United States and the secretary of defense.”

  Hicks, of course, never used the term “stand down” or referred to an order from the White House. But the existence of such an order was treated by conservatives as established fact, and Fox aired the accusation at least eighty-five times in the following weeks.

  Conservatives never got their A Few Good Men moment, however, because no stand-down order had ever been given. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey would explain, the team had actually been “told that the individuals in Benghazi were on their way back and that they would be better used at the Tripoli Airport—because one of them was a medic—that they would be better used to receive the casualties coming back from Benghazi and that if they had gone, they would have simply passed each other in the air.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Gibson confirmed that he had not received a stand-down order, and his commanding officer corroborated his testimony.

  The truth is, even if Gibson’s team had boarded the plane, it would not have left the tarmac—let alone arrived in Benghazi—until nearly an hour after the second attack occurred. They would have been too late to save any lives, and, indeed, lives may have been jeopardized because survivors might have landed in Tripoli only to find that the medic had gone to the scene from which they had just been evacuated.

  Of course, Fox News never corrected the record. Rather than wrestle with the fact that they had, effectively, falsely accused the U.S. military of falling short in its duty to protect Americans—thus slandering the men and women who keep us safe—conservatives continued to insist that the phantom order had been given.

  The “whistleblowers”

  As claim after claim fizzled in the face of the facts, conservatives kept hoping that something would emerge to cast blame on Hillary Clinton. In mid-April 2013, CBS News’s Sharyl Attkisson rode to their rescue with a report claiming that “multiple new whistleblowers [were] privately speaking” to congressional investigators. Her report pointed to letters, leaked by Issa’s committee, asking the CIA, the Department of Defense, and the State Department to help obtain security clearances for attorneys so that whistleblowers at that agency could lawyer up—in the event, as Issa cleverly suggests, “the agency subsequently retaliates against them for cooperating with the committee’s investigation.”

  New witnesses being intimidated and retaliated against by Hillary and her top aides to suppress damning information? It was just the sort of thuggish behavior that the right would expect of the vaunted “Clinton machine.” The story lit up the Washington sky. After all, this was CBS News, not Fox. Indeed, days after Attkisson broke the story Issa had leaked to her—with the scandal freshly laundered and ready for pickup—Issa promptly announced a hearing to “examine evidence that the Obama administration officials have attempted to suppress information.”

  But Attkisson proved to be an untrustworthy source—belying her network’s reputation as a credible and serious outlet, but surprising few who were familiar with her record.

  Previously, Attkisson had received notoriety for reporting that cast doubt on the safety of vaccines, and acclaim from the right for her investigations into the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms’ so-called Fast and Furious operation—another popular conservative conspiracy theory falsely alleging that the Obama administration allowed guns to be trafficked across the U.S. border with Mexico. She even received an award at a Conservative Political Action Committee conference for her intrepid reporting.

  After leaving her job at CBS, Attkisson joined the right-wing Heritage Foundation, and she wrote a book about her experiences in the news business. Darrell Issa was the guest of honor at the book party. As part of the launch, she claimed, bizarrely, that the government had attempted to hack her personal computer, releasing a video illustrating what she claimed was an unnamed government agency using keystroke logging software to track her movements. On the video, you see a Microsoft Word document with text rapidly disappearing from the screen, what Attkisson calls “my computer file… wiping at hyperspeed before my eyes.”

  WATCH SOMEONE IN THE GOVERNMENT TAKE OVER SHARYL ATTKISSON’S COMPUTER, screamed Townhall. On Fox, Howard Kurtz called it “highly sophisticated hacking,” “chilling stuff.”

  This was too rich. At Media Matters, we called a computer security expert, who looked at Attkisson’s video and quickly figured out what it showed: Her backspace key was stuck.

  So, in retrospect, it’s not surprising that it was Attkisson who reported the next big break in the Benghazi case.

  The whistleblower story helped create the sense that the investigation was still unfolding, long after multiple investigations had run out of gas. Even if Republicans were never able to produce damning evidence of Hillary’s complicity, by keeping the issue alive they could continue asking questions—if nothing else to distract her and give her opponents a chance to suggest that the country was still owed answers. “Here’s the ugly truth” is a pretty fun thing to say at a press conference; “we still don’t know the truth” is almost as good.

  So it’s no wonder that the week after Attkisson’s report, Issa announced that his panel would “examine evidence that Obama administration officials have attempted to suppress information about errors and reckless misjudgments.”

  And in short order, a familiar face appeared on the scene: Victoria Toensing, an attorney who, along with her law partner and husband, Joseph diGenova, had been key players in the scheme to bring down the Clintons back in the 1990s. I have no doubt that had I not left my old world, I might have been one of the reporters eagerly playing stenographer as Toensing whispered in my ear.

  This time, I had to watch from the sidelines as she made the rounds on Fox News and right-wing radio. “I’m not talking generally, I’m talking specifically about Benghazi—that people have been threatened. And not just the State Department. People have been threatened at the CIA,” Toensing claimed.

  “It’s frightening, and they’re doing some very despicable threats to people. Not ‘We’re going to kill you,’ or not ‘We’re going to prosecute you tomorrow,’ but they’re taking career people and making them well aware that their careers will be over.” />
  It became such a big story that Fox’s Ed Henry even demanded to President Obama’s face that he help “people in your own State Department saying they’ve been blocked from coming forward.”

  Toensing’s client was Gregory Hicks (the diplomat who was treated as the source of the “stand down” talking point, even though he’d never said those words). As the deputy chief of mission for the Libya delegation, and someone who had spoken to Ambassador Chris Stevens during the attack and reported to Secretary Clinton that night, Hicks was credible. But when he testified, Hicks didn’t say what conservatives were expecting to hear.

  One Congressman asked him whether he had been interviewed by the State Department ARB. Hicks had, more than once. Hicks had also spoken to the FBI as part of its investigation.

  Okay, so maybe he hadn’t been kept quiet—surely he had been punished for speaking out? After all, Toensing had claimed that Hicks had been “demoted.”

  Actually, not so much, he explained. Hicks had returned to a government job in Washington for personal reasons. “My family really didn’t want me to go back. We’d endured a year of separation when I was in Afghanistan in 2006 and 2007. That was the overriding factor. So I voluntarily curtailed—I accepted an offer of what’s called a no-fault curtailment. That means that there’s—there would be no criticism of my departure of post, no negative repercussions.” As was later revealed, Hicks even kept his salary and rank in his new job.

  So much for that claim. But conservatives pounced on something else Hicks said before the committee: that the State Department had ordered him “not to allow” himself and his colleagues “to be personally interviewed” by Representative Chaffetz during his fact-finding mission to Libya. Breitbart News ran a new story headlined: WHISTLEBLOWER: HILLARY’S STATE DEPT. TOLD ME NOT TO TALK TO CONGRESS.

  Not quite. As the New York Times later reported, “Mr. Hicks had been free to talk to Mr. Chaffetz, but that department policy required a department lawyer to be present during interviews for any Congressional investigation.”

  The GOP’s “star witness,” as Dana Milbank would later write in the Washington Post, “was of little use to Republicans in their efforts to connect the lapses in the Benghazi response to Clinton or to the Obama White House.”

  That fall, another CBS reporter, Lara Logan, had a scintillating report about a previously unheard-from whistleblower: a security contractor using the pseudonym “Morgan Jones” who claimed to be an “eyewitness” to the attack. “Jones’s” story was dramatic—he claimed that he had scaled a wall of the Benghazi compound, personally struck a terrorist in the face with his rifle butt, and later went to the hospital, where he saw Ambassador Stevens’s body.

  This looked like big news: Someone who was there the night of the attack was willing to talk about what he’d seen (the five security personnel who’d been in the safe room with Stevens and Smith had declined to step into the public eye, testifying privately to the FBI and the State Department ARB). And “Jones” charged that not only was the compound inadequately protected, but, even more devastating, that the late Sean Smith had shared similar concerns. Lindsey Graham announced that he would block confirmation of every single Obama nominee until “Morgan Jones” and other government witnesses got to testify before Congress. Benghazi was about to break open once again.

  “Morgan Jones” was actually named Dylan Davies, and his story started to crumble almost immediately. Davies, it quickly emerged, had a book coming out two days later—a book published by Threshold, which you may remember is a conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster, which in turn is owned by CBS (Logan never disclosed this during her report). From monitoring Fox, Media Matters picked up that the network had been using Davies as a source but broke contact after he asked for money, thus establishing that Davies didn’t even meet the standards of Fox.

  But CBS pressed on with its report on Davies’s claims—claims that, it turned out, were totally refuted by Davies’s own prior accounts. In the incident report he wrote three days after the attack and submitted to his employer, Davies wrote that he never got near the compound—in fact, he spent most of the evening at home. He had not seen Ambassador Stevens’s body. He wasn’t an eyewitness at all. And not only had he revealed this to his employer before changing his story to write the book and get on TV, he had told the FBI the same: He wasn’t there and hadn’t seen a thing. CBS had swallowed a lie whole and regurgitated it onto the air.

  For several days, Media Matters ran a campaign exposing the 60 Minutes report’s flaws and calling for the network to retract the story. Within two weeks, the story had been taken down, Logan had been placed on administrative leave, and Davies’s book had been recalled from stores.

  Still, when CBS acknowledged their mistake, they did so in a brief, ninety-second correction that failed to explain how, exactly, a story made up out of whole cloth had made it onto CBS’s air, leading us to demand that CBS open a full investigation into what had gone wrong (including the possibility that Logan had been consulting with Lindsey Graham while working on the story).

  Despite the best efforts of the conservative media—and the assistance of some in the mainstream press—the right is still looking in vain for its Benghazi whistleblower.

  On the Friday before Thanksgiving 2014, the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee released a report summing up two years of work. The New York Times reported: “A report released late Friday about the fatal 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, left Republicans in the same position they have been in for two years: with little evidence to support their most damning critiques of how the Obama administration, and then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, responded to the attacks.”

  After all this, the Benghazi witch hunts have produced nothing. No stand-down order. No blocked rescues. No muzzled whistleblowers. No attempt to mislead the public. Without a smoking gun, Republicans have spent the last two years—and will likely spend the next two—blowing smoke.

  So why do they persist? The answer is that while conservatives would be thrilled to find some previously undiscovered evidence to blame Hillary Clinton for the Benghazi attack, they don’t need it for their strategy to work. The right, no doubt, has polled the issue, so they know that voters have heard enough about Benghazi to believe that there is blame to be assessed somewhere in the government. They know they’ve succeeded in sowing the suspicion that there is some further truth not yet told.

  They also know that, as long as they continue to talk about Benghazi as some kind of unsolved mystery, the media will continue to hype the “ongoing investigation” into “what really happened that night.”

  In Media Matters’ exhaustive e-book debunking of the right’s various lies, The Benghazi Hoax, we described Benghazi as a MacGuffin, the late director Alfred Hitchcock’s term for “an obscure plot driver whose real significance derives from the way that it motivates the characters.” So if we want to know what Benghazi really means, we should look at how it has motivated the characters in our story in the lead-up to Hillary’s 2016 campaign.

  Benghazi spurred President Obama and Hillary Clinton to review and enhance protections for Americans who serve abroad—Americans like Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods, and Glen Doherty. It offered new material for Republicans and conservative media to paint Obama as weak on terror and to undermine Hillary’s reputation as a strong secretary of state while burnishing the image of her as a self-serving liar. It provided future opportunities for the blowhards on Capitol Hill, where it was widely thought that the head of the Benghazi inquiry, Trey Gowdy, was angling for a federal judgeship in the next GOP administration. It seduced mainstream journalists too willing to buy right-wing spin in search of something tantalizing to report.

  And it was the foundational element of a media dynamic in which everything the Clintons say or do is scandalized—even their path-breaking global philanthropy.

  Chapter Nine

  No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

  Full disclosure:
I’m a donor to the Clinton Foundation. And, at the level I’ve given—a few thousand dollars over the years—I’d be considered a substantial donor, since 90 percent of Foundation supporters contribute $100 or less annually.

  If that fact surprises you, it should, for the incredibly broad donor base the Foundation attracts to its path-breaking global philanthropy is one of those telling details the press never bothers to tell.

  Indeed, of all the controversies that have swirled around the Clintons for years now, it’s their work on behalf of the world’s neediest that has been most seriously distorted through both partisan sniping and journalistic malpractice.

  The real story of the Clinton Foundation starts back in 2000, when Bill Clinton’s two decades of public service through elected office ended, and he found another way to serve, chartering the William J. Clinton Foundation in 2001. After eight years in the White House, and with a long list of domestic and international accomplishments under his belt, he was well regarded, still relatively young, and, as always, committed to using his talents for the greater good.

  As Hillary went to work for the people of New York in the United States Senate, the former president traveled the world, meeting with leaders from every walk of life and drawing inspiration for the Clinton Foundation’s work.

  A meeting with the prime minister of St. Kitts–Nevis at the 2002 International AIDS Conference—and the urging of Nelson Mandela—led to an initiative to combat the global rise of HIV/AIDS, which would eventually become a program called the Clinton Health Access Initiative, focused on improving access to care and treatment around the world. It was a commendable mission for a former president—lowering the prices of life-saving medications—and it became just the first of many such philanthropic initiatives.