Sen. Rand Paul did his part to keep the beloved Benghazi “scandal” alive by suggesting that Hillary Clinton is responsible for the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens who died during the attack.
As I have written, nothing points to “no there there” more than Fox’s own decision to drop its coverage of Clinton’s testimony at the Benghazi hearing yesterday before it was even halfway through. But that has not kept Fox from perpetuating the scandal through baseless speculation and innuendo.
Today, Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul kept up that effort with the support of most of the Outnumbered hosts.
JEDEDIAH BILA: The video became the story instead of what should have actually been the story which is that this administration was doing a terrible job when it came to terrorism, terrible job maintaining peace in Libya. They wanted a narrative, I think that’s pretty clear right now. My question for you, Senator, though is when you look at her polling, when you look at trust issues, when you look at honesty, people really doubt that with her. When they see this, is the American public just going to say oh well it was the fog of war or is this going to impact her in the same way that the e-mail scandal has?
RAND PAUL: I think it’s a constellation of things, but what I take from this is the most important, more important than the emails, frankly, more important than the spin afterwards, is that really it’s the nine months preceding Benghazi, and that it appears that on multiple occasions when they asked for more security, they asked more sandbags, more soldiers etcetera, they were denied but there’s another story here also. Why were we in Libya and was it a good idea? Hillary Clinton was the biggest proponent, bugging President Obama, saying we need to topple Qaddafi. Well if you look at Libya now it’s a failed state, there is no government, a third of those in Libya pledge allegiance to ISIS. I contend that not only did she not provide adequate security for Benghazi, but that she was a proponent of a war that actually made things less stable and made it worse off and actually made it more likely that we will be attacked from someone in Libya.
Roginsky was the lone Democrat among the five-person panel. She confronted Paul on Republicans cutting funding for security to embassies – which he denied and got some instant backup from cohost Harris Faulkner. Roginsky backed off without citing facts and figures. Either she didn’t bother to have them ready or she knew, as a paid Fox contributor she knew better than to disagree with a Republican guest too strenuously.
But Roginsky pushed back magnificently on the blame-Clinton-for-the-death suggestion.
ROGINKSY: Look, she was secretary of state, this happened on her watch, she took responsibility for it. I don’t think she’s ever said that, “This is not my fault.” She took responsibility for it. You go on to then say that she could have done what? Because I had dinner with a former ambassador yesterday, I asked him about protocol over this and when this kind of stuff happens, you don’t call the secretary of state, you call somebody called the regional security officer, you call diplomatic security and that’s who you call. So for anybody to sit here and say Hillary Clinton purposely let this man die, I think, is a horrible thing to say to her and it goes way too far and I think when you have responses like, that’s when people say, “Okay, this is no longer something that’s a legitimate investigation. In fact, this is just going after her for partisan reasons.” If she weren’t running for president, you and I both know she would not have spent 11 hours testifying yesterday.
Watch it below, from the October 23 Outnumbered (transcript via Media Matters).
