“With Hillary Clinton making her presidential run official, Republicans from Mitt Romney to Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul jumped at the chance Sunday to revisit Clinton’s biggest controversies from her tenure as secretary of state.
“Paul, who entered the presidential race last week, turned to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack by armed militants on a diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that killed US ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others. The attack was “a 3 a.m. phone call that she never picked up,” he told Dana Bash of CNN’s State of the Union.
“Paul said: “She didn’t provide the security, not just that day, for nine months. Dozens and dozens of requests for more security, all completely ignored by Hillary Clinton.” Paul’s claim that Clinton herself ignored a litany of security requests for the Benghazi outpost does not completely check out, though it is true that the US diplomats in Libya had warned of insufficient protection and the deteriorating climate in eastern Libya in the months ahead of Stevens’ death.
“The accuracy of his claim comes down to this: There is no hard proof that Clinton “completely ignored” “dozens and dozens” of requests for more staffing. Still, there is smoke. Clinton’s reason for not responding to requests from US diplomats in Libya outlining the need for enhanced security staffing was simple: the requests did not make it up to her through the chain of command, she said.
“To critics like Paul, Clinton assumes responsibility for what went wrong during her four years as secretary of state regardless of whether she was informed. Paul’s spokesman Eleanor May said: “Did the State Department, under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s leadership, deny the request for additional security? The answer is yes.”
“Experts say people may never know what Clinton knew about the security shortfalls in Benghazi, which officials envisioned as a temporary outpost to monitor eastern Libya’s nation-building efforts after the collapse of the Moammar Gadhafi regime.
“It is precisely for that reason that several top-ranking GOP senators have decided to nominate Clinton for the position of next U.S. ambassador in Libya,” a source in the Republican Party exclusively revealed to Newslo. “They feel that sending her off to Benghazi would have a triple effect: that would, of course, send her far away from the epicenter of politics in Washington, it would also likely benefit US diplomacy, and finally, they feel that it would satisfy justice. Many inside the GOP blame Clinton directly for what happened to the former US ambassador Stevens, and think she deserves to know what it feels like to be on the brink of immediate danger.”
