Benghazi’s smoking gun…in email form

Hillary Clinton can equivocate all she likes on the question of whether a supposedly inflammatory video sparked the violence that led to the 2012 Benghazi attack – but the emails tell a very different story.

Newly-released emails from the House Select Committee on Benghazi show on-the-ground embassy personnel in Libya imploring the State Department not to mislead people into believing a YouTube video, known as “The Innocence of Muslims,” incited the violence that killed four Americans on Sept. 11, 2012.

“The email, released by the House Select Committee on Benghazi on Saturday, was sent by a Tripoli embassy official to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s staffers in Washington, D.C., at 6:43 a.m. on September 14, 2012,” P.J. Media reports.

What did it say? It said a video wasn’t the cause, and the State Department would be wrong to make it look like the cause:

Colleagues, I mentioned to [redacted] this morning, and want to share with all of you, our view at Embassy Tripoli that we must be cautious in our local messaging with regard to the inflammatory film trailer, adapting it to Libyan conditions. Our monitoring of the Libyan media and conversations with Libyans suggest that the films not as explosive of an issue here as it appears to be in other countries in the region. The overwhelming majority of the FB comments and tweets we’ve received from Libyans since the Ambassador’s death have expressed deep sympathy, sorrow, and regret. They have expressed anger at the attackers, and emphasized that this attack does not represent Libyans or Islam. Relatively few have even mentioned the inflammatory video. So if we post messaging about the video specifically, we may draw unwanted attention to it. And it is becoming increasingly clear that the series of events in Benghazi was much more terrorist attack than a protest which escalated into violence. It is our opinion that in our messaging, we want to distinguish, not conflate, the events in other countries with this well-planned attack by militant extremists. I have discussed this with [redacted] and he shares PAS’s view.

“[T]he series of events in Benghazi was much more terrorist attack than a protest which escalated into violence.” Not only was it a terrorist attack, but a “well-planned attack by militant extremists” at an embassy where the staff had been asking, to no avail, for better security.

That email was sent on Sept. 14. That same day, Hillary Clinton blamed the video, saying that “We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.”

The close timeline between the Tripoli email and Clinton’s remark wasn’t simply an unfortunate case of crossed wires, either. Rather, it was the beginning of the State Department’s attempt at digging in its heels on the “blame the video” narrative.

“It was two days,” P.J. Media reports, “before [National Security Advisor] Susan Rice appeared on five Sunday talk shows to blame the violence in Benghazi on the video.”

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