September 22, 2025 • 53 mins
How the attack in Benghazi collided with an American election, and how the seeds of a scandal were planted.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Pushkin previously on fiasco.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
It was a high risk venture.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
I was very worried about a security.
Speaker 4 (00:35):
Six months after the uprising, Libya is flooded with weapons
and places at the tend power vacuums.
Speaker 5 (00:40):
For the people who you're dealing with are not your friends.
Speaker 6 (00:43):
The scene is quiet. A relatively small but already armed
group shows up at the gates.
Speaker 7 (00:50):
Find out what exactly is going on.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
What they had when they walked out was all the
information they needed to conduct a precision more to attack
at night, and so the next ones are right on target.
The eleventh anniversary of September eleventh was kind of like
thirty first birthday one year after a major milestone. It
(01:14):
just didn't land with as much fanfare.
Speaker 8 (01:16):
It's expected to be.
Speaker 9 (01:17):
As quiet day as both candidates commemorate the nine to
eleven attacks, both President Obama.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Still, it was a somber enough occasion that both candidates
in the twenty twelve presidential race, the incumbent Barack Obama
and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney, agreed to suspend all
negative campaigning for the day.
Speaker 10 (01:34):
Yeah you will hear no negative campaigning, not to take tell.
Speaker 11 (01:38):
One day we won't have that, by the way, this is.
Speaker 7 (01:40):
Around the nine to eleven attacks. You know, we would
see it not as an opportunity necessarily for politics. I mean,
we were going to keep making our case, but we're
going to make our case affirmatively.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
This is longhe Chen. He was Mitt Romney's chief policy
advisor during the twenty twelve campaign.
Speaker 7 (01:57):
Our hope and our intention was to go into it
focused on what we needed to do looking ahead, rather
than spending the day on September eleventh talking about some
of the challenges created by the Obama administration.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Chen is being polite here. What he means is the
two campaigns were going to take a day off from
beating up on each other, and one of the challenges
the Romney team would not be talking about was Obama's
policy in the Middle East, his approach to the war
on terror that had started more than a decade earlier
under George W. Bush. Romney had been calling Obama soft
(02:28):
on terrorism since the start of his campaign, but on
this day he would hold his fire out of respect.
But then, at around one o'clock in the afternoon DC time,
some concerning news started filtering in from Egypt. A large
group of angry protesters had gathered in front of the
American Embassy in Cairo.
Speaker 12 (02:48):
Protesters are outside the US Embassy. There are there about
a thousand of them and protests.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
As you heard in our last episode, the crowd was
protesting a video called The Innocence of Muslims that had
recently been uploaded to YouTube by a man in California.
Speaker 13 (03:01):
They are protesting a video they say to fames the
prophet Muhammad.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Earlier in the day, the US Embassy in Cairo had
denounce the anti Muslim video in a written statement.
Speaker 13 (03:12):
Saying, quote the Embassy of the United States and Cairo
condemns the continuing efforts misguided individuals to hurt the religious
feelings of Muslims.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
As The statement was intended to diffuse the situation to
distance the US government from the islamophobic video, but it
did not prevent the protests in front of the Embassy
in Cairo from turning violent.
Speaker 12 (03:33):
Protesters have stormed the walls of the embassy and pulled
down US flags. Now they have replaced them with black
flags with Islamic emblems Now America.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
As footage of the chaos aired on American television. The
US Embassy's statement from earlier in the day got the
attention of conservative commentators like lou Dobbs.
Speaker 14 (03:52):
Obamba administration, the State Department actually apologized to the very
radical Islamis who were demonstrating in hurting the feelings of Muslims.
It's just disgusting.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Then that evening, at around seven pm Eastern time, the
news out of Cairo was compounded with reports of a
second incident nearby, this one in Libya. It appeared that
the protests in Cairo had spread to Benghazi, Libya's second
biggest city. A mob had set fire to a diplomatic
(04:26):
compound and killed an American.
Speaker 15 (04:28):
As you can imagine, there is a degree of conflicting
information coming out of nighttime Libya amid the chaos of
an attack on the US consulate.
Speaker 16 (04:36):
The Libyan government has now informed the State Department that
an American consulate official has been killed in an attack
on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya. We're just getting
this information.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
From his apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Lanhi Chen watched the
news and fielded requests from media outlets that wanted Romney's
take on the day's events.
Speaker 7 (04:56):
The media inquiries did start to pick up as the
early evening war into late evening Eastern Time, and a
number of conservative media outlets, some online, some radio, some television,
and they were particularly up. They were very concerned about
why the Romney campaign hadn't yet used this as something
(05:17):
with which to attack President Obama.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Between the breaking news of the attack and Benghazi, the
protest in Cairo, and the embassy statement about the religious
feelings of Muslims, the Romney campaign saw an opportunity. Here
was a perfect example of the Obama administration bending over
backwards to show respect to the Muslim world at the
expense of American power and security. It didn't matter that
(05:42):
the Cairo Embassy's statement had been issued hours before the
Benghazi attack. It all just fit together.
Speaker 7 (05:49):
The statement that was issued by US station in Cairo,
I think accounted for essentially the quote hurt feelings that
resulted because of the video, and then as the Benghazi
news came in, it sort of added to this notion
that we were under attack and the response from the
Obama administration was an apology to the Islamic world.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Mitt Romney was delivering a speech in Reno, Nevada at
a conference of the National Guard when the gears of
his campaign back in Boston started the turn.
Speaker 7 (06:19):
I recall our communications director calling me at some point
around dinner time basically saying, I think it's not going
to be possible for us to end this day without
saying something.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
As night fell, Lanhi Chen initiated a conference call with
other campaign operatives to discuss whether their candidate should weigh in.
Speaker 7 (06:36):
We had a small closet that you could kind of
walk into in our apartment, and I remember going into
that closet and shutting the door and doing the call
in there amidst all of our clothes and shoes and
everything else, because I didn't want to disturb my wife,
didn't want to disturb our son, And a lot of
the evening transpired with me in that closet trying to
work all this out.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
The consensus among the Romney staffers was that they would
draft a statement that night and run it by the candidate,
but hold the final product in an embargo from the
press until after midnight, at which point it would be
September twelfth. That way, they could skirt any backlash about
negative campaigning on the anniversary of nine to eleven, but
still be seen as responding quickly to events on the ground.
Speaker 7 (07:19):
We ended up with a statement that was aggressive. We
knew it was aggressive. We debated the aggressiveness of it.
I will say that I was not one hundred percent convinced,
but by the end of that call, I was that
the more aggressive posture was the right one.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Once the campaign team had their wording down, Chen called
Romney and read the statement aloud to him, it's disgraceful.
It said that the Obama administration's first response to the
violence in Egypt and Libya was not to condemn attacks
on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who
wage them.
Speaker 7 (07:50):
And he sort of paused and said, okay, that that
sounds about right to me. Has there been any other
news that we should account for? I said no, I
think that's it, and he said, okay, sounds good. Let
a rip. Let's do it, And I thought, okay, case closed.
We're going to put out the statement. I'm going to
get to bed, and we're going to see kind of
where things develop, and I'll wake up the next day
(08:11):
to fight again.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
A decision was made to lift the nine to eleven
embargo early after all, and at ten twenty four pm,
the Romney campaign sent the statement out to the media.
Speaker 7 (08:22):
I think Romney certainly went to bed feeling pretty good
about the statement. I know I did, and a number
of us did as well, because we'd spend so much
time thinking about that evening. You know, I think we
all really felt like this was the right approach and
this was an evidence of exactly what we had been
talking about.
Speaker 10 (08:39):
Mitt Romney responded in a statement saying, it's disgraceful that
the Obama administration's first response was not to condemn attacks
on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who
wage the attacks, published reports playing the unbasays estate.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Romney's statement was the first volley in what would become
the long political war over Benghazi, and calling Obama disgraceful
mere hours after the attack was first reported, and in
doing so, as it turned out, while the attack was
still unfolding, Romney was taking a risk, maybe even crossing
a line.
Speaker 7 (09:15):
If you'd said to me that night, when we were
getting together to put together that first statement that we
would still be talking about that night and the events
that transpired years later, I would have said, Yeah, maybe
maybe it's a blip in history.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
I'm Leon Nafok from Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries. This
is fiasco BEng Ghazi.
Speaker 17 (09:34):
This is a political cover up of something kind what's
being called Benghazi Gate.
Speaker 18 (09:38):
Intelligence officials acknowledged they originally got it wrong.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
We got the classified cable that was chilling.
Speaker 19 (09:45):
Why should anybody have any credibility in what the administration
says giving its shifting narrative.
Speaker 4 (09:50):
It was a fucking mess, man, there's a fucking mess.
It's really hard to figure out what's going on.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Episode four Feckless, in which the attack in Benghazi collides
with an American election. We'll be right.
Speaker 6 (10:07):
Back, And this really is what New Hampshire is all about.
Isn't it a day like this at a farm like this?
Doug and Stella, thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Mitt Romney announced his candidacy for president on a New
Hampshire farm in twenty eleven. He was wearing slacks and
a checkered button down shirt, and he spoke from a
podium with a picturesque barn behind him. It was the
perfect setting for Romney to make his case that Barack
Obama didn't understand everyday Americans.
Speaker 6 (10:39):
And this is what America is about as well, don't
you think, Oh, Gosh.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
The kickoff was mostly focused on the economy, but Romney
also took the opportunity to distinguish himself from the president
on foreign policy.
Speaker 6 (10:51):
At a time of historic change and great opportunity in
the Arab world, He's hesitant and uncertain. A few mens
into officey he traveled around the globe to apologize for America.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Romney was referencing a trip that Obama had taken to
the Middle East in two thousand and nine at the
start of his presidency. It included a high profile appearance
in Egypt, during which the President called for a new
era of mutual respect between the Muslim world and the West.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
I've come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning
between the United States and Muslims around the world one based.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
In his speech, Obama recalled growing up in Indonesia surrounded
by practicing Muslims. He spoke reverently of Islamic contributions to
Western civilization, like algebra in the treatment of infectious disease.
He even quoted from the Quran, as the.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
Holy Quran tells us be conscious of God and speak
always the truth.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Six years after the start of the Iraq War, Obama's
speech was an implicit critique of the Bush administration. The
new president seemed to be saying that the American government
would no longer hold an antagonistic attitude towards the Middle
East or tolerate the Islamophobia and jingoism that had been
awakened under his predeces.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
And I considered part of my responsibility as president of
the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam
wherever they appear.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Back home, Republicans framed Obama's posture as weak and naive.
They called it an apology for America.
Speaker 17 (12:26):
As we investigate the Obama apology tour and now it
has systematically dismantled America's credibility around the world.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
But first, the apology narrative took hold on Fox News
and other conservative media outlets. Obama was undermining the United
States by acting like Americans had something to be sorry for.
Speaker 14 (12:43):
There you heard the president's apology tour.
Speaker 6 (12:46):
The apology tour, This apology tour, apology tour.
Speaker 13 (12:49):
The president who apologizes to Muslim religious fanatics.
Speaker 20 (12:52):
Can we stop apologizing?
Speaker 1 (12:54):
I'm tired of the apologies. When it came time for
Romney to put out a campaign book, he even named
it after this idea that.
Speaker 6 (13:01):
Colmit Romney his book No Apology, The Case for American Greatness.
Speaker 7 (13:05):
The Obama argument was that they were looking for a
more nuanced view of the Islamic world.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Again, Romney advisor Lanhi Chen.
Speaker 7 (13:13):
They took pains, for example, to distinguish between Islamic fundamentalism
or Islamic terrorism. And they were very careful about how
they approached the region and what they wanted to do,
in part because I think President Obama felt that there
could be common cause made with parts of the Islamic world.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
Obama's insistence on making common cause with the Muslim world
gave Romney an opening during the twenty twelve race, an
easy way to communicate to voters how he and the
incumbent were different.
Speaker 6 (13:43):
Think about this internationally, President Obama has adopted an appeasement strategy.
In Barack Obama's profoundly mistaken view, there's nothing unique about
the United States.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Obama did have one massive advantage when it came to
his record on fighting terrorism.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Tonight, I can report to the American people and to
the world, the United States has conducted an operation that
killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaida.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
A little over a year before the attack in Benghazi,
Obama had ordered the raid that killed Osamam bin Laden.
He had eliminated the leader of al Qaida and dealt
the organization in existential blow. Naturally, Obama's reelection campaign placed
this achievement at the center of his foreign policy record.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
I said, we go after al Qaeda and Bin Laden.
Speaker 7 (14:32):
We did.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
Obama's vice president made hay of it as well, Osama
bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive. By
the end of the summer, polling showed that Obama was
leading Romney on foreign policy, and the race was widely
seen as his to lose. On September twelfth, the morning
(14:55):
after the attack in Benghazi, Lanhi Chen started his day
the same way he always did, by pouring through news
coverage to see what people were saying about his candidate.
Speaker 7 (15:04):
On an ordinary day. By the time I'd wake up,
you know, there might be twenty five thirty thirty five
five articles on that morning. I recall waking up and
clips were coming fast and furious.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Chen was curious to see whether the aggressive stance Romney
had taken the night before was having its desired effect.
The statement did seem to be getting a lot of attention,
but not in the way the Romney campaign had hoped.
Speaker 11 (15:30):
Whether you agree or don't agree with the Romney statement,
it just sounds cynical and gross.
Speaker 13 (15:34):
And I have to say I'm stun they put out
this release when they did, before we knew all the
facts before daybreak.
Speaker 14 (15:41):
Just so patently political.
Speaker 20 (15:43):
It really gives you.
Speaker 16 (15:44):
Pause a political handgrad and I think shame on that
campaign personally.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
Normally, when a campaign is under this kind of heavy criticism,
the candidate can marshal a battalion of loyal, credentialed partisans
to get on TV and mounted defense. They're called surrogates,
and typically the Romney campaign had a deep bench of
surrogates at their disposal. In this case, though support was
slow to come. It appeared that even Romney's fellow Republicans
(16:11):
thought the campaign had gone too far.
Speaker 7 (16:14):
We found a reticence amongst a number of our key
national security surrogates who would have been forceful voices on
the outside. They were either not on board, or they
wanted to speak to me or someone on the campaign
to give them some sense of our thinking before they
were willing to get out there and say something.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
That morning, Chen dialed into a conference call with other
top campaign officials and Romney himself, who was not happy.
According to one account, he gripped the armrest of his
chair as he spoke.
Speaker 7 (16:46):
He expressed his sense that perhaps we had been too
quick with the statement and that there was a brewing
controversy over it. It was something to the effect of, guys,
I think we may have made a mistake here, or
we may have misfired.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
Romney knew it didn't look good. Four Americans, including an ambassador,
were dead, and here he was pouncing on it to
try to win an election. It wasn't just Obama partisan
who were outraged. Establishment Republicans also seemed to agree that
Romney campaign had improperly politicized a national security crisis.
Speaker 8 (17:19):
I'm a hawk, but you do not want to have
this become a political election issue right now. We should
have one president of the United States at a time
when it comes to foreign policy. I don't think he
should be a second force of foreign policy now.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Mitch McConnell and John Bayner, the two highest ranking Republicans
in Congress, offered statements condemning the Bengazi attack, but neither
took the opportunity to criticize Obama or come to Romney's defense.
John McCain also declined to address Romney's statement, saying only
that Ambassador Chris Stevens was one of his dear friends,
(17:54):
but not everyone in the conservative movement had the same qualms.
Speaker 20 (17:58):
But what really is going on right there is a
coordinated effort by the media in coordination with the White House.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
On talk radio, Rush Limbaugh gave a full throated defense
of Roma and suggested that the outrage of the campaign
statement was a distraction from Obama's mishandling of the attack.
Speaker 20 (18:16):
We're in the middle of an absolute disaster, a foreign
policy disaster, and there's a coordinated effort to make it
about Romney, whether or not it's presidential for Romney.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
One commentator on the website Breitbart dot Com dismissed the
notion that Romney had done anything wrong and called on
the Obama campaign to direct their outrage at the murderers
instead of Romney. And so the Romney campaign faced a choice.
Were they going to give in to the criticism they
were hearing from more moderate Republicans or would they stay
on message and hope the rest of the party fell
(18:52):
in line.
Speaker 7 (18:53):
How do we address this now going forward? That was
really more the focus of that call and the tone
that Romney took that morning, And it was really a
division between do we walk it back or do we
double down on it.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
After some debate, the Romney campaign decided not to backtrack.
The guy who wrote a book called No Apology simply
could not apologize.
Speaker 7 (19:17):
It would have been seen as a sign of weakness.
It would have been seen as a rebuke of our
own line of thinking about not just this event, but
perhaps more broadly about Obama.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
So the Romney campaign was going to stay the course. Yes,
what happened to Benghazi was a tragedy, but it was
an avoidable one that illustrated the failures of Obama's foreign policy.
As lnhi Chen told a reporter at the time, the
attack was a direct result of the Obama administration conducting
its foreign policy in effeckless manner. That word feckless was
(19:52):
a callback to a critique that Romney had been leveling
against Obama for the better part of a year.
Speaker 6 (19:58):
The very real dangers that America faces if we continue
the effeckless policies of the past three years.
Speaker 12 (20:05):
Knit Romney said, that you are America's most chectless president
since Carter.
Speaker 15 (20:11):
What would you like to say to mister Romney.
Speaker 20 (20:14):
I tell him to go feck himself. That's an.
Speaker 7 (20:18):
And I think that word feckless describes a timidity. And
that's the reason why that critique stuck.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
Whatever had happened in Benghazi, it was proof of Obama's fecklessness,
particularly when viewed alongside the conciliatory statement issued by the
US Embassy in Cairo. It was true that making this
point required Romney to conflate the Benghazi attack with the
administration's response to the Innocence of Muslims video, But the
point here was to level a general critique of the president,
(20:47):
not get into specifics.
Speaker 17 (20:54):
Back to our breaking news in a matter of moments,
live in Jacksonville.
Speaker 10 (20:57):
Governorment Romney is prepared to make a statement.
Speaker 6 (21:00):
And we understand he may take questions now.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
As criticism continued to pour in the day after the attack,
the Romney campaign pulled together a press conc in which
Romney would address reporters directly. Hillary Clinton had just done
the same thing at State Department headquarters, and Obama was
getting ready to deliver his own statement in the White
House Rose Garden. The setting for Romney's press conference was
less official. It took place at a strip mall in Jacksonville, Florida.
Speaker 6 (21:28):
Good morning, Americans woke up this morning with tragic news
and felt heavy hearts.
Speaker 7 (21:36):
So he was having a press conference in a strip
mall where there was a reptile store of some kind.
And I don't know why that sticks with me, but
it does. It was sort of fitting for the time.
I guess that we were in a pit of vipers
and there was a reptile store nearby.
Speaker 6 (21:51):
I think it's a terrible course for America to stand
in apology for our values, that the first response to
the United States must be outrage at the breach of
the sovereignty of our nation.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Reporters echoed the questions lanhi Chen had seen in the
press clippings that morning. Why had the Romney campaign weighed
in so early? It was the anniversary of nine to eleven.
Shouldn't they at least wait until after the attack was over?
Speaker 3 (22:20):
Watching this basin itself a mixed signal when you've criticized
the administration.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
At a time that Americans are being you know, shouldn't
politics offer for this?
Speaker 6 (22:29):
We have a campaign for presidency of the United States,
and are speaking about the different courses we would each
take with regards to the challenges that the world faces.
Speaker 11 (22:38):
If you had known last night, if the investor had
gotten obviously, I'm.
Speaker 6 (22:41):
Gathering you did not know, I'm I'm not gonna take
hypotheticals about what would have been known on and so forth.
Speaker 14 (22:47):
We respotted last night.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
It was a rough press conference and a rough morning
for the candidate overall, but it was still possible that
Romney's fellow Republicans would get behind him.
Speaker 7 (22:57):
I really didn't have a great sense of what that
day and what the next few days we're going to
look like.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
In the first few days after the attack and been god,
a wave of anti American uprising started to crop up
across the Arab world in response to the Innocence of
Muslims video. The Obama administration was concerned about the risk
of another attack.
Speaker 21 (23:22):
Pictures here from protests and anti American demonstrations in more
than a dozen countries.
Speaker 4 (23:28):
The Bengazi attack happened on a Tuesday. The day we
were all watching was Friday, because of Friday prayers.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
This is Tommy Vitor. He's best known today as a
co host of Pod Save America. Back in twenty twelve,
he was the thirty two year old spokesperson for the
National Security Council, a panel of advisors responsible for helping
the president make decisions on foreign policy and terrorism.
Speaker 4 (23:51):
Because what happened in a lot of places was everyone
would go to the mosque, if you had any mom
who was giving a sermon about the innocence of Muzzlim videos,
you could see more protests and more violence and more
attacks on the US facilities.
Speaker 13 (24:05):
American diplomatic missions across the globe are on high alert.
Speaker 12 (24:08):
They are expecting and desion of anti American protests.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
After Friday prayers, protesters demonstrated outside US diplomatic outposts in Morocco, Mauritania, Pakistan, Indonesia, Kuwait,
even Australia and the Philippines. You know, a dominus fact.
The chain reaction with being more protests in Arab capitals.
Speaker 22 (24:26):
There were small demonstrations in front of Tunisia, there were
other ones in the Gaza Strip.
Speaker 21 (24:31):
The unrest came to Sudan.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
Protesters shouting with our soul, our blood, we defend you,
Prophet Mohammed.
Speaker 4 (24:37):
And so that led to a whole series of meetings
and conversations about how to harden various facilities all around
the globe and to really review like whether US personnel
were safe. I mean, that was the real focus.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
Some of the demonstrations were peaceful, others turned violent. In Yemen,
protesters breached the gates of the US embassy. In Tunisia,
they set vehicles on fire. In Sudan, they climbed over
the walls of the US embassy and raised a black
Islamic flag.
Speaker 22 (25:07):
Wherever there is weak security for seeing some radicals take
advantage of that and using this opportunity to attack the embassidy.
Speaker 4 (25:14):
In truth, like, we didn't really have time to immediately
mourn and focus on the Benghazi attacks and do an
after action report because we were so worried about whether
there could be another Benghazi someplace else.
Speaker 7 (25:28):
We were worried.
Speaker 4 (25:29):
About personnel all over the world, diplomatic personnel, intelligence personnel,
military personnel. It was a total rethinking of our security
situation all over the globe.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Meanwhile, the US intelligence community was trying to get to
the bottom of who was responsible for the attack in
Benghazi and how they had managed to kill four people.
Speaker 4 (25:49):
Even with the entire intelligence capability of the United States government,
you are still scrambling to figure out what happened in
situations like this.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
From the start, a central question was how the Benghazi
attack began. Did it grow spontaneously out of peaceful protests
inspired by the video or was it a terrorist attack
that had been planned separately. At stake was whether the
tragedy had been preventable, whether someone in the US government
had screwed up by not thwarting the attack or better
(26:20):
preparing the compound to withstand it.
Speaker 4 (26:22):
That's just the nature of diplomacy. It's nature of like
the fog of war like there was no way to
quickly vet and get people on the ground to sort
through the aftermath. Even with enormous intelligence capability, it still
took hours and hours and hours to figure out what
exactly happened.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
As investigators sought witnesses and made contact with Libyan authorities,
President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton delivered public speeches
and met with the victims' families. Obama also visited the
State Department, where grief over losing two of their own
was still just setting in A sitting American ambassador had
not been killed in the line of duty since nineteen
(27:02):
seventy nine.
Speaker 3 (27:04):
To you, their families and colleagues, to all Americans know this,
their sacrifice will never be forgotten.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
On Friday afternoon, Obama and Clinton presided over a solemn
ceremony as the victims' bodies were returned from Libya. Family
members stood by for a military salute as servicemen loaded
flag draped caskets into hearses. The event was carried live
on National TV.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
We bring home for Americans who gave their lives for
our country and our values to the families.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
The ceremony took place in the midst of a fevered
rush in the media to get clarity on whether the
attack and Benghazi had been pre planned or linked to
a protest. Reporters initially had a hard time getting a
definitive picture. The Washington Post cited a Libyan journalist who
described the attackers as racing towards a protest. The New
York Times seemed to back that up, citing a Libyan
(28:09):
official who said the first part of the attack had
evolved from protests, while the second on the CIA base
had been coordinated. However, the same article also cited two
Libyan guards who had been wounded in the attack, who
said there had been no indication of a protest outside
the compound before the shooting started. Separately, the President of
Libya described the attack as highly organized.
Speaker 11 (28:31):
The President of Libya says that this was something that
had been in.
Speaker 20 (28:35):
The works for two months.
Speaker 11 (28:36):
This attack, he blames it on al Qaeda.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
It was a lot of scrambling in the initial days.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
This is Pamela K. Brown in twenty twelve. She was
an executive producer at Fox News. Before that, she had
spent time building an international roodex at NBC, ABC and
CBS News while reporting on conflicts like the First Gulf
War and the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
I had good contexts I made in Saudi Arabia. I
had friends in Egypt. I had friends in a UAE,
and I say friends people that would take my phone
call and do their very best to answer my question
or help me in my quest.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
The evening after the attack in Benghazi, anchors at Fox
News were running with a definitive claim that the attack
was pre planned and likely linked to al Qaida. It
had nothing to do with the innocence of Muslim's video.
Speaker 17 (29:26):
Fox News has obtained information that those killings were apparently planned,
not a spontaneous demonstration.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
One thread that I developed from a source on the
ground that there was no protest and the attacks were
not spontaneous. The attack was planned and had nothing to
do with the movie. I was confident, highly confident. That's
something you just have to lock and load on when
you really have it.
Speaker 15 (29:52):
There is growing consensus tonight among the intelligence community that
the attack in Libya had little or nothing to do
with Muslim protests against an anti Islamic film.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
In addition to Brown's source on the ground, top Republicans
on the House Intelligence Committee were arguing that the weapons
used in the attack were proof of premeditation. Specifically, they
noted that the CIA facility in Benghazi had been hit
with mortars, meaning the attackers would have needed exact coordinates
for the building in order to target it.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
It was such an area that they knew the way
the mortar rounds were coming in people we spoke to
it showed that there had been pre planning.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
The FBI later theorized that the assailants may have gotten
the coordinates needed to launch the mortars when they raided
the Benghazi compound. In other words, the attack on the
CIA base may have been planned, but planned in one night.
In the days after the attack, there was a lot
riding on this point for Republicans. If the attack in
Benghazi was pre planned, it meant that the Obama administration
(30:57):
was exactly as weak on terror as mitt Romney had
been saying. The potential link to al Qaeda meant that
Obama hadn't conquered the terrorist organization after all, and that
while he was out running his victory lab over bin
Laden's death, the group had managed to murder an American ambassador.
(31:18):
On Thursday, September thirteenth, the intelligence community provided a classified
briefing to the President and to Congress. Their assessment reiterated
that the attack had begun spontaneously following the protests in Cairo,
but that extremists with ties to al Qaida were involved.
Speaker 23 (31:34):
All right, good afternoon, ladies, and gentlemen, thanks for being here.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
At a press conference the next day, ABC's Jake Tapper
pushed White House Press Secretary Jay Carney to square the
idea of a spontaneous protest with emerging evidence about the
weapons used in the attack.
Speaker 3 (31:49):
The group around, but the Benghazi post was well armed.
It was a well coordinated attack.
Speaker 15 (31:54):
Do you think it was a spontaneous protest against a movie?
Speaker 23 (31:59):
Look, this is obviously under investigation. We do not at
this moment have information to suggest or to tell you
that would indicate that any of this unrest was prel
What is true about?
Speaker 1 (32:11):
On the Sunday news shows that weekend, un Ambassador Susan
Rice further amplified the government's official assessment by appearing on
every major network CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, and Fox News.
This was a feat known as the full Ginsburg, named
after Monica Lewinski's lawyer, who's the first to ever do
it in nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 3 (32:32):
Madam Ambassador, thank you for joining us.
Speaker 16 (32:33):
Good to be with you.
Speaker 14 (32:34):
Candy, Doctor Rice, thank you so much for coming here
today and answering our question.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
Good to be with you in each interview. When the
Bengazi attack came up, Rice crafted her answers based on
the intelligence briefing submitted to the president three days earlier.
Speaker 24 (32:46):
What happened in Benghazi was in fact, initially a spontaneous
reaction to what had just transpired hours before in Cairo,
almost a copycat of the demonstrat.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
Rice made it clear that the investigation was still underway
and cautioned that there was a lot the administration didn't know.
Speaker 24 (33:03):
We'll wait to see exactly what the investigation finally confirms,
but that's the best information we have at present.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
It didn't take long for more solid intelligence to come in.
Within a week of Susan Rice's tour of the Sunday Shows,
it was clear the Obama White House had been wrong
to suggest the Benghazi attack grew out of a protest
against the Innocence of Muslim's video. There had been no
protest against the video in Benghazi. Security camera footage obtained
by the CIA showed that the diplomatic compound was quiet
(33:33):
that night, and to an organized group of armed assailants
broke in.
Speaker 18 (33:37):
Intelligence officials acknowledged they originally got it wrong.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
On September nineteenth, a counter terrorism official from the Obama
administration testified that the assault was in fact a coordinated
terrorist attack.
Speaker 11 (33:49):
The intelligence community now believes it was a deliberate and
organized attack. Some of those involved, it says, were linked
to groups affiliated with or sympathetic to Al Qaida, to.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
The Romney campaign and their fellow Republicans. It looked like
the administration was dramatically changing its story on Benghazi.
Speaker 21 (34:06):
Last week, the administration insisted the attack was a spontaneous
reaction to a YouTube video, but today Secretary Clinton has
said it was indeed terrorism.
Speaker 11 (34:15):
Mitt Romney said today it raises questions about how those
first statements could be so wrong.
Speaker 6 (34:20):
There was a great deal of confusion about that from
the very beginning on the part of the administration.
Speaker 19 (34:25):
Why should anybody have any credibility in what the administration
says giving its shifting narrative.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
Tommy Vitor, Obama's National Security Council spokesman, acknowledges that the
administration's narrative did shift, but all these years later, the
notion that there was anything nefarious about it still exasperates him.
Speaker 4 (34:44):
It was a fucking mess, man, It was a fucking mess.
It's really hard to figure out what's going on. You know,
when something happens thousands of miles away in the dead
of night, in complicated circumstances, you have to allow for
shifting explanations. It takes time to figure out what happened.
I promise you when I would walk into the situation
room meetings, there was not some conversation about how do
(35:07):
we spin this. The conversation was, Hey, intelligence guys, what
do we know?
Speaker 1 (35:15):
The messy reality is that there was disagreement among intelligence
officials as information about the Bengazi attack rolled in. At
one point, the executive coordinator of the Presidential Daily brief
had written that the presence of armed assailants on the
ground suggested that this was an intentional assault and not
an escalation of a peaceful protest, but that statement was
(35:35):
removed from the initial briefing because other analysts didn't think
there was enough evidence to support it.
Speaker 4 (35:40):
There was clearly a difference of opinion among various parts
of the government about what happened, and so those dissenting
views would start to leak out, which would cause reporting
that was just off or confused or wrong.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
But Pamela Brown, the producer at Fox News, saw something
suspicious in the Obama White House's insistence on bringing up
the innocence of Muslims video. The fact that the administration
had been so attached to the spontaneous uprising theory to
Brown that they were trying to get away with something.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
It was a very big deal for them to pin
all of this on the video. When somebody goes out
and sticks to a story like that and it's just
not true.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
This sense that Obama was hiding the truth pervaded Fox News.
Soon the network was calling it a cover up.
Speaker 17 (36:34):
More on the Benghazi cover off, what's being called Benghazi Gate,
probably more serious than Watergate.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
To what was your theory at the time of like
why the Obama people wanted to blame it on the video?
What was what was in it for them to blame
it on the video?
Speaker 2 (36:53):
I have no idea. This is a larger question for
someone in mess in foreign policy. So the question is
why were we there, Why was this so important to
have Ambassador Stevens in this position and temporary mission compound?
And what was the hope That I cannot answer.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
Fox's primetime hosts were less circumspect. In the weeks after
the attack, Sean Hannity was mapping out a vast conspiracy
designed to cover up what really happened to Ambassador Stevens.
Speaker 17 (37:29):
It's clear to me that either they are totally stupid,
or they have the worst intelligence, or that this is
a political cover up of some kind because they didn't
want to admit. What is hobbyist to everybody that on
the anniversary of nine to eleven they should have had
some protection for our embassies, and they didn't.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
We'll be right back. As Pamela Brown reported the Benghazi story,
she filed several freedom of information requests with the State
Department to see if there was anything that didn't match
up to the official narrative. For instance, the administration had
said that there was no indication to the attack in
(38:10):
Benghazi that the diplomatic compound was under imminent threat, but
Brown's Foyer requests turned up State Department cables indicating that
some alarms had been sounded in the weeks leading up
to the attack.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
We got the classified cable which said that the compound
could not withstand a coordinating attack. That was chilling.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
That cable was sent in August of twenty twelve, and
it indicated that the State Department knew that there were
Al Qaeda cells in Benghazi. The message was approved by
Ambassador Chris Stevens.
Speaker 9 (38:41):
I really believe, having read it, that it is this
smoking gun warning.
Speaker 3 (38:45):
Here.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
You've got this now. It's worth saying that the cable
Brown received in response to her Foyer request did not
say an attack in Benghazi was imminent, but it did
suggest that if one did occur, the compound would be
vulnerable in any event. Brown and her colleagues at Fox
News thought the cable spoke pretty loudly. Catherine Herridge, the
(39:06):
reporter Brown worked with most closely on Benghazi coverage, characterized
it on the air as proof if the Obama administration
should have done more and was now knowingly trying to
deflect blame.
Speaker 9 (39:18):
I can't think of anything that would be more specific
than if these groups had emailed the Stage Department and
said here's the time, here's the place, and here's the
method of the attack that.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
Fall, Fox News continued to put out stories about the
attack that sounded extremely damning. For instance, they reported that
the administration knew within twenty four hours of the attack
that groups associated with al Qaida were involved. They also
ran segments suggesting that the president could have stopped the
attack but chose not to.
Speaker 18 (39:46):
Lawmakers demanded to know how lack security may have been
and whether warning signs were simply ignored.
Speaker 1 (39:52):
Meanwhile, Congress questioned State Department personnel who confirmed that a
request for more security in Benghazi had been denied.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
So there wasn't sufficient resources provided.
Speaker 7 (40:03):
That was one of the main reasons I continued to
ask for those resources.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
Yes, those statements prompted Republican lawmakers to hit Fox's airway
and call for more investigations.
Speaker 2 (40:12):
This is why we need an independent council, and we
need the investigations to began immediately.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
These questions about what the Obama White House knew and
when they knew it dovetailed perfectly with the administration's evolving
account of how the attack had started, and when the
intelligence community's assessment was revised to reflect the fact that
there had been no protest in Benghazi, it looked like
even more evidence that the administration was hiding behind the
(40:39):
Innocence of Muslims video.
Speaker 6 (40:41):
There was Jay Carney, There were several Obama officials going
out saying it was a response to the movie, is
this is this a cover up?
Speaker 20 (40:49):
Well, they lie, I mean, there's no question about it.
Speaker 22 (40:51):
And by the way, if the Republicans did that, it
be hell to pay.
Speaker 12 (40:54):
Everybody would.
Speaker 1 (40:59):
About a month before the twenty twelve election, the Romney
campaigns saw a change of fortune in their pull numbers.
This was in part due to Romney's stellar performance in
the first presidential debate.
Speaker 6 (41:10):
Under the president's policies, middle income Americans had been buried.
They're just been crushed.
Speaker 3 (41:15):
Now that may not seem like a big deal when
it just is numbers on a sheet of paper, but
if we're talking about.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
It's hard to say exactly what role the ben Ghazi
controversy played in Romney's surge, but ongoing questions over the
administration's handling of the attack had seemingly validated the Romney
campaigns aggressive posture from the night of It wasn't just
Breitbart in Fox News either. Even the mainstream media didn't
seem to completely trust Obama.
Speaker 18 (41:45):
Patients is starting to wear sin with shifting explanations from
the administration.
Speaker 13 (41:50):
The president also facing a lot of questions about the
death of American Ambassador Stevens.
Speaker 11 (41:53):
But getting answers to exactly what did happen has not
been easy.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
Lonhi Chen saw victory in sight.
Speaker 7 (41:59):
There definitely was a point where it turned. We saw
an appreciable shift in public opinion in our own internal
pulling in all of the key states, and Romney was
very competitive, if not ahead, in all the states he
needed to to be ahead in at least according to
our polling, and by the way, a number of public
polls as well, that he was really closing in on
the possibility of winning the presidency.
Speaker 1 (42:22):
A new poll shows Governor Romney surging and closing the gap,
especially in some key swing states.
Speaker 15 (42:27):
I think the race is very close.
Speaker 4 (42:29):
I think the wind is that Governor Romney's back, and
they're clearly a momentum.
Speaker 3 (42:32):
You can see it on the trail, you can see
it in the data.
Speaker 24 (42:36):
But I believe in minimum is clearly.
Speaker 1 (42:37):
The second presidential debate was set for October sixteenth. The
first one had been focused on domestic policy, so ben
Ghazi had not come up. This time it was bound to.
Speaker 7 (42:48):
We were in the driver's seat, so in some ways
the second debate took on additional importance in our minds
because we felt that it was important to continue momentum,
but also to open up some lines of attack, potentially
on Obama areas where we felt he could be weak.
Speaker 1 (43:01):
But Romney was squeamish about continuing to beat the ben
Ghazi drum. It was an issue that the Republican base
cared about, but one that swing voters who could decide
the election didn't want to dwell on.
Speaker 7 (43:12):
We knew it was a topic that had to be
delicately navigated and traversed because of the initial reaction and
because of how hot the event had become.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
As Romney took the stage, he looked cautious but confident.
Speaker 16 (43:25):
This is Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. This site
of tonight's debate, This second.
Speaker 1 (43:31):
Go the Benghazi attack came up about halfway through the debate.
The President addressed the question with a pointed jab at
his opponent, emphasizing that the attack was still going on
when the Romney campaign put out its statement, while.
Speaker 3 (43:43):
We were still dealing with our diplomats being threatened. Governor
Romney put out a press release trying to make political points,
and that's not how a commander in chief operates.
Speaker 1 (43:55):
Romney responded with an argument that had been made repeatedly
on Fox News that it had taken the administration two
whole weeks to call the storming of the compound in
Benghazi a terrorist attack.
Speaker 6 (44:06):
There were many days that passed before we knew whether
this was a spontaneous demonstration or actually whether it was
a terrorist attack. And there was no demonstration involved. It
was a terrorist attack, and it took a long time
for that to be told to the American people.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
Romney's implication was that the administration had tried to hide
the fact that, on Obama's watch, America had suffered a
deadly blow in the war on terror. Obama was ready
with a response.
Speaker 3 (44:31):
The day after the attack, Governor I stood in the
Rose Garden and I told the American people in the
world that we are going to find out exactly what happened,
that this was an act of terror. And I also
said that we're going to hunt down bows who committed
this crime.
Speaker 6 (44:49):
I think it's interesting the President just said something, which
is that on the day after the attack, he went
to the Rose Garden and said that this was an
active terror. I want to make sure we get that
for the record, because it took the president fourteen days
before he called the attack in Benghazi an active terror.
Speaker 3 (45:05):
Get the transfer he.
Speaker 2 (45:07):
Did, in fact, sir, so let me call it an act.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
He did call it an active terror.
Speaker 21 (45:15):
It did as well.
Speaker 1 (45:16):
Romney fumbled for words.
Speaker 6 (45:18):
The administration indicated that this was a reaction to a video.
Am I incorrect in that regard.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
Lannie Chen was watching the debate from the green room.
Speaker 7 (45:28):
I do recall at the time thinking he's going to
want to know after the debate, what did Obama say
and was I right or wrong? I knew he was
going to ask me that right afterwards, because it was
one of those things that was like a factual question, right.
It wasn't like, hey, what do you think I did?
It was like, tell me what he said.
Speaker 1 (45:49):
Chen called back to Romney headquarters to make sure he
knew the exact words the President had used in the
Rose Garden the day after the attack, and he braced
himself for Romney to step off the debate stage.
Speaker 7 (46:00):
After the debate, he comes off the stage, he comes
into the green room, he makes a bee line for me,
and he says, you know, was I Was it accurate?
And I told him it was that that I thought
he had not misrepresented what had happened.
Speaker 1 (46:13):
The truth was, it had taken Obama about two weeks
to characterize the Bengazi attack as more than just a
mob action, But it was also true. On the morning
of September twelfth, the President had stood in the Rose
Garden and said.
Speaker 3 (46:26):
No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of
this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light
of the values that we stand for.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
Chen says he still thinks active terror and terrorism are different.
Speaker 7 (46:39):
There was a distinction between terror and terrorism. That in
fact Obama had not called it terrorism. He taught that
he called it an act of terror, but not an
act of terrorism or terrorism. That was the distinction.
Speaker 3 (46:50):
Why is that?
Speaker 1 (46:50):
Why was that a meaningful distinction?
Speaker 7 (46:52):
We felt it took on a different tone when you
were willing to call it terrorism versus an act of terror.
An act of terror in some ways, almost disassociates it
a little bit from the emotion of it being a
terrorist attack, a terrorist attack, an active terrorism versus an
act of terror, which we thought it was Obama's effort
(47:14):
to disassociate it from the severity or the degree to
which it was an attack on the United States.
Speaker 1 (47:25):
More than a month had passed since four Americans died
in Benghazi. The administration and Congress had begun investigations to
understand how and why it happened, But the debate between
the sitting president and the man who wanted to replace him,
it just came down to semantics. By now you can
(47:54):
tell there were multiple threads to the Benghazi story that
wound together to form the outline of a scandal. Whether
the attack was pre planned or spontaneous, whether there had
been a protest, in Benghazi, over the innocence of Muslims
video or not, why the compound out in Benghazi had
not been better protected, whether the Obama administration initially downplayed
(48:15):
the terrorism angle for political purposes. Each of these threads
became fodder for debate and speculation. Together, they created an
air of intrigue. Soon the attack in Benghazi became simply Benghazi,
All right, let's.
Speaker 3 (48:31):
Turn to Benghazi, misleading America on ben Gaza, all.
Speaker 9 (48:34):
Of the emails relating to Benghazi.
Speaker 1 (48:36):
Benghazi was a place most Americans had never heard of
before Ambassador Stevens and his colleagues died there, but within
weeks the word alone was enough to conjure any number
of questions and theories. On the night of the attack,
Mitt Romney looked uncouth and opportunistic for trying to score
political points over Stevens's death. By the time the election ended,
(48:58):
those days were long gone, and Benghazi had become a
political event first and foremost.
Speaker 13 (49:10):
Fox News Election Alert. Fox News can now project that
President Obama will win the state of Pennsylvania and its
twenty electoral votes.
Speaker 1 (49:18):
As election results rolled in on the night of November sixth,
the Romney team was stunned their internal polling had been
showing Romney with a lead, instead.
Speaker 16 (49:28):
Seeing a projectsment. Barack Obama will be re elected President
of the United States. He will remain in the White House.
They're excited in Chicago, they're excited at Times.
Speaker 1 (49:37):
Square on Fox News. It took some time for reality
to set in.
Speaker 14 (49:41):
Yes, I think this is prettymature.
Speaker 13 (49:43):
We got seventy We got a quarter of the vote.
Speaker 12 (49:45):
Now, remember, here's.
Speaker 1 (49:46):
One of their analysts. Former Bush strategist Carl Rove objected
to the call, prompting anchor Megan Kelly to question the
statisticians in the election unit live on TV.
Speaker 21 (49:54):
Now here are the guys. This is the decision desk.
You tell me whether you stand by your call in Ohio.
Given the doubts, Karl Rove just race.
Speaker 3 (50:03):
We're actually quite comfortable with the call in Ohio. Basically
right now, there's just too much Obama vote that's outstanding
there that we.
Speaker 1 (50:10):
But Benghazi was not going away. Now that Obama had
secured his second term, all eyes turned to Hillary Clinton,
whose intention to run for president in twenty sixteen was
considered a foregone conclusion. As Secretary of State, Clinton had
appointed an independent review Board to investigate the State Department's
failure to protect the compound and the ambassador. Meanwhile, congressional
(50:33):
oversight committees were continuing to ask their own questions.
Speaker 18 (50:36):
The House Foreign Affairs Committee on Benghazi kicks off at
the top of the hour.
Speaker 8 (50:41):
Focusing on what happened before, during, and after the attack.
Speaker 1 (50:46):
In December, Clinton was set to testify a by Benghazi
before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, but her testimony was
delayed after she fainted and sustained a concussion.
Speaker 5 (50:56):
She became dehydrated, fainted, apparently hit her head, and had
that concussion. She did not go to the hospital. Doctors
are said to be monitoring her. But this means that
she will not testify this week about the attack on
the mission in Benghazi and the killing of Hearth.
Speaker 1 (51:10):
The Fox News something was up.
Speaker 16 (51:12):
This is a duck and cover.
Speaker 20 (51:13):
Let's be honest, and the cleansings are great at this.
Speaker 1 (51:16):
Apparently she's suffering from a cute be Ghazi allergy.
Speaker 13 (51:19):
We can't verify this because she's barricaded in her Rock
Creek Park mansion here in Washington.
Speaker 1 (51:24):
He doesn' want to answer the question.
Speaker 10 (51:25):
I bet that we might never hear her testimony on.
Speaker 1 (51:28):
This On the next episode of Fiasco, Benghazi gets a whistleblower.
Speaker 4 (51:47):
I remember his words so clearly.
Speaker 19 (51:50):
He said, the government is lying to what they're saying.
Speaker 2 (51:54):
Happened, did not happen.
Speaker 1 (51:57):
For a list of books, articles, and documentaries we used
in our research, follow the link in our show notes.
Fiasco is a production of Prologue Projects, and it's distributed
by Pushkin Industries. The show is produced by Andrew Parsons,
Ulla Kulpa, Sam Lee and me Leon Mayfock, with editorial
support from Sam Graham Felsen and Madeline Kaplan. Our researcher
(52:21):
was Frances Carr. Our score was composed by Dan English,
Joe Valley and Noah Hecht. Additional music by Nick Sylvester,
Joel Saint, Julian Billy Libby and Little Cheddar Studios. Our
theme song is by Spatial Relations audio mixed by Rob Buyers,
Michael Raphael and Johnny Vince Evans. Our artwork is by
(52:41):
Teddy Blanks at Chips and y A. Copyright council provided
by Peter Yassi at Yasi Butler PLLC. Thanks to Archive
dot Org, Nicole Hemmer and Katherine Herridge. Special thanks to
Luminary and thank you for listening binge the entire season
(53:07):
of Fiasco Benghazi ad free by subscribing to Pushkin Plus.
Sign up on the Fiasco show page on Apple Podcasts,
or at pushkin dot fm slash Plus. Pushkin Plus subscribers
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Pushkin previously on fiasco.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
It was a high risk venture.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
I was very worried about a security.
Speaker 4 (00:35):
Six months after the uprising, Libya is flooded with weapons
and places at the tend power vacuums.
Speaker 5 (00:40):
For the people who you're dealing with are not your friends.
Speaker 6 (00:43):
The scene is quiet. A relatively small but already armed
group shows up at the gates.
Speaker 7 (00:50):
Find out what exactly is going on.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
What they had when they walked out was all the
information they needed to conduct a precision more to attack
at night, and so the next ones are right on target.
The eleventh anniversary of September eleventh was kind of like
thirty first birthday one year after a major milestone. It
(01:14):
just didn't land with as much fanfare.
Speaker 8 (01:16):
It's expected to be.
Speaker 9 (01:17):
As quiet day as both candidates commemorate the nine to
eleven attacks, both President Obama.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Still, it was a somber enough occasion that both candidates
in the twenty twelve presidential race, the incumbent Barack Obama
and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney, agreed to suspend all
negative campaigning for the day.
Speaker 10 (01:34):
Yeah you will hear no negative campaigning, not to take tell.
Speaker 11 (01:38):
One day we won't have that, by the way, this is.
Speaker 7 (01:40):
Around the nine to eleven attacks. You know, we would
see it not as an opportunity necessarily for politics. I mean,
we were going to keep making our case, but we're
going to make our case affirmatively.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
This is longhe Chen. He was Mitt Romney's chief policy
advisor during the twenty twelve campaign.
Speaker 7 (01:57):
Our hope and our intention was to go into it
focused on what we needed to do looking ahead, rather
than spending the day on September eleventh talking about some
of the challenges created by the Obama administration.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Chen is being polite here. What he means is the
two campaigns were going to take a day off from
beating up on each other, and one of the challenges
the Romney team would not be talking about was Obama's
policy in the Middle East, his approach to the war
on terror that had started more than a decade earlier
under George W. Bush. Romney had been calling Obama soft
(02:28):
on terrorism since the start of his campaign, but on
this day he would hold his fire out of respect.
But then, at around one o'clock in the afternoon DC time,
some concerning news started filtering in from Egypt. A large
group of angry protesters had gathered in front of the
American Embassy in Cairo.
Speaker 12 (02:48):
Protesters are outside the US Embassy. There are there about
a thousand of them and protests.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
As you heard in our last episode, the crowd was
protesting a video called The Innocence of Muslims that had
recently been uploaded to YouTube by a man in California.
Speaker 13 (03:01):
They are protesting a video they say to fames the
prophet Muhammad.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Earlier in the day, the US Embassy in Cairo had
denounce the anti Muslim video in a written statement.
Speaker 13 (03:12):
Saying, quote the Embassy of the United States and Cairo
condemns the continuing efforts misguided individuals to hurt the religious
feelings of Muslims.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
As The statement was intended to diffuse the situation to
distance the US government from the islamophobic video, but it
did not prevent the protests in front of the Embassy
in Cairo from turning violent.
Speaker 12 (03:33):
Protesters have stormed the walls of the embassy and pulled
down US flags. Now they have replaced them with black
flags with Islamic emblems Now America.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
As footage of the chaos aired on American television. The
US Embassy's statement from earlier in the day got the
attention of conservative commentators like lou Dobbs.
Speaker 14 (03:52):
Obamba administration, the State Department actually apologized to the very
radical Islamis who were demonstrating in hurting the feelings of Muslims.
It's just disgusting.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Then that evening, at around seven pm Eastern time, the
news out of Cairo was compounded with reports of a
second incident nearby, this one in Libya. It appeared that
the protests in Cairo had spread to Benghazi, Libya's second
biggest city. A mob had set fire to a diplomatic
(04:26):
compound and killed an American.
Speaker 15 (04:28):
As you can imagine, there is a degree of conflicting
information coming out of nighttime Libya amid the chaos of
an attack on the US consulate.
Speaker 16 (04:36):
The Libyan government has now informed the State Department that
an American consulate official has been killed in an attack
on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya. We're just getting
this information.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
From his apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Lanhi Chen watched the
news and fielded requests from media outlets that wanted Romney's
take on the day's events.
Speaker 7 (04:56):
The media inquiries did start to pick up as the
early evening war into late evening Eastern Time, and a
number of conservative media outlets, some online, some radio, some television,
and they were particularly up. They were very concerned about
why the Romney campaign hadn't yet used this as something
(05:17):
with which to attack President Obama.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Between the breaking news of the attack and Benghazi, the
protest in Cairo, and the embassy statement about the religious
feelings of Muslims, the Romney campaign saw an opportunity. Here
was a perfect example of the Obama administration bending over
backwards to show respect to the Muslim world at the
expense of American power and security. It didn't matter that
(05:42):
the Cairo Embassy's statement had been issued hours before the
Benghazi attack. It all just fit together.
Speaker 7 (05:49):
The statement that was issued by US station in Cairo,
I think accounted for essentially the quote hurt feelings that
resulted because of the video, and then as the Benghazi
news came in, it sort of added to this notion
that we were under attack and the response from the
Obama administration was an apology to the Islamic world.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Mitt Romney was delivering a speech in Reno, Nevada at
a conference of the National Guard when the gears of
his campaign back in Boston started the turn.
Speaker 7 (06:19):
I recall our communications director calling me at some point
around dinner time basically saying, I think it's not going
to be possible for us to end this day without
saying something.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
As night fell, Lanhi Chen initiated a conference call with
other campaign operatives to discuss whether their candidate should weigh in.
Speaker 7 (06:36):
We had a small closet that you could kind of
walk into in our apartment, and I remember going into
that closet and shutting the door and doing the call
in there amidst all of our clothes and shoes and
everything else, because I didn't want to disturb my wife,
didn't want to disturb our son, And a lot of
the evening transpired with me in that closet trying to
work all this out.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
The consensus among the Romney staffers was that they would
draft a statement that night and run it by the candidate,
but hold the final product in an embargo from the
press until after midnight, at which point it would be
September twelfth. That way, they could skirt any backlash about
negative campaigning on the anniversary of nine to eleven, but
still be seen as responding quickly to events on the ground.
Speaker 7 (07:19):
We ended up with a statement that was aggressive. We
knew it was aggressive. We debated the aggressiveness of it.
I will say that I was not one hundred percent convinced,
but by the end of that call, I was that
the more aggressive posture was the right one.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Once the campaign team had their wording down, Chen called
Romney and read the statement aloud to him, it's disgraceful.
It said that the Obama administration's first response to the
violence in Egypt and Libya was not to condemn attacks
on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who
wage them.
Speaker 7 (07:50):
And he sort of paused and said, okay, that that
sounds about right to me. Has there been any other
news that we should account for? I said no, I
think that's it, and he said, okay, sounds good. Let
a rip. Let's do it, And I thought, okay, case closed.
We're going to put out the statement. I'm going to
get to bed, and we're going to see kind of
where things develop, and I'll wake up the next day
(08:11):
to fight again.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
A decision was made to lift the nine to eleven
embargo early after all, and at ten twenty four pm,
the Romney campaign sent the statement out to the media.
Speaker 7 (08:22):
I think Romney certainly went to bed feeling pretty good
about the statement. I know I did, and a number
of us did as well, because we'd spend so much
time thinking about that evening. You know, I think we
all really felt like this was the right approach and
this was an evidence of exactly what we had been
talking about.
Speaker 10 (08:39):
Mitt Romney responded in a statement saying, it's disgraceful that
the Obama administration's first response was not to condemn attacks
on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who
wage the attacks, published reports playing the unbasays estate.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Romney's statement was the first volley in what would become
the long political war over Benghazi, and calling Obama disgraceful
mere hours after the attack was first reported, and in
doing so, as it turned out, while the attack was
still unfolding, Romney was taking a risk, maybe even crossing
a line.
Speaker 7 (09:15):
If you'd said to me that night, when we were
getting together to put together that first statement that we
would still be talking about that night and the events
that transpired years later, I would have said, Yeah, maybe
maybe it's a blip in history.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
I'm Leon Nafok from Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries. This
is fiasco BEng Ghazi.
Speaker 17 (09:34):
This is a political cover up of something kind what's
being called Benghazi Gate.
Speaker 18 (09:38):
Intelligence officials acknowledged they originally got it wrong.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
We got the classified cable that was chilling.
Speaker 19 (09:45):
Why should anybody have any credibility in what the administration
says giving its shifting narrative.
Speaker 4 (09:50):
It was a fucking mess, man, there's a fucking mess.
It's really hard to figure out what's going on.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Episode four Feckless, in which the attack in Benghazi collides
with an American election. We'll be right.
Speaker 6 (10:07):
Back, And this really is what New Hampshire is all about.
Isn't it a day like this at a farm like this?
Doug and Stella, thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Mitt Romney announced his candidacy for president on a New
Hampshire farm in twenty eleven. He was wearing slacks and
a checkered button down shirt, and he spoke from a
podium with a picturesque barn behind him. It was the
perfect setting for Romney to make his case that Barack
Obama didn't understand everyday Americans.
Speaker 6 (10:39):
And this is what America is about as well, don't
you think, Oh, Gosh.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
The kickoff was mostly focused on the economy, but Romney
also took the opportunity to distinguish himself from the president
on foreign policy.
Speaker 6 (10:51):
At a time of historic change and great opportunity in
the Arab world, He's hesitant and uncertain. A few mens
into officey he traveled around the globe to apologize for America.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Romney was referencing a trip that Obama had taken to
the Middle East in two thousand and nine at the
start of his presidency. It included a high profile appearance
in Egypt, during which the President called for a new
era of mutual respect between the Muslim world and the West.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
I've come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning
between the United States and Muslims around the world one based.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
In his speech, Obama recalled growing up in Indonesia surrounded
by practicing Muslims. He spoke reverently of Islamic contributions to
Western civilization, like algebra in the treatment of infectious disease.
He even quoted from the Quran, as the.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
Holy Quran tells us be conscious of God and speak
always the truth.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Six years after the start of the Iraq War, Obama's
speech was an implicit critique of the Bush administration. The
new president seemed to be saying that the American government
would no longer hold an antagonistic attitude towards the Middle
East or tolerate the Islamophobia and jingoism that had been
awakened under his predeces.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
And I considered part of my responsibility as president of
the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam
wherever they appear.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Back home, Republicans framed Obama's posture as weak and naive.
They called it an apology for America.
Speaker 17 (12:26):
As we investigate the Obama apology tour and now it
has systematically dismantled America's credibility around the world.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
But first, the apology narrative took hold on Fox News
and other conservative media outlets. Obama was undermining the United
States by acting like Americans had something to be sorry for.
Speaker 14 (12:43):
There you heard the president's apology tour.
Speaker 6 (12:46):
The apology tour, This apology tour, apology tour.
Speaker 13 (12:49):
The president who apologizes to Muslim religious fanatics.
Speaker 20 (12:52):
Can we stop apologizing?
Speaker 1 (12:54):
I'm tired of the apologies. When it came time for
Romney to put out a campaign book, he even named
it after this idea that.
Speaker 6 (13:01):
Colmit Romney his book No Apology, The Case for American Greatness.
Speaker 7 (13:05):
The Obama argument was that they were looking for a
more nuanced view of the Islamic world.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Again, Romney advisor Lanhi Chen.
Speaker 7 (13:13):
They took pains, for example, to distinguish between Islamic fundamentalism
or Islamic terrorism. And they were very careful about how
they approached the region and what they wanted to do,
in part because I think President Obama felt that there
could be common cause made with parts of the Islamic world.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
Obama's insistence on making common cause with the Muslim world
gave Romney an opening during the twenty twelve race, an
easy way to communicate to voters how he and the
incumbent were different.
Speaker 6 (13:43):
Think about this internationally, President Obama has adopted an appeasement strategy.
In Barack Obama's profoundly mistaken view, there's nothing unique about
the United States.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Obama did have one massive advantage when it came to
his record on fighting terrorism.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Tonight, I can report to the American people and to
the world, the United States has conducted an operation that
killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaida.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
A little over a year before the attack in Benghazi,
Obama had ordered the raid that killed Osamam bin Laden.
He had eliminated the leader of al Qaida and dealt
the organization in existential blow. Naturally, Obama's reelection campaign placed
this achievement at the center of his foreign policy record.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
I said, we go after al Qaeda and Bin Laden.
Speaker 7 (14:32):
We did.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
Obama's vice president made hay of it as well, Osama
bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive. By
the end of the summer, polling showed that Obama was
leading Romney on foreign policy, and the race was widely
seen as his to lose. On September twelfth, the morning
(14:55):
after the attack in Benghazi, Lanhi Chen started his day
the same way he always did, by pouring through news
coverage to see what people were saying about his candidate.
Speaker 7 (15:04):
On an ordinary day. By the time I'd wake up,
you know, there might be twenty five thirty thirty five
five articles on that morning. I recall waking up and
clips were coming fast and furious.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Chen was curious to see whether the aggressive stance Romney
had taken the night before was having its desired effect.
The statement did seem to be getting a lot of attention,
but not in the way the Romney campaign had hoped.
Speaker 11 (15:30):
Whether you agree or don't agree with the Romney statement,
it just sounds cynical and gross.
Speaker 13 (15:34):
And I have to say I'm stun they put out
this release when they did, before we knew all the
facts before daybreak.
Speaker 14 (15:41):
Just so patently political.
Speaker 20 (15:43):
It really gives you.
Speaker 16 (15:44):
Pause a political handgrad and I think shame on that
campaign personally.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
Normally, when a campaign is under this kind of heavy criticism,
the candidate can marshal a battalion of loyal, credentialed partisans
to get on TV and mounted defense. They're called surrogates,
and typically the Romney campaign had a deep bench of
surrogates at their disposal. In this case, though support was
slow to come. It appeared that even Romney's fellow Republicans
(16:11):
thought the campaign had gone too far.
Speaker 7 (16:14):
We found a reticence amongst a number of our key
national security surrogates who would have been forceful voices on
the outside. They were either not on board, or they
wanted to speak to me or someone on the campaign
to give them some sense of our thinking before they
were willing to get out there and say something.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
That morning, Chen dialed into a conference call with other
top campaign officials and Romney himself, who was not happy.
According to one account, he gripped the armrest of his
chair as he spoke.
Speaker 7 (16:46):
He expressed his sense that perhaps we had been too
quick with the statement and that there was a brewing
controversy over it. It was something to the effect of, guys,
I think we may have made a mistake here, or
we may have misfired.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
Romney knew it didn't look good. Four Americans, including an ambassador,
were dead, and here he was pouncing on it to
try to win an election. It wasn't just Obama partisan
who were outraged. Establishment Republicans also seemed to agree that
Romney campaign had improperly politicized a national security crisis.
Speaker 8 (17:19):
I'm a hawk, but you do not want to have
this become a political election issue right now. We should
have one president of the United States at a time
when it comes to foreign policy. I don't think he
should be a second force of foreign policy now.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Mitch McConnell and John Bayner, the two highest ranking Republicans
in Congress, offered statements condemning the Bengazi attack, but neither
took the opportunity to criticize Obama or come to Romney's defense.
John McCain also declined to address Romney's statement, saying only
that Ambassador Chris Stevens was one of his dear friends,
(17:54):
but not everyone in the conservative movement had the same qualms.
Speaker 20 (17:58):
But what really is going on right there is a
coordinated effort by the media in coordination with the White House.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
On talk radio, Rush Limbaugh gave a full throated defense
of Roma and suggested that the outrage of the campaign
statement was a distraction from Obama's mishandling of the attack.
Speaker 20 (18:16):
We're in the middle of an absolute disaster, a foreign
policy disaster, and there's a coordinated effort to make it
about Romney, whether or not it's presidential for Romney.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
One commentator on the website Breitbart dot Com dismissed the
notion that Romney had done anything wrong and called on
the Obama campaign to direct their outrage at the murderers
instead of Romney. And so the Romney campaign faced a choice.
Were they going to give in to the criticism they
were hearing from more moderate Republicans or would they stay
on message and hope the rest of the party fell
(18:52):
in line.
Speaker 7 (18:53):
How do we address this now going forward? That was
really more the focus of that call and the tone
that Romney took that morning, And it was really a
division between do we walk it back or do we
double down on it.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
After some debate, the Romney campaign decided not to backtrack.
The guy who wrote a book called No Apology simply
could not apologize.
Speaker 7 (19:17):
It would have been seen as a sign of weakness.
It would have been seen as a rebuke of our
own line of thinking about not just this event, but
perhaps more broadly about Obama.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
So the Romney campaign was going to stay the course. Yes,
what happened to Benghazi was a tragedy, but it was
an avoidable one that illustrated the failures of Obama's foreign policy.
As lnhi Chen told a reporter at the time, the
attack was a direct result of the Obama administration conducting
its foreign policy in effeckless manner. That word feckless was
(19:52):
a callback to a critique that Romney had been leveling
against Obama for the better part of a year.
Speaker 6 (19:58):
The very real dangers that America faces if we continue
the effeckless policies of the past three years.
Speaker 12 (20:05):
Knit Romney said, that you are America's most chectless president
since Carter.
Speaker 15 (20:11):
What would you like to say to mister Romney.
Speaker 20 (20:14):
I tell him to go feck himself. That's an.
Speaker 7 (20:18):
And I think that word feckless describes a timidity. And
that's the reason why that critique stuck.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
Whatever had happened in Benghazi, it was proof of Obama's fecklessness,
particularly when viewed alongside the conciliatory statement issued by the
US Embassy in Cairo. It was true that making this
point required Romney to conflate the Benghazi attack with the
administration's response to the Innocence of Muslims video, But the
point here was to level a general critique of the president,
(20:47):
not get into specifics.
Speaker 17 (20:54):
Back to our breaking news in a matter of moments,
live in Jacksonville.
Speaker 10 (20:57):
Governorment Romney is prepared to make a statement.
Speaker 6 (21:00):
And we understand he may take questions now.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
As criticism continued to pour in the day after the attack,
the Romney campaign pulled together a press conc in which
Romney would address reporters directly. Hillary Clinton had just done
the same thing at State Department headquarters, and Obama was
getting ready to deliver his own statement in the White
House Rose Garden. The setting for Romney's press conference was
less official. It took place at a strip mall in Jacksonville, Florida.
Speaker 6 (21:28):
Good morning, Americans woke up this morning with tragic news
and felt heavy hearts.
Speaker 7 (21:36):
So he was having a press conference in a strip
mall where there was a reptile store of some kind.
And I don't know why that sticks with me, but
it does. It was sort of fitting for the time.
I guess that we were in a pit of vipers
and there was a reptile store nearby.
Speaker 6 (21:51):
I think it's a terrible course for America to stand
in apology for our values, that the first response to
the United States must be outrage at the breach of
the sovereignty of our nation.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Reporters echoed the questions lanhi Chen had seen in the
press clippings that morning. Why had the Romney campaign weighed
in so early? It was the anniversary of nine to eleven.
Shouldn't they at least wait until after the attack was over?
Speaker 3 (22:20):
Watching this basin itself a mixed signal when you've criticized
the administration.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
At a time that Americans are being you know, shouldn't
politics offer for this?
Speaker 6 (22:29):
We have a campaign for presidency of the United States,
and are speaking about the different courses we would each
take with regards to the challenges that the world faces.
Speaker 11 (22:38):
If you had known last night, if the investor had
gotten obviously, I'm.
Speaker 6 (22:41):
Gathering you did not know, I'm I'm not gonna take
hypotheticals about what would have been known on and so forth.
Speaker 14 (22:47):
We respotted last night.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
It was a rough press conference and a rough morning
for the candidate overall, but it was still possible that
Romney's fellow Republicans would get behind him.
Speaker 7 (22:57):
I really didn't have a great sense of what that
day and what the next few days we're going to
look like.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
In the first few days after the attack and been god,
a wave of anti American uprising started to crop up
across the Arab world in response to the Innocence of
Muslims video. The Obama administration was concerned about the risk
of another attack.
Speaker 21 (23:22):
Pictures here from protests and anti American demonstrations in more
than a dozen countries.
Speaker 4 (23:28):
The Bengazi attack happened on a Tuesday. The day we
were all watching was Friday, because of Friday prayers.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
This is Tommy Vitor. He's best known today as a
co host of Pod Save America. Back in twenty twelve,
he was the thirty two year old spokesperson for the
National Security Council, a panel of advisors responsible for helping
the president make decisions on foreign policy and terrorism.
Speaker 4 (23:51):
Because what happened in a lot of places was everyone
would go to the mosque, if you had any mom
who was giving a sermon about the innocence of Muzzlim videos,
you could see more protests and more violence and more
attacks on the US facilities.
Speaker 13 (24:05):
American diplomatic missions across the globe are on high alert.
Speaker 12 (24:08):
They are expecting and desion of anti American protests.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
After Friday prayers, protesters demonstrated outside US diplomatic outposts in Morocco, Mauritania, Pakistan, Indonesia, Kuwait,
even Australia and the Philippines. You know, a dominus fact.
The chain reaction with being more protests in Arab capitals.
Speaker 22 (24:26):
There were small demonstrations in front of Tunisia, there were
other ones in the Gaza Strip.
Speaker 21 (24:31):
The unrest came to Sudan.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
Protesters shouting with our soul, our blood, we defend you,
Prophet Mohammed.
Speaker 4 (24:37):
And so that led to a whole series of meetings
and conversations about how to harden various facilities all around
the globe and to really review like whether US personnel
were safe. I mean, that was the real focus.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
Some of the demonstrations were peaceful, others turned violent. In Yemen,
protesters breached the gates of the US embassy. In Tunisia,
they set vehicles on fire. In Sudan, they climbed over
the walls of the US embassy and raised a black
Islamic flag.
Speaker 22 (25:07):
Wherever there is weak security for seeing some radicals take
advantage of that and using this opportunity to attack the embassidy.
Speaker 4 (25:14):
In truth, like, we didn't really have time to immediately
mourn and focus on the Benghazi attacks and do an
after action report because we were so worried about whether
there could be another Benghazi someplace else.
Speaker 7 (25:28):
We were worried.
Speaker 4 (25:29):
About personnel all over the world, diplomatic personnel, intelligence personnel,
military personnel. It was a total rethinking of our security
situation all over the globe.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Meanwhile, the US intelligence community was trying to get to
the bottom of who was responsible for the attack in
Benghazi and how they had managed to kill four people.
Speaker 4 (25:49):
Even with the entire intelligence capability of the United States government,
you are still scrambling to figure out what happened in
situations like this.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
From the start, a central question was how the Benghazi
attack began. Did it grow spontaneously out of peaceful protests
inspired by the video or was it a terrorist attack
that had been planned separately. At stake was whether the
tragedy had been preventable, whether someone in the US government
had screwed up by not thwarting the attack or better
(26:20):
preparing the compound to withstand it.
Speaker 4 (26:22):
That's just the nature of diplomacy. It's nature of like
the fog of war like there was no way to
quickly vet and get people on the ground to sort
through the aftermath. Even with enormous intelligence capability, it still
took hours and hours and hours to figure out what
exactly happened.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
As investigators sought witnesses and made contact with Libyan authorities,
President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton delivered public speeches
and met with the victims' families. Obama also visited the
State Department, where grief over losing two of their own
was still just setting in A sitting American ambassador had
not been killed in the line of duty since nineteen
(27:02):
seventy nine.
Speaker 3 (27:04):
To you, their families and colleagues, to all Americans know this,
their sacrifice will never be forgotten.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
On Friday afternoon, Obama and Clinton presided over a solemn
ceremony as the victims' bodies were returned from Libya. Family
members stood by for a military salute as servicemen loaded
flag draped caskets into hearses. The event was carried live
on National TV.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
We bring home for Americans who gave their lives for
our country and our values to the families.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
The ceremony took place in the midst of a fevered
rush in the media to get clarity on whether the
attack and Benghazi had been pre planned or linked to
a protest. Reporters initially had a hard time getting a
definitive picture. The Washington Post cited a Libyan journalist who
described the attackers as racing towards a protest. The New
York Times seemed to back that up, citing a Libyan
(28:09):
official who said the first part of the attack had
evolved from protests, while the second on the CIA base
had been coordinated. However, the same article also cited two
Libyan guards who had been wounded in the attack, who
said there had been no indication of a protest outside
the compound before the shooting started. Separately, the President of
Libya described the attack as highly organized.
Speaker 11 (28:31):
The President of Libya says that this was something that
had been in.
Speaker 20 (28:35):
The works for two months.
Speaker 11 (28:36):
This attack, he blames it on al Qaeda.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
It was a lot of scrambling in the initial days.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
This is Pamela K. Brown in twenty twelve. She was
an executive producer at Fox News. Before that, she had
spent time building an international roodex at NBC, ABC and
CBS News while reporting on conflicts like the First Gulf
War and the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
I had good contexts I made in Saudi Arabia. I
had friends in Egypt. I had friends in a UAE,
and I say friends people that would take my phone
call and do their very best to answer my question
or help me in my quest.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
The evening after the attack in Benghazi, anchors at Fox
News were running with a definitive claim that the attack
was pre planned and likely linked to al Qaida. It
had nothing to do with the innocence of Muslim's video.
Speaker 17 (29:26):
Fox News has obtained information that those killings were apparently planned,
not a spontaneous demonstration.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
One thread that I developed from a source on the
ground that there was no protest and the attacks were
not spontaneous. The attack was planned and had nothing to
do with the movie. I was confident, highly confident. That's
something you just have to lock and load on when
you really have it.
Speaker 15 (29:52):
There is growing consensus tonight among the intelligence community that
the attack in Libya had little or nothing to do
with Muslim protests against an anti Islamic film.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
In addition to Brown's source on the ground, top Republicans
on the House Intelligence Committee were arguing that the weapons
used in the attack were proof of premeditation. Specifically, they
noted that the CIA facility in Benghazi had been hit
with mortars, meaning the attackers would have needed exact coordinates
for the building in order to target it.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
It was such an area that they knew the way
the mortar rounds were coming in people we spoke to
it showed that there had been pre planning.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
The FBI later theorized that the assailants may have gotten
the coordinates needed to launch the mortars when they raided
the Benghazi compound. In other words, the attack on the
CIA base may have been planned, but planned in one night.
In the days after the attack, there was a lot
riding on this point for Republicans. If the attack in
Benghazi was pre planned, it meant that the Obama administration
(30:57):
was exactly as weak on terror as mitt Romney had
been saying. The potential link to al Qaeda meant that
Obama hadn't conquered the terrorist organization after all, and that
while he was out running his victory lab over bin
Laden's death, the group had managed to murder an American ambassador.
(31:18):
On Thursday, September thirteenth, the intelligence community provided a classified
briefing to the President and to Congress. Their assessment reiterated
that the attack had begun spontaneously following the protests in Cairo,
but that extremists with ties to al Qaida were involved.
Speaker 23 (31:34):
All right, good afternoon, ladies, and gentlemen, thanks for being here.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
At a press conference the next day, ABC's Jake Tapper
pushed White House Press Secretary Jay Carney to square the
idea of a spontaneous protest with emerging evidence about the
weapons used in the attack.
Speaker 3 (31:49):
The group around, but the Benghazi post was well armed.
It was a well coordinated attack.
Speaker 15 (31:54):
Do you think it was a spontaneous protest against a movie?
Speaker 23 (31:59):
Look, this is obviously under investigation. We do not at
this moment have information to suggest or to tell you
that would indicate that any of this unrest was prel
What is true about?
Speaker 1 (32:11):
On the Sunday news shows that weekend, un Ambassador Susan
Rice further amplified the government's official assessment by appearing on
every major network CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, and Fox News.
This was a feat known as the full Ginsburg, named
after Monica Lewinski's lawyer, who's the first to ever do
it in nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 3 (32:32):
Madam Ambassador, thank you for joining us.
Speaker 16 (32:33):
Good to be with you.
Speaker 14 (32:34):
Candy, Doctor Rice, thank you so much for coming here
today and answering our question.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
Good to be with you in each interview. When the
Bengazi attack came up, Rice crafted her answers based on
the intelligence briefing submitted to the president three days earlier.
Speaker 24 (32:46):
What happened in Benghazi was in fact, initially a spontaneous
reaction to what had just transpired hours before in Cairo,
almost a copycat of the demonstrat.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
Rice made it clear that the investigation was still underway
and cautioned that there was a lot the administration didn't know.
Speaker 24 (33:03):
We'll wait to see exactly what the investigation finally confirms,
but that's the best information we have at present.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
It didn't take long for more solid intelligence to come in.
Within a week of Susan Rice's tour of the Sunday Shows,
it was clear the Obama White House had been wrong
to suggest the Benghazi attack grew out of a protest
against the Innocence of Muslim's video. There had been no
protest against the video in Benghazi. Security camera footage obtained
by the CIA showed that the diplomatic compound was quiet
(33:33):
that night, and to an organized group of armed assailants
broke in.
Speaker 18 (33:37):
Intelligence officials acknowledged they originally got it wrong.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
On September nineteenth, a counter terrorism official from the Obama
administration testified that the assault was in fact a coordinated
terrorist attack.
Speaker 11 (33:49):
The intelligence community now believes it was a deliberate and
organized attack. Some of those involved, it says, were linked
to groups affiliated with or sympathetic to Al Qaida, to.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
The Romney campaign and their fellow Republicans. It looked like
the administration was dramatically changing its story on Benghazi.
Speaker 21 (34:06):
Last week, the administration insisted the attack was a spontaneous
reaction to a YouTube video, but today Secretary Clinton has
said it was indeed terrorism.
Speaker 11 (34:15):
Mitt Romney said today it raises questions about how those
first statements could be so wrong.
Speaker 6 (34:20):
There was a great deal of confusion about that from
the very beginning on the part of the administration.
Speaker 19 (34:25):
Why should anybody have any credibility in what the administration
says giving its shifting narrative.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
Tommy Vitor, Obama's National Security Council spokesman, acknowledges that the
administration's narrative did shift, but all these years later, the
notion that there was anything nefarious about it still exasperates him.
Speaker 4 (34:44):
It was a fucking mess, man, It was a fucking mess.
It's really hard to figure out what's going on. You know,
when something happens thousands of miles away in the dead
of night, in complicated circumstances, you have to allow for
shifting explanations. It takes time to figure out what happened.
I promise you when I would walk into the situation
room meetings, there was not some conversation about how do
(35:07):
we spin this. The conversation was, Hey, intelligence guys, what
do we know?
Speaker 1 (35:15):
The messy reality is that there was disagreement among intelligence
officials as information about the Bengazi attack rolled in. At
one point, the executive coordinator of the Presidential Daily brief
had written that the presence of armed assailants on the
ground suggested that this was an intentional assault and not
an escalation of a peaceful protest, but that statement was
(35:35):
removed from the initial briefing because other analysts didn't think
there was enough evidence to support it.
Speaker 4 (35:40):
There was clearly a difference of opinion among various parts
of the government about what happened, and so those dissenting
views would start to leak out, which would cause reporting
that was just off or confused or wrong.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
But Pamela Brown, the producer at Fox News, saw something
suspicious in the Obama White House's insistence on bringing up
the innocence of Muslims video. The fact that the administration
had been so attached to the spontaneous uprising theory to
Brown that they were trying to get away with something.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
It was a very big deal for them to pin
all of this on the video. When somebody goes out
and sticks to a story like that and it's just
not true.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
This sense that Obama was hiding the truth pervaded Fox News.
Soon the network was calling it a cover up.
Speaker 17 (36:34):
More on the Benghazi cover off, what's being called Benghazi Gate,
probably more serious than Watergate.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
To what was your theory at the time of like
why the Obama people wanted to blame it on the video?
What was what was in it for them to blame
it on the video?
Speaker 2 (36:53):
I have no idea. This is a larger question for
someone in mess in foreign policy. So the question is
why were we there, Why was this so important to
have Ambassador Stevens in this position and temporary mission compound?
And what was the hope That I cannot answer.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
Fox's primetime hosts were less circumspect. In the weeks after
the attack, Sean Hannity was mapping out a vast conspiracy
designed to cover up what really happened to Ambassador Stevens.
Speaker 17 (37:29):
It's clear to me that either they are totally stupid,
or they have the worst intelligence, or that this is
a political cover up of some kind because they didn't
want to admit. What is hobbyist to everybody that on
the anniversary of nine to eleven they should have had
some protection for our embassies, and they didn't.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
We'll be right back. As Pamela Brown reported the Benghazi story,
she filed several freedom of information requests with the State
Department to see if there was anything that didn't match
up to the official narrative. For instance, the administration had
said that there was no indication to the attack in
(38:10):
Benghazi that the diplomatic compound was under imminent threat, but
Brown's Foyer requests turned up State Department cables indicating that
some alarms had been sounded in the weeks leading up
to the attack.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
We got the classified cable which said that the compound
could not withstand a coordinating attack. That was chilling.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
That cable was sent in August of twenty twelve, and
it indicated that the State Department knew that there were
Al Qaeda cells in Benghazi. The message was approved by
Ambassador Chris Stevens.
Speaker 9 (38:41):
I really believe, having read it, that it is this
smoking gun warning.
Speaker 3 (38:45):
Here.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
You've got this now. It's worth saying that the cable
Brown received in response to her Foyer request did not
say an attack in Benghazi was imminent, but it did
suggest that if one did occur, the compound would be
vulnerable in any event. Brown and her colleagues at Fox
News thought the cable spoke pretty loudly. Catherine Herridge, the
(39:06):
reporter Brown worked with most closely on Benghazi coverage, characterized
it on the air as proof if the Obama administration
should have done more and was now knowingly trying to
deflect blame.
Speaker 9 (39:18):
I can't think of anything that would be more specific
than if these groups had emailed the Stage Department and
said here's the time, here's the place, and here's the
method of the attack that.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
Fall, Fox News continued to put out stories about the
attack that sounded extremely damning. For instance, they reported that
the administration knew within twenty four hours of the attack
that groups associated with al Qaida were involved. They also
ran segments suggesting that the president could have stopped the
attack but chose not to.
Speaker 18 (39:46):
Lawmakers demanded to know how lack security may have been
and whether warning signs were simply ignored.
Speaker 1 (39:52):
Meanwhile, Congress questioned State Department personnel who confirmed that a
request for more security in Benghazi had been denied.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
So there wasn't sufficient resources provided.
Speaker 7 (40:03):
That was one of the main reasons I continued to
ask for those resources.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
Yes, those statements prompted Republican lawmakers to hit Fox's airway
and call for more investigations.
Speaker 2 (40:12):
This is why we need an independent council, and we
need the investigations to began immediately.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
These questions about what the Obama White House knew and
when they knew it dovetailed perfectly with the administration's evolving
account of how the attack had started, and when the
intelligence community's assessment was revised to reflect the fact that
there had been no protest in Benghazi, it looked like
even more evidence that the administration was hiding behind the
(40:39):
Innocence of Muslims video.
Speaker 6 (40:41):
There was Jay Carney, There were several Obama officials going
out saying it was a response to the movie, is
this is this a cover up?
Speaker 20 (40:49):
Well, they lie, I mean, there's no question about it.
Speaker 22 (40:51):
And by the way, if the Republicans did that, it
be hell to pay.
Speaker 12 (40:54):
Everybody would.
Speaker 1 (40:59):
About a month before the twenty twelve election, the Romney
campaigns saw a change of fortune in their pull numbers.
This was in part due to Romney's stellar performance in
the first presidential debate.
Speaker 6 (41:10):
Under the president's policies, middle income Americans had been buried.
They're just been crushed.
Speaker 3 (41:15):
Now that may not seem like a big deal when
it just is numbers on a sheet of paper, but
if we're talking about.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
It's hard to say exactly what role the ben Ghazi
controversy played in Romney's surge, but ongoing questions over the
administration's handling of the attack had seemingly validated the Romney
campaigns aggressive posture from the night of It wasn't just
Breitbart in Fox News either. Even the mainstream media didn't
seem to completely trust Obama.
Speaker 18 (41:45):
Patients is starting to wear sin with shifting explanations from
the administration.
Speaker 13 (41:50):
The president also facing a lot of questions about the
death of American Ambassador Stevens.
Speaker 11 (41:53):
But getting answers to exactly what did happen has not
been easy.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
Lonhi Chen saw victory in sight.
Speaker 7 (41:59):
There definitely was a point where it turned. We saw
an appreciable shift in public opinion in our own internal
pulling in all of the key states, and Romney was
very competitive, if not ahead, in all the states he
needed to to be ahead in at least according to
our polling, and by the way, a number of public
polls as well, that he was really closing in on
the possibility of winning the presidency.
Speaker 1 (42:22):
A new poll shows Governor Romney surging and closing the gap,
especially in some key swing states.
Speaker 15 (42:27):
I think the race is very close.
Speaker 4 (42:29):
I think the wind is that Governor Romney's back, and
they're clearly a momentum.
Speaker 3 (42:32):
You can see it on the trail, you can see
it in the data.
Speaker 24 (42:36):
But I believe in minimum is clearly.
Speaker 1 (42:37):
The second presidential debate was set for October sixteenth. The
first one had been focused on domestic policy, so ben
Ghazi had not come up. This time it was bound to.
Speaker 7 (42:48):
We were in the driver's seat, so in some ways
the second debate took on additional importance in our minds
because we felt that it was important to continue momentum,
but also to open up some lines of attack, potentially
on Obama areas where we felt he could be weak.
Speaker 1 (43:01):
But Romney was squeamish about continuing to beat the ben
Ghazi drum. It was an issue that the Republican base
cared about, but one that swing voters who could decide
the election didn't want to dwell on.
Speaker 7 (43:12):
We knew it was a topic that had to be
delicately navigated and traversed because of the initial reaction and
because of how hot the event had become.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
As Romney took the stage, he looked cautious but confident.
Speaker 16 (43:25):
This is Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. This site
of tonight's debate, This second.
Speaker 1 (43:31):
Go the Benghazi attack came up about halfway through the debate.
The President addressed the question with a pointed jab at
his opponent, emphasizing that the attack was still going on
when the Romney campaign put out its statement, while.
Speaker 3 (43:43):
We were still dealing with our diplomats being threatened. Governor
Romney put out a press release trying to make political points,
and that's not how a commander in chief operates.
Speaker 1 (43:55):
Romney responded with an argument that had been made repeatedly
on Fox News that it had taken the administration two
whole weeks to call the storming of the compound in
Benghazi a terrorist attack.
Speaker 6 (44:06):
There were many days that passed before we knew whether
this was a spontaneous demonstration or actually whether it was
a terrorist attack. And there was no demonstration involved. It
was a terrorist attack, and it took a long time
for that to be told to the American people.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
Romney's implication was that the administration had tried to hide
the fact that, on Obama's watch, America had suffered a
deadly blow in the war on terror. Obama was ready
with a response.
Speaker 3 (44:31):
The day after the attack, Governor I stood in the
Rose Garden and I told the American people in the
world that we are going to find out exactly what happened,
that this was an act of terror. And I also
said that we're going to hunt down bows who committed
this crime.
Speaker 6 (44:49):
I think it's interesting the President just said something, which
is that on the day after the attack, he went
to the Rose Garden and said that this was an
active terror. I want to make sure we get that
for the record, because it took the president fourteen days
before he called the attack in Benghazi an active terror.
Speaker 3 (45:05):
Get the transfer he.
Speaker 2 (45:07):
Did, in fact, sir, so let me call it an act.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
He did call it an active terror.
Speaker 21 (45:15):
It did as well.
Speaker 1 (45:16):
Romney fumbled for words.
Speaker 6 (45:18):
The administration indicated that this was a reaction to a video.
Am I incorrect in that regard.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
Lannie Chen was watching the debate from the green room.
Speaker 7 (45:28):
I do recall at the time thinking he's going to
want to know after the debate, what did Obama say
and was I right or wrong? I knew he was
going to ask me that right afterwards, because it was
one of those things that was like a factual question, right.
It wasn't like, hey, what do you think I did?
It was like, tell me what he said.
Speaker 1 (45:49):
Chen called back to Romney headquarters to make sure he
knew the exact words the President had used in the
Rose Garden the day after the attack, and he braced
himself for Romney to step off the debate stage.
Speaker 7 (46:00):
After the debate, he comes off the stage, he comes
into the green room, he makes a bee line for me,
and he says, you know, was I Was it accurate?
And I told him it was that that I thought
he had not misrepresented what had happened.
Speaker 1 (46:13):
The truth was, it had taken Obama about two weeks
to characterize the Bengazi attack as more than just a
mob action, But it was also true. On the morning
of September twelfth, the President had stood in the Rose
Garden and said.
Speaker 3 (46:26):
No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of
this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light
of the values that we stand for.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
Chen says he still thinks active terror and terrorism are different.
Speaker 7 (46:39):
There was a distinction between terror and terrorism. That in
fact Obama had not called it terrorism. He taught that
he called it an act of terror, but not an
act of terrorism or terrorism. That was the distinction.
Speaker 3 (46:50):
Why is that?
Speaker 1 (46:50):
Why was that a meaningful distinction?
Speaker 7 (46:52):
We felt it took on a different tone when you
were willing to call it terrorism versus an act of terror.
An act of terror in some ways, almost disassociates it
a little bit from the emotion of it being a
terrorist attack, a terrorist attack, an active terrorism versus an
act of terror, which we thought it was Obama's effort
(47:14):
to disassociate it from the severity or the degree to
which it was an attack on the United States.
Speaker 1 (47:25):
More than a month had passed since four Americans died
in Benghazi. The administration and Congress had begun investigations to
understand how and why it happened, But the debate between
the sitting president and the man who wanted to replace him,
it just came down to semantics. By now you can
(47:54):
tell there were multiple threads to the Benghazi story that
wound together to form the outline of a scandal. Whether
the attack was pre planned or spontaneous, whether there had
been a protest, in Benghazi, over the innocence of Muslims
video or not, why the compound out in Benghazi had
not been better protected, whether the Obama administration initially downplayed
(48:15):
the terrorism angle for political purposes. Each of these threads
became fodder for debate and speculation. Together, they created an
air of intrigue. Soon the attack in Benghazi became simply Benghazi,
All right, let's.
Speaker 3 (48:31):
Turn to Benghazi, misleading America on ben Gaza, all.
Speaker 9 (48:34):
Of the emails relating to Benghazi.
Speaker 1 (48:36):
Benghazi was a place most Americans had never heard of
before Ambassador Stevens and his colleagues died there, but within
weeks the word alone was enough to conjure any number
of questions and theories. On the night of the attack,
Mitt Romney looked uncouth and opportunistic for trying to score
political points over Stevens's death. By the time the election ended,
(48:58):
those days were long gone, and Benghazi had become a
political event first and foremost.
Speaker 13 (49:10):
Fox News Election Alert. Fox News can now project that
President Obama will win the state of Pennsylvania and its
twenty electoral votes.
Speaker 1 (49:18):
As election results rolled in on the night of November sixth,
the Romney team was stunned their internal polling had been
showing Romney with a lead, instead.
Speaker 16 (49:28):
Seeing a projectsment. Barack Obama will be re elected President
of the United States. He will remain in the White House.
They're excited in Chicago, they're excited at Times.
Speaker 1 (49:37):
Square on Fox News. It took some time for reality
to set in.
Speaker 14 (49:41):
Yes, I think this is prettymature.
Speaker 13 (49:43):
We got seventy We got a quarter of the vote.
Speaker 12 (49:45):
Now, remember, here's.
Speaker 1 (49:46):
One of their analysts. Former Bush strategist Carl Rove objected
to the call, prompting anchor Megan Kelly to question the
statisticians in the election unit live on TV.
Speaker 21 (49:54):
Now here are the guys. This is the decision desk.
You tell me whether you stand by your call in Ohio.
Given the doubts, Karl Rove just race.
Speaker 3 (50:03):
We're actually quite comfortable with the call in Ohio. Basically
right now, there's just too much Obama vote that's outstanding
there that we.
Speaker 1 (50:10):
But Benghazi was not going away. Now that Obama had
secured his second term, all eyes turned to Hillary Clinton,
whose intention to run for president in twenty sixteen was
considered a foregone conclusion. As Secretary of State, Clinton had
appointed an independent review Board to investigate the State Department's
failure to protect the compound and the ambassador. Meanwhile, congressional
(50:33):
oversight committees were continuing to ask their own questions.
Speaker 18 (50:36):
The House Foreign Affairs Committee on Benghazi kicks off at
the top of the hour.
Speaker 8 (50:41):
Focusing on what happened before, during, and after the attack.
Speaker 1 (50:46):
In December, Clinton was set to testify a by Benghazi
before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, but her testimony was
delayed after she fainted and sustained a concussion.
Speaker 5 (50:56):
She became dehydrated, fainted, apparently hit her head, and had
that concussion. She did not go to the hospital. Doctors
are said to be monitoring her. But this means that
she will not testify this week about the attack on
the mission in Benghazi and the killing of Hearth.
Speaker 1 (51:10):
The Fox News something was up.
Speaker 16 (51:12):
This is a duck and cover.
Speaker 20 (51:13):
Let's be honest, and the cleansings are great at this.
Speaker 1 (51:16):
Apparently she's suffering from a cute be Ghazi allergy.
Speaker 13 (51:19):
We can't verify this because she's barricaded in her Rock
Creek Park mansion here in Washington.
Speaker 1 (51:24):
He doesn' want to answer the question.
Speaker 10 (51:25):
I bet that we might never hear her testimony on.
Speaker 1 (51:28):
This On the next episode of Fiasco, Benghazi gets a whistleblower.
Speaker 4 (51:47):
I remember his words so clearly.
Speaker 19 (51:50):
He said, the government is lying to what they're saying.
Speaker 2 (51:54):
Happened, did not happen.
Speaker 1 (51:57):
For a list of books, articles, and documentaries we used
in our research, follow the link in our show notes.
Fiasco is a production of Prologue Projects, and it's distributed
by Pushkin Industries. The show is produced by Andrew Parsons,
Ulla Kulpa, Sam Lee and me Leon Mayfock, with editorial
support from Sam Graham Felsen and Madeline Kaplan. Our researcher
(52:21):
was Frances Carr. Our score was composed by Dan English,
Joe Valley and Noah Hecht. Additional music by Nick Sylvester,
Joel Saint, Julian Billy Libby and Little Cheddar Studios. Our
theme song is by Spatial Relations audio mixed by Rob Buyers,
Michael Raphael and Johnny Vince Evans. Our artwork is by
(52:41):
Teddy Blanks at Chips and y A. Copyright council provided
by Peter Yassi at Yasi Butler PLLC. Thanks to Archive
dot Org, Nicole Hemmer and Katherine Herridge. Special thanks to
Luminary and thank you for listening binge the entire season
(53:07):
of Fiasco Benghazi ad free by subscribing to Pushkin Plus.
Sign up on the Fiasco show page on Apple Podcasts,
or at pushkin dot fm slash Plus. Pushkin Plus subscribers
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