September 29, 2025 • 58 mins
As the political world looks toward the 2016 Presidential election, Benghazi becomes a Clinton scandal.
For a list of books, documentaries and resources we used to research this episode visit: bit.ly/fiascopolitics
Subscribe to Pushkin+ to hear the entire season of Fiasco: Benghazi, ad-free, right now. Find Pushkin+ on the Fiasco show page in Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin.fm.
Subscribe on Apple: apple.co/pushkin
Subscribe on Pushkin: pushkin.fm/plus
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Pushkin previously on fiasco. A number of conservative media outlets
were particularly genda.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
This is a political cover up of some kind of
intelligence officials acknowledged they originally got it wrong.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
I know the Ghazi Annex chief personally, and he's a
decent man.
Speaker 4 (00:46):
The House Foreign Affairs Committee on Benghazi kicks off at
the top of the hour.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Hillary Clinton's painted apparently hit her head and had that concussion.
Speaker 5 (00:53):
I bet that we might never hear her testimony. She
doesn't want to answer the question.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
When Alison Camarada was an anchor on Fox News, she
talked about Benghazi a lot.
Speaker 5 (01:07):
For what's been called Benghazi Gate. There was a lack
of security at the US consulate in Benghazi, but who
is to blame for not beefing it up? Was the
administration just clueless or was there a cover up?
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Joining us among other things, it was just a good,
rich story with a seemingly endless stream of angles to explore.
Speaker 5 (01:26):
There were some mysteries embedded in Benghazi that needed to
be answered, so that gave it legs for sure.
Speaker 6 (01:33):
There were four dead.
Speaker 5 (01:34):
Americans and that is obviously something that resonated with our viewers,
and they wanted justice, and we could beat the drum
of justice.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
At the time, Camarada was one of the co hosts
of Fox and Friends Weekend. She ended up leaving the
network in twenty fourteen, and she's been public with her
criticisms of Fox News in the years since. But during
the months after the Benghazi attack, Camarada spent her weekend
mornings dutifully beating the drums of justice alongside her Fox colleagues.
Speaker 5 (02:06):
That Chris Stevens was saying, we're under attack, We're under attack,
please help, And of course nothing was done to help them.
Four Americans dead, and we need justice for this, so
on wins.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
According to Camarata, Fox's relentless emphasis on ben Ghazi came
directly from the network's founder and chief executive, Roger Ales.
Speaker 5 (02:27):
Sometimes at Fox, Roger got to be in his bonnet
over certain stories, and we would do them time and
again and again and again. Ben Gazzi's right at the
top of that list. I don't know that it was
some grand strategy from the get go, but I just
think that he did naturally lean towards outrage.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Ales didn't personally dictate Fox's coverage at all times, but
he didn't need to because his producers knew what he wanted.
Speaker 6 (02:56):
By the time you became an executive producer at Fox,
you could channel Roger. It wasn't hard Obama, bad Muslims,
bad Hillary, bad Republicans, good Democrats, crazy like it wasn't
rocket science.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Before he created Fox News in nineteen ninety six, Ayles
spent decades in conservative politics, serving as a campaign advisor
to Richard Nixon, Mitch McConnell, and George H. W. Bush. Later,
he was the executive producer of a short lived TV
talk show starring Rush limbar Ardys and gentleman Best Rush
(03:32):
bar From the beginning, Ayle's positioned Fox News as a
counterbalance to what he called the communist broadcasting system CBS
and the Clinton News Network CNN.
Speaker 7 (03:44):
Fox News channel fair and balanced, where news is going,
where news should be.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
But in its early days, Fox's conservative opinion shows like
The O'Reilly Factor were kept at arm's length from its
news division.
Speaker 7 (03:56):
Few broadcasts take any chances these days, and most are
very politically correct. Well, We're going to try to be different,
stimulating and a bit daring.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
It was only gradually that Fox's identity as a platform
for the right became more holistic By the time the
Bengazi attack happened, the network was producing a mix of commentary, activism,
and propaganda.
Speaker 8 (04:26):
Welcome into Fox and Friends.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Fox and Friends Weekend, where Camarato worked, aired every Saturday
and Sunday from six to ten am.
Speaker 6 (04:33):
Well, I always saw Fox and Friends' Weekend as quite
of a morning zoo of political talk. I mean, I
sometimes called it talk radio in a skirt. I mean,
it was a variety show. It was mixing in the
really incendiary political stuff, but not for too long. We
(04:55):
would immediately in a toss, turn to and coming up
breaking news. Subway sandwiches. Foot long subs are only eleven
and a half inches long.
Speaker 5 (05:07):
Subway sandwiches foot long subs are only eleven and a
half inches long.
Speaker 6 (05:14):
I know, everyone, I fill your outage.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
There's gonna be Camarata says that despite being an anchor,
she didn't have much control over the actual content of
Fox and Friends. Because it aired so early in the morning,
a small team of producers would always work overnight to
build the next day's show.
Speaker 6 (05:33):
By the time I got in, there was already a rundown.
It was a built show. When I came in, I
was busy. You know, I was going and I was
getting into my outfit. I was getting into hair and makeup,
and then I had like probably from five fifteen till
I had to run to the set at five point
fifty to get miked up to dive in and study.
(05:56):
You know, that's not enough time. It just wasn't built
to ever do real research. It was basically headlines, talking points,
and you know, mixing it up.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
In January of twenty Thirteenillary Clinton was set to testify
before Congress about Benghazi for the first time. As it happened,
she was planning to leave the Obama administration about a
week later, which meant that her Benghazi testimony would be
one of her last public appearances as Secretary of State.
Speaker 5 (06:26):
While the White House preparing today for Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton to testify tomorrow regarding the deadly September eleventh
attack on our consulate in Libya, Secretary.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Clinton was there was there a lot of anticipation for
her appearance?
Speaker 6 (06:38):
Oh god, yes, I mean part of the Fox model
is just constant build up. It's teasing.
Speaker 5 (06:45):
Republicans are expected to grill her about what she knew
about the attack and when she knew it. Some have
charged that the administration deliberately tried to hide that the
ambush was the work of terrorists linked to al Qaeda.
Speaker 6 (06:57):
It's teasing what's going to happen tomorrow. It's teasing what's
going to happen this week in front of committee. It's
teasing Hillary Clinton's appearance. And that's not new what.
Speaker 8 (07:11):
She knew when she knew it.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Is this going to get answered today?
Speaker 2 (07:14):
She has had time to prepare, but she has an
awful lot to answer for.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
She's one of the top candidates for president in twenty sixteen,
so she can either help move on or she could
have a Susan roy Sunday Show moment.
Speaker 9 (07:24):
And not.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
The committee will come to order. Clinton appeared in front
of both the Senate and the House back to back.
She started her day shortly after nine am with a
prepared statement in which she took responsibility for making changes
of the State Department to prevent another tragedy.
Speaker 6 (07:43):
As I have.
Speaker 10 (07:43):
Said many times, I take responsibility, and nobody is more
committed to getting this right.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
For the most part, Clinton's questioners were fairly cordial.
Speaker 8 (07:53):
Thank you, Adam, Secretary, and wonderful to see you in
good health, and as combative as ever.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
There were two points that kept coming up over and
over again, and they generated the most intense moments of
the day. The first had to do with a case
cable sent to the State Department with Ambassador Stevens's approval
about a month before the attack. The cable had warned
about an increase in violent incidents in Benghazi and the
rise of anti American militias. Republicans wanted to know why
(08:25):
Clinton hadn't personally reviewed the cable and weighed in that
had I been president at the time and I found
that you did not read the cables from Benghazi, you
did not read the cables from bessaror Stevens, I would
have relieved you of your post.
Speaker 6 (08:38):
I think it's inexcusable.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
The thing is.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
The second point of focus was on the Obama administration's
original explanation of the Bengazi attack as a protest gone wrong.
A Republican senator from Wisconsin wanted to know why Clinton
hadn't immediately called the survivors of the attack to find
out whether or not there really had been a protest
that night.
Speaker 10 (08:57):
We were misled that there was supposedly protests, and then something
sprang out of that, and assault sprang out of that.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
Clinton, who up to this point had appeared even keeled
and in decent spirits, suddenly changed her tones, and they didn't.
Speaker 10 (09:10):
With all due respect, the fact is we had four
dead Americans.
Speaker 6 (09:14):
Was it because of a protest?
Speaker 10 (09:15):
Or was it because of guys out for a walk
when night, or decide they'd go kill some Americans?
Speaker 6 (09:19):
What difference at this point does it make?
Speaker 10 (09:22):
It is our job to figure out what happened and
do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Senator Now, honestly, this became the SoundBite of the day.
On the big broadcast networks, Clinton's testimony was described as
fiery and riveting.
Speaker 7 (09:38):
Today, this woman who has traveled the world as America's
top diplomat, came to the Hill ready for a fight,
and her.
Speaker 11 (09:46):
Long awaited appearance before Congress was remarkable.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Harrying Hasso questions all day.
Speaker 12 (09:51):
Clinton was also the political pro massaging big egos, sidestepping
attacks when she could when she couldn't, giving as good.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
As she got.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
But on Fox News, the clip of Clinton saying what
difference does it make? Was played as callous indifference toward
those who lost their lives in Bengazi.
Speaker 7 (10:10):
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's monumental gaff that may haunt
her for the rest of her political career.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Allison Camarada covered Quinton's testimony as a fill in host
on the regular weekday edition of Fox and.
Speaker 6 (10:21):
Friends mad As Hill.
Speaker 5 (10:23):
Secretary Clinton fires back at Congress in a battle over
ben Ghazi.
Speaker 10 (10:27):
What difference at this point does itn't make?
Speaker 5 (10:31):
Well, this morning, we may have an answer for what
difference it makes, and it may include three more dead Americans.
You're going to want to hear this, all right.
Speaker 6 (10:38):
Fox really was good at sloganeering and catchphrases and coming
up with a little outrage nugget to send viewers on
their way, So that one just came, you know, ready made.
They just zeroed in for days and days and weeks
and weeks on what difference does it make? As though
she was being callous, as though she was being cavalier. Basically,
(11:02):
they were trying to make it sound synonymous with who cares?
Speaker 10 (11:05):
What difference at this point does itn't make?
Speaker 13 (11:08):
It makes a lot of difference.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
You may notice Camarata uses the word they when talking
about Fox News. Part of the reason it might just
be that she doesn't work there anymore. But even at
the time, Camarada says she felt separate from the network
and not fully bought in, which I admit reminds me
of coming home in high school and telling my mom
it was my friends who had been smoking, not me.
(11:30):
But Camarada told me that she was never comfortable with
how her producers and co hosts talked about Bengazi, and
in particular, how they presented the Clinton sound bite. Over
the coming weeks. Camarada bristled at Fox's framing of what
she thought was an uncontroversial comment if she listened to
the whole thing, But Fox's producers often cut out right
(11:51):
after what difference at this point does it make?
Speaker 6 (11:53):
So they would end it right there instead of it
is our job to figure out what happened and do
everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again,
that's her next sentence, and they wouldn't always play that part.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Camarata decided to push back on air.
Speaker 5 (12:08):
Her point is that what is the label? What difference
does the label make? And her point, which then she
didn't answer, is where's the justice? Why hasn't it even
been prosecuted? We are our American was killed. They were
terrorists and had we gone.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
It was a quiet rebellion and pretty easy to miss
if you weren't looking for it. But Camarada told me
that every time she departed from the party line in
this way, she felt like she was risking her job.
Speaker 5 (12:35):
There was no winning that conversation with Roger. He had
his opinion, and you were supposed to sort of reflect
his opinion.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Looking back, Camarata describes Fox's Bengazi coverage as a kind
of feedback loop.
Speaker 5 (12:50):
There is a certain kind of self fulfilling prophecy when
it comes to outrage. We did train the audience to
become outraged.
Speaker 6 (12:57):
Often the scripts.
Speaker 5 (12:58):
Would say you'll be outraged right after a commercial. We
told people stick around for the outrage.
Speaker 6 (13:04):
We told them they would be outraged.
Speaker 5 (13:06):
We told them afterwards, were sure they are outraged, and
lo and behold, they came outraged.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
The right wing outrage machine was not invented by Fox News.
It had been around in various forms for decades, and
Hillary Clinton had long been one of its favorite targets. Now,
in the aftermath of the Benghazi attack, the machine was
about to kick into high gear. I'm Leon Nafok from
(13:31):
Prolog Projects and Pushkin Industries. This is fiasco Bengazi.
Speaker 4 (13:36):
He said, the government is lying to you. What they're
saying happened did not happen.
Speaker 5 (13:42):
Is the Obama administrations threatened Benghazi whistleblowers.
Speaker 13 (13:45):
I was literally afraid from my life.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
What do you mean, stand down?
Speaker 12 (13:48):
They're invading the place. Yeah. I think there's a direct
line from what happened in the nineteen nineties to twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
Episode five Greatest Hits, in which Benghazi transforms from an
Obama scandal into the ultimate Clinton scandal, as decades of
built up Clinton lore provide all parties with a roadmap,
a backstory, and a cudgel. We'll be right back. When
(14:19):
Hillary Clinton testified before Congress in January of twenty thirteen,
it was not her first time having to publicly address
a scandal. She had been fighting off various allegations ever
since her husband Bill first ran for president in nineteen
ninety two, long before Fox News even existed. The din
of controversy was a fact of life for the Clintons
(14:40):
and a source of endless frustration.
Speaker 12 (14:42):
Clinton was elected, and there were people in the right
wing who didn't accept that election as legitimate.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
This is David Brock. During the early days of Bill
Clinton's presidency. He was a young journalist working at a
conservative magazine called The American Spectator.
Speaker 12 (15:00):
And you know, in circles that I was in, they
were talking about impeaching him literally before he was even
sworn into office. So there was a machinery in place
to try to make that happen.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
As Brock tells it, the writing he did for The
American Spectator was part of an effort known internally as
the Arkansas Project. It was funded by a conservative billionaire
named Richard Mellen'scaife, and its purpose was to dig up
dirt on the Clintons from before they moved into the
White House.
Speaker 12 (15:30):
Anything was fair game. They were looking for anything they
could find that could help, at first to cause problems
for Clinton, and then it became more explicit mission to
get him out office.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Brock told me that at the time he genuinely thought
he was doing journalism, but he realized pretty quickly that
his patrons saw him more as a political operative, and
he embraced it. The outgoing message on Brock's answering machine
during Clinton's first term was I'm out trying to bring
down the president.
Speaker 12 (16:00):
That was the intention of the Arkansas project. It used
tactics of journalism, but it was more like political opposition
research without any scruples at all. It had no fealty
to facts or truth. If it was a myth that
could stick, that was fine. It was just to create
an atmosphere in which it was difficult for Clinton to
(16:23):
govern and to throw sand in the gears of any
progress that would be made under Clinton.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
In nineteen ninety three, Brock got a tip from a
major Republican donor. Apparently there were some Arkansas State troopers
who had served on Bill Clinton's security detail while he
was governor, and they had some salacious stories to tell
about what they'd seen.
Speaker 12 (16:45):
I went down to Arkansas. I spent hours and hours
debriefing the troopers. They were seemingly first hand witnesses to
these events.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
The troopers told Brock that they had helped then Governor
Clinton coordinate and cover up his extramarital.
Speaker 12 (17:01):
Affairs, basically being part of a political movement that wanted
to do damage to the Clintons. You know, I took
them at their word. I did not do a lot
of like checking beyond what they said.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
As Brock explained it to me, the main goal of
the story was to conjure the width of scandal so
that journalists in the mainstream media could pick up the scent.
The Spectator had a relatively modest circulation and they were
known to have an anti Clinton slant. But if they
could get coverage of the State Trooper story into a
more mainstream outlet, it would remove the air of bias
(17:38):
from the allegations and amplify the scandal to a massive audience.
Brock came to think of this process as scandal laundering.
Speaker 12 (17:47):
One of the goals that the Spectator was to try
to hook more established media onto some of our narratives.
You'd plant a seed and then it kind of grows
on all sorts of places, and by the time you're done,
it's on the evening news.
Speaker 4 (18:06):
This is CNN.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
When Brock was ready to go to press with his story,
but the State Troopers, the American Spectator made a point
of giving CNN a sneak peek.
Speaker 12 (18:16):
They went for it. They interviewed the troopers themselves the
day the piece was published, and the troopers were on
six o'clock evening news on CNN on a particular day
the story broke, Hilary Sawer.
Speaker 7 (18:29):
She told me, she said, I know who she is,
I know what she is here for get the whole
out of here.
Speaker 12 (18:34):
So it very quickly got into the bloodstream of the
mainstream media, which is what our goal was.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
The troopers say they helped Clinton pick up women up
to the day he left for Washington to become president.
The story became known as Troopergate. The scandal had been
duly laundered.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
One senior administration official complained that every time they have
to deny a new round of these kinds of allegations,
it gets harder.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Over the next few years, the American Spectator printed one
story after another suggesting that the Clintons were nothing less
than criminal masterminds.
Speaker 12 (19:08):
There were stories about Clinton being involved in drug grinning
out of an airport in Arkansas. There was some speculation
that the Clintons somehow were implicated in Vincent Foster's death,
which was a suicide, but was said to be something else.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
What Brock is referring to here is the so called
Clinton body count, a darkly absurd rumor alleging that the
Clintons have had multiple close associates murdered the best known
data point in this fantasy was always Vince Foster, a
longtime friend and colleague of the Clintons who worked in
the White House before taking his own life in nineteen
ninety three. After Foster's death, the allegation that the Clintons
(19:49):
had something to do with it gained so much traction
that it was discussed in congressional hearings. One of the
theories that sprouted from Foster's death was that he and
Hillary Clinton have been having an affair, but there were
many other theories too, and between nineteen ninety three and
nineteen ninety seven, at least five official investigations looked into them.
(20:10):
Each one came to the same conclusion, including one led
by independent counsel Ken Starr.
Speaker 7 (20:17):
The Whitewater Special prosecutor. Kenneth Starr issued his final report
today on the death of former White House Deputy Council
Vince Foster and reaffirmed that Foster was depressed and committed suicide.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
Bill Clinton had famously bragged on the campaign trail that
a vote for him was a vote for Hillary too.
Speaker 11 (20:35):
I always say that that my slogan might well be
a buy one, get one free.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
Unfortunately for Hillary that seemed to mean that when it
came to scandal, she and her husband would also be
treated as a pair. During just the first two years
of Clinton's presidency, Hillary was implicated in Troopergate, which you've
heard about, Travelgate, in which Hillary was accused of funneling
government business to a travel agent friend, and Whitewater, which
(21:01):
concerned an Arkansas real estate deal for which she spent
four hours in front of a federal grand jury.
Speaker 10 (21:06):
The White House today had little comment on the first
lady's grand jury appear runs, other than to say she
answered all questions and was not told she'd have to return.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
When reports first surfaced about her husband's affair with a
former White House intern, Hillary Clinton blamed a vast right
wing conspiracy.
Speaker 14 (21:22):
I mean, look at the very people who were involved
in this. They have popped up in other settings. The
great story here for anybody willing to find it and
write about it and explain it is this vast right
wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since
the day he announced for president.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
At the time, independent counsel Ken Starr dismissed the idea
as nonsense, while the media portrayed Clinton as the woman
who cried conspiracy won too many times.
Speaker 8 (21:54):
The first lady salvo appears to be a favorite Clinton tactic,
fired off in almost every scandal, from Jennifer Flowers to
Paula Jones to Whitewater.
Speaker 11 (22:03):
Instead of his Clinton raising her antenna and circling the
country to find the source of our problems, she can
look at her own family and she'll find them right there.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
The problem for the Clintons was that some of what
they were accused of turned out to be true. No,
they didn't have a kill list, but Bill Clinton did
have extramarital affairs that he consistently lied about. Also, the
Clinton's attempts to damage control in the face of scandal
often caused them to make decisions that looked suspicious and secretive.
Speaker 12 (22:35):
I mean, both things ended up being true. There was
an affair with Monkolinsky, and there was a best right
wing conspiracy. So I think people said this is like
a delusional type of defense, and that she had possibly
deluded herself into thinking that the Lensky affair didn't happen.
But what got lost there was that both things were true.
(22:56):
Just because the allegations of the affair ended up being correct.
The way that all that was dug up was part
of the wrongful scheme.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
Back in nineteen ninety four, Rockets started working on a
biography of Hillary Clinton. His friends all assumed it would
be a devastating takedown, but Brock found himself writing something
much milder. The book was almost generous to Clinton. Rock
called her intelligent, talented, ambitious, and very determined. After the
(23:27):
book was published, Brock found himself getting uninvited from dinner
parties and not getting booked by right wing radio hosts
like g Gordon Lyddy and Oliver North. This cold reception
wounded Brock and convinced him that his friends on the
right were just as unscrupulous about the truth as his
enemies on the left. Eventually, Brock came to regret his
(23:49):
work for the Arkansas Project, and in a piece for
Esquire magazine titled Confessions of a right Wing hit Man,
he described himself as having been bought and paid for
by the conservative movement. David Brock, the road warrior of
the right, is dead, he declared.
Speaker 12 (24:05):
Part of what happened was I felt complicit in the lying,
the separation that I made from the right wing, and
the conversion that I had wasn't really around ideology, it
was around ethics.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
In subsequent years, Brock made the most of his status
as an x right wing defector. In two thousand and four,
he founded Media Matters, a liberal watchdog group that scrutinized
the conservative media ecosystem. Brock had once been a part of.
That ecosystem had changed dramatically since the early nineties, mostly
due to the advent of Fox News. But when Hillary
(24:39):
Clinton became the focus of the Benghazi scandal, Brock got
deja vu.
Speaker 12 (24:44):
The phrase that was used was Hillary lied, four died,
and so the idea that Hillary was a liar, she
covered things up. That was one of the through lines
in Benghazi. They were convinced that Hillary was hiding something,
going back to the Whitewater scandal and Vince Foster and
all the other things. It had those same themes. And
(25:06):
then the fact that every allegation kept getting knocked down, debunked,
and disproven didn't seem to slow it down. The facts
didn't matter, and it was hard to cut through the
fog of disinformation.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Brock was ready to deploy Media Matters as a countervailing force.
In twenty thirteen, the website dedicated a huge percentage of
its resources to monitoring Fox News' coverage of Benghazi. Their
goal was to delegitimize Fox's coverage in the eyes of
mainstream journalists who might otherwise feel compelled to match it
or amplify.
Speaker 12 (25:41):
It, because you figure, you can't really change Fox itself,
but you could change how others viewed Fox so that
what happened with Whitewater didn't happen with Benghazi, that the
whole rest of the media became obsessed with it as well,
and then yeah, you'd never get out from under it.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Do you remember what your instructions were to your team
at Media Matters in terms of how to cover Benghazi.
Speaker 12 (26:05):
The main thing was, there's nothing too small to address.
Every minor charge, any minor misrepresentation could end up mushrooming
and becoming quote a thing. So we had to be
very careful and listen very carefully, and be very attentive
(26:28):
to every sort of jot and tittle of what they
were saying, because you never knew what would get traction.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Just nine days after delivering her congressional testimony, Hillary Clinton said,
farewell to the State Department.
Speaker 10 (26:44):
And I hope that you will continue to make yourselves,
make me and make our country proud. Thank you all,
and God bless you.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
But no one expected her to leave the spotlight for long.
With the twenty sixteen election coming up, it was widely
understood that Clinton would soon start running for the Democratic nomination,
and so Clinton's handling of ben Gotta remained in the news,
where the scandal would go on to sprout yet another
new head, and this time there would be whistleblowers.
Speaker 4 (27:18):
My husband and I were in Parpagnon, France. We were
right on the Mediterranean, and I awoke to my cell
phone with a big headline US ambassador murdered in Benghazi.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
This is Victoria Tunsing. She's a lawyer who served in
the Justice Department during the Reagan administration before going into
private practice and making herself the go to attorney for
various Republican causes. Tunsing and her husband, a fellow lawyer
named Joe Degeneva, became media stars during the nineties as
legal commentators. In nineteen ninety eight, the Washington Post reported
(27:57):
that the couple had appeared on TV or in news
stories talking about the Clinton Lewinsky scandal more than three
hundred times in one month.
Speaker 4 (28:05):
We have tapes where her voice to Lynda Tripp is
saying I had a sexual relationship, and most importantly, people
asked me to lie about it. Here is one more
person saying the president lied to me.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
After the Benghazi attack, Tunsen got a phone call that
made her want to get involved.
Speaker 4 (28:24):
I got a call the next day from a good
friend who I was supposed to meet in Paris, and
he says, I can't do it. These are my friends
who were murdered in Benghazi.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
According to Tunsing, her friend, a former lawyer. The CIA
then told her something she never forgot.
Speaker 4 (28:41):
He said, the government is lying to you. What they're
saying happened did not happen.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
When Tunsing got back to Washington, she put out a
call on Capitol Hill saying she was willing to work
pro bono on behalf of anyone involved in the Benghazi story.
Speaker 4 (28:56):
About a week later, I get a phone call, we
have a client for you to represent, and I find
out the person that needed representation was the DCM, called
the Deputy Chief of Mission, the number two person in
the embassy.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
The Deputy Chief of Mission in Tripoli was Greg Hicks.
You first heard from him in episode three when he
was trying to reach Chris Stevens by phone as the
attack in Benghazi was unfolding. Later, when Hicks returned to
the United States, he was asked to step down from
his position in Libya. He agreed, but when he started
looking for another job at the State Department, he found
(29:34):
that no one seemed interested in working with him.
Speaker 3 (29:37):
I walked the halls of the State Department looking for
a job. I would get an interview and there would
always be sad eyes, and they would listen and say,
you really have a great career. You've done a lot
of good things, and we could certainly use you in
this job, but we have another candidate. I'm sorry, and
you know, a couple of months later, I would look
(29:58):
at the available jobs list and it would still be open.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Hicks suspected that higher ups in the State Department were
blocking him from getting the jobs he was applying for.
He didn't know why exactly, but as far as as
he could figure, his problems could be traced back to
an incident involving a Republican Congressman, Jason Chaffits. This gets
slightly convoluted, so bear with me. Chafits was investigating Benghazi
(30:22):
as a member of the House Oversight Committee. Roughly a
month after the attack, he traveled to Libya's capital to
see the US embassy with his own eyes. Because of
Chaefitz's role in the House investigation, the State Department sent
one of its lawyers to sit in on all of
his conversations with embassy officials, but when Hicks took chafits
to meet with the local CIA station chief, the State
(30:45):
Department lawyer was not allowed to join because he didn't
have the necessary security clearance. Afterwards, Hicks says he received
a phone call from Hillary Clinton's chief of staff, Cheryl Mills,
who was well known as a loyal, longtime associate of
the Clintons.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
She spoke for This is Clinton in many circumstances, so
everyone in the department knew that if Cheryl Mills was calling,
you set up straight and listened very carefully, because something
is going to be imparted to you. I was shaking
(31:21):
in my boots.
Speaker 1 (31:23):
According to Hicks, Mills wanted to know what had happened
during Chaefitz's briefing with the CIA station chief, and though
Hicks says she never explicitly said, she was angry at
him for allowing the briefing to take place without the
State Department. Lawyer Hicks had no doubt she was furious.
Speaker 3 (31:40):
It was in the tone of her voice. She was very,
very upset, and so in my view, this was a
concern that Jason Chafitz may have gained information that would
be released into the public debate leading up to the
(32:00):
presidential election. That is my interpretation of what was going on.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
Later, when Hicks was back in Washington and struggling to
find a new position in the State Department, he thought
back to that phone call with Clinton's chief of staff
and concluded that it was the reason he was now
being blacklisted. Hicks thought he had marked himself in Clinton's
mind as someone who wasn't a team player, someone who
couldn't be counted on to defend the administration when called
(32:31):
to do so.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
I became to think that all of this was being
driven from Hillary Clinton's perspective, even though she was out
of the administration by then, but also by the Obama administration.
They were afraid of me, and then they were creating
even greater fears in my own mind that I was
a threat to them, and I felt they were a
threat to me. I absolutely felt they were a threat
(32:54):
to me. It just becomes so negative in your own
mind that what can I do? Everything I do, I'm
being squashed like a bug. And on top of that,
by this time, I also was beginning to believe that
I was under surveillance. Over time, as I was walking
(33:17):
my dog at night, I noticed that there was constantly
a truck park at the end of my cul de
sac with the lights on point that at my house,
and I was like, well, where did that truck come from?
Speaker 13 (33:29):
And what's he doing here?
Speaker 3 (33:32):
And so you begin to have tricks.
Speaker 13 (33:35):
Played in your mind.
Speaker 3 (33:36):
I don't know whether that was surveillance or not, but
I came.
Speaker 13 (33:41):
To believe that I was under surveillance.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
Hicks's new lawyer, Victoria Tunsing, wasn't surprised by her client's experience.
Speaker 4 (33:49):
This is what they do. Democrats have no problem doing
in a whistleblower. The whistleblower they don't like, they kill.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
Tonsing could personally relate to Hicks's fears. Back in nineteen
ninety eight, when she and her husband were appearing on
TV to talk about the Clinton Lewinsky scandal. They came
to believe the White House was targeting them.
Speaker 4 (34:09):
To when my husband and I were speaking out a
lot about the Clintons. They hired a private detective to
find out anything about us, but they couldn't find anything.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
At the time, Tunsing's husband made a similar claim during
an interview on Meet the Press.
Speaker 7 (34:26):
Deputies, Republican attorney Joe Degeneva, a commentator who defends Starr,
says he was told he's being investigated too.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
That is truly a frightening, frightening development. It was a
spectacular enough charge that the White House felt compelled to respond.
Speaker 7 (34:40):
You don't retain private investigators that go Snooper ran about prosecutors,
reporters or Joe Dejenneva.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Now, at the height of the Bengazi scandal, Tunsing's client
Greg Hicks, also suspected he was being watched, and as
he explained to me, the person he was thinking about
was Vince Foster. Did you fear for your life?
Speaker 13 (35:04):
I did when the surveillance started. I was very concerned.
Speaker 3 (35:08):
The Vince Foss story was well known. I knew of
what had happened to him, and I was concerned that
that I might be on a list for elimination.
Speaker 13 (35:21):
I was literally afraid from my life.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
You get to a point where just you become desperate,
and so at this point I felt my only way
out was to come forward and testify.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
And so in May of twenty thirteen, after more than
twenty five years as a State Department employee with no
public profile, Greg Hicks stepped into the spotlight. By this point,
Fox News had spent two weeks talking about the anonymous
whistleblowers getting ready to come out against the State Department.
As Hicks's representative, Victoria Tunsing made the most of the anticipation.
Speaker 15 (35:59):
Well, let me just tell you that, knowing the unclassified
information is, there are inconsistent facts with what the administer
has said.
Speaker 13 (36:10):
Can you sure any one of those with us?
Speaker 12 (36:12):
No, I can't be.
Speaker 4 (36:13):
I just can't, you know, be glad to come back here.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
But in early May it was announced that the House
Oversight Committee would hold a hearing to interview Hicks and
three others. Among them was a former marine in the
State Department's Bureau of Counter Terrorism, who conveniently was being
represented by Victoria Tunsing's husband. At Fox News, the emergence
of the whistleblowers was treated with unrestrained excitement.
Speaker 6 (36:37):
Well, guess what, there's four whistleblowers now.
Speaker 10 (36:39):
Who say that they have new information about Benghazi and
what exactly happened that night and the county is.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
The big ticket items expected from Hicks centered on two
separate points. First that the US military didn't do everything
it could to help the Americans in Benghazi, and second
that Hicks knew it was a terrorist attack immediately, even
as the Obama administration was going on about an anti
Islamic video. Tunsing promised fireworks on heraldo at large, she
(37:09):
and her husband and delivered what was essentially a promo
for their client's testimony.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
This purported testimony is a game changer. Is it fair
to say that your clients will debunk the notion that
the scurreless anti Muslim video is what precipitated the violence
in Benghazi without a doubt, without a doubt.
Speaker 4 (37:32):
This is cover up, one oh one, without a doubt.
That's why we got involved.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
Greg Hicks told me that having an advocate as aggressive
as Victoria Tunsing made him feel less afraid.
Speaker 3 (37:44):
It was a big watershed when I made the decision
to go forward and be a whistleblower, and with Victoria
as my attorney. Victoria is such a confident person in
such an accomplished lawyer that I just began to feel safer,
and I began to feel better that I was on
the right track, that I was doing the right thing.
(38:07):
She was instrumental in respect during my own natural self confidence.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
I asked Hicks if he ever worried that associating himself
with Tunsing, with her long record of anti Clinton activism,
would undermine his credibility as a witness. He told me
he had barely thought about it, even if others did.
Speaker 9 (38:26):
To an extent, I am fascinated by the sudden appearance
in the Benghazi story of Joseph Degeneva and Victoria Tensing,
who were two of the real stars of the anti
Clinton legal community in the nineteen nineties. When you want
to keep a scandal ginned up, you go to the pros.
Speaker 1 (38:41):
Eventually, in the days leading up to the whistleblower hearing,
Fox News built up the anticipation, much like they did
with Clinton's testimony in January.
Speaker 5 (38:49):
It was a well guarded secret. But we now know
the identities of the ben Ghazi whistleblowers, So will we
finally get answers about what happened?
Speaker 1 (38:58):
We have nuans Even Alison Camarada, the reluctant weekend host
of Fox and Friends was excited to hear the whistleblower's account.
Speaker 6 (39:05):
I thought, ooh good, this will be interesting. Like now
I'm going to hear what happened.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
Finally, the hearing had come to order. Greg Hicks test
to fight in front of the Oversight Committee on Wednesday,
May eighth, twenty thirteen. The hearing was titled Benghazi Exposing
Failure and Recognizing Courage. Hicks was billed as the star witness.
Speaker 3 (39:31):
I'm glad my bladder was much stronger in those days
because I literally sat in the same chair for six
and a half hours.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
In his opening statement, Hicks spent a full half hour
recounting his experience on the night of the attack. Under questioning,
he expressed his belief that if military planes had been
sent to Benghazi that night, it was possible they could
have deterred the mortar attack on the CIA annex. Hicks
also described his reaction when he saw Susan Rice on
the Sunday shows, saying the attack had grown spontaneously out
(40:03):
of a protest.
Speaker 3 (40:04):
I was stunned, my jaw dropped, and I was embarrassed.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
There was one detail that stood out from the rest
of Hicks's testimony. It had to do with a decision
made on the night of the attack by the US
military's Central Command for Africa AFRICAM for short. Hicks testified
that a team of four Special Forces officers based in
Tripoli had been ready to get on a plane to Benghazi,
only to be told by someone at AFRICAM not to go.
Speaker 3 (40:36):
Now.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
Once again, this gets a little tricky, but as you
may recall, one team of agents from Tripoli did fly
to Benghazi during the attack. In fact, one of them
was killed at the CIA Annex. The team Hicks was
talking about in his testimony was separate. They were getting
ready to fly to Benghazi much later, closer to six
a m. After the attack was essentially over. But Hicks
(40:59):
saw the decision to keep them in Tripoli as a
grave mistake. As he put it, there was every reason
to continue to believe that our personnel were in danger.
Here's how Congressman Jason Chafitz asked about afrikam's decision to
hold back the Special Forces in Tripoli.
Speaker 7 (41:16):
How did the personnel react at being told to stand down?
Speaker 16 (41:21):
They were furious. Well, I will quote Lieutenant Colonel Gibson.
He said, this is the first time in my career
that a diplomat has more balls than somebody in the military.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
Hicks himself never used the phrase stand down order, and
he told me that he never thought the term was accurate.
But during the hearing, Republicans used the phrase repeatedly.
Speaker 3 (41:44):
Where'd the standown order come from?
Speaker 1 (41:46):
I believe it came from, and Hicks did not correct them.
Speaker 16 (41:50):
Either Africom or South Africa, now I understanding is a general.
Speaker 1 (41:53):
When the hearing ended, Hicks felt like he had done
his part to bring the truth about Benghazi to the public.
Speaker 12 (41:59):
So with that, this hearing is closed, but this investigation
is not over.
Speaker 3 (42:06):
I remember walking out of the ray Burn Building feeling
like the weight of the world had lifted from my shoulders.
I felt very good about what I'd said and about
how the hearing had transpired.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
On MSNBC, the verdict was that Hicks's testimony had not
revealed much in the way of new informations. Fox News
was all geared up today to really capture the outrage.
It's been endless politicization, and today this was their blockbuster,
this was their watergate, and by two o'clock people were
like changing the chance but on Fox News, the big
(42:40):
takeaway was stand down order.
Speaker 3 (42:43):
They were told to stand down. What do you mean
stand down? They're invading the place.
Speaker 10 (42:47):
Who told the military to stand down?
Speaker 3 (42:49):
You're telling people to stand down?
Speaker 12 (42:51):
You have no idea when.
Speaker 3 (42:52):
The attack ends.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
Media matters. David Brock's website found that in the weeks
after Hicks's testimony, Fox's primetime programming mentioned the standown order
at least eighty five times. It didn't matter that the
team of Special Forces officers that was held back in
Tripoli wouldn't have gotten to bend Gaussie and time to
stand up to anyone. The fact that they could have
been sent and weren't was enough. Hicks's testimony reinforced an
(43:18):
idea that had been circulating in various forms since the
attack that the Obama administration had made a deliberate decision
not to rescue Chris Stevens and the others. Among the
Fox News anchors who talked about the standdown order was
Allison Camarata.
Speaker 5 (43:36):
Right, So, I mean a shocking revelation. That was a
particularly stunning moment on Wednesday at the hearings, because either
we don't have contingency plans in place, I mean, I
think it is an American's assumption that the reason that
we have military stationed around the world is for events
like this, that when something terrible is going down, that we,
(43:56):
in a moment's notice, can at least attempt a rescue
of our fellowtail.
Speaker 1 (44:03):
This is Camarata on Fox and Friends Weekend, raising questions
about the standdown order the Sunday after Hicks's hearing.
Speaker 5 (44:10):
Right now, the next question, of course, by the way,
should have been, or is now today, who gave that
order to stand down? Who was it that said don't
send help to our people who were under attack?
Speaker 6 (44:23):
Of who gave the stand down order? Became the catchphrase
that just kept on giving. It embodied all of it,
the outrage, the tragedy, the mystery. It just had it all.
It never got old. And I was very interested in
who gave the standown order. That was something that really
(44:46):
intrigued me and piqued my interest, and I wanted to
get to the bottom of it. And then during the
testimony it's clear that there was no standdown order given,
and that comes up and people debunk it, but it
never went away. At Fox, it was too valuable to
(45:09):
get rid of because that kept the viewers watching.
Speaker 1 (45:14):
The phrase standdown order went through a strange evolution over
the course of the Benghazi scandal. It was almost like
it got detached from any one specific situation and started
getting used to refer to a bunch of different decisions
that were made on the night of the attack. For instance,
you might recall from episode three that the Benghazi CIA
(45:34):
station chief hesitated to send his men to the diplomatic
compound when they first got the distress call, and that
eventually they overruled him and just took off. Fox News
was calling that a standdown order as early as October
of twenty twelve. Separately, there was the decision not to
send jets to Benghazi from Italy because it would have
taken them too long to get there. That was referred
(45:57):
to as a stand down order too. After Hicks's testimony,
the phrase started being used in reference to that six
a m decision in Tripoli, and against the backdrop of
the other stand down orders, it just kind of tract.
Speaker 13 (46:13):
And I'm curistic.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
Were you conscious of at the time that there was
a sort of conflation happening around this term stand doown order?
Speaker 6 (46:21):
You are way overthinking this. Once you have a handy slogan,
don't try to dissect it too closely, Like, all you
need to know is that somebody gave a standown order.
And maybe it's the CIA, maybe it's Hillary Clinton, maybe
it was President Obama, maybe it was Africom. But there
(46:44):
was a standown order. So the fact that it morphed
from one to the other, that's just a little consequence.
You just got to keep repeating it and repeating it
and repeating it.
Speaker 5 (46:55):
Right, There's still so many questions. I mean, who gave
the order to stand down instead of trying to help?
And now who is looking for the perpetrators? Why hasn't
anyone been prosecuted?
Speaker 6 (47:06):
Where is the justice?
Speaker 5 (47:07):
We allow this to happen without justice? Is that who
we are now as a country when we have this.
Speaker 1 (47:12):
Camarata's first show after the hearing coincided with Mother's Day.
To mark the occasion, Camarada's producers played a clip from
an interview with Patricia Smith, the mother of the IT
specialist who was killed in Benghazi, alongside Ambassador Stevens.
Speaker 8 (47:27):
I want to wish Hillary a happy Mother's Day. She's
got her child. I don't have mine because of her.
I know that In the.
Speaker 1 (47:35):
Months after the attack, Smith appeared on Fox News multiple
times speaking out about her son and her frustration with
those she believed were responsible for his death.
Speaker 8 (47:45):
But the government doesn't care. They don't care about us
people at all. All they have to do is tell
me what happened, and I would have gone away, but
they didn't even bother. I was an unimportant person and
now I'm an unimportant person that doesn't have a child
for Mother's Day, and I'm I feel it so deeply.
(48:06):
They cannot understand how I feel.
Speaker 5 (48:10):
That's heartbreaking, heartbreaking to hear on Mother's Day. But obviously
the victims' families are not satisfied and they want more answers.
Speaker 6 (48:17):
Her grief was raw. Her grief was raw, and it
never got less raw. She just became this kind of
go to victim. I guess that Fox could keep exploiting
and holding up as this personification of grief, and I
(48:38):
found it really uncomfortable. And I did hope that she
got answers, you know, I mean, I could never have
said on the air, Wow, we're really exploiting her. I
just think that I did the best I could.
Speaker 3 (48:57):
Was there a distance for you internally about that? And
did that contribute to your decision to leave?
Speaker 8 (49:02):
Oh?
Speaker 6 (49:02):
Every day, every day, But I mean it wasn't just Benghazi.
I mean every day I wrestled with being at Fox,
and I tried to leave many times, and Roger blocked me,
and I felt trapped. I still needed my paycheck. I'm
tap dancing pretty hard on the air, and I'm trying
to preserve my integrity. But you know, some days were
(49:26):
harder than others. I mean, it's just really unpleasant to
be part of that outrage factory. I didn't like it,
and I tried in my own meager ways to either
make it not an outrage factory, or to present a
different position, or to be the voice of reason, or
to add levity. I tried to deploy lots of different
(49:46):
coping mechanisms, and then at some point right after this,
they just ran out.
Speaker 1 (49:54):
We'll be right back. Camarata left Fox News in March
of twenty fourteen. At her new job at CNN, she
doesn't remember being asked to do any Benghazi coverage. The
fact that re a broader reluctance on the part of
the mainstream media to treat the attack as a scandal.
(50:15):
That's not to say that Fox was the only outlet
covering it. In just the month following the attack, The
New York Times put it on its front page eighteen times. Meanwhile,
two of the broadcast networks, CBS and ABC were so
eager to get in on the action that they ended
up airing stories that had to be retracted or substantially corrected.
Speaker 15 (50:34):
The most important thing to every person at sixty minutes
is the truth, and the truth is we made a mistake.
Speaker 1 (50:43):
Still, by far, the most expansive coverage of Benghazi came
from Fox News and other conservative outlets. According to David Brock,
this was a result of how much the media had
changed since the nineties and how much more awareness there
was and the part of mainstream journalists about how scandal
laundering worked.
Speaker 12 (51:01):
My sense of it was by that point, because Fox
News was beating the drums so hard on it, it
had the inverse effect, and there was more skepticism in
the main media about picking it up because it had
been such a Fox phenomenon, And so I think it
was very different than what went on in the nineties,
(51:23):
when the path to getting something from a place like
The Spectator onto CNN was much easier.
Speaker 1 (51:34):
Brock says that Benghazi was fueled by the same forces
and in many cases the same individuals that drove earlier
Clinton scandals like Whitewater and Troopergate.
Speaker 12 (51:45):
The Clinton scandals, in the end, in my opinion, end
up having very little to do with the details. You know,
I think there's a direct line from what happened in
the nineteen nineties to twenty sixteen, and there was always
something that was beyond just normal politics about the way
(52:07):
they went after the Clintons.
Speaker 1 (52:10):
What would you say was animating people like Victoria Tenzing.
Speaker 12 (52:14):
I can't say for her exactly, but I can say
that there was kind of a joy in the hunt.
I guess you could see that too, that they were
in times of triumph, deliriously happy when they were able
to score.
Speaker 1 (52:32):
It feels almost too pat to say the Bengazi scandal
was driven or propped up by a single news network,
like it shouldn't be possible for it to have been
so straightforward, And in fact, when Hillary Clinton was ensnared
in scandal much earlier in her career, it wasn't that
straightforward back then. In order for stories about Vince Foster
and Whitewater to gain traction, they needed to travel through
(52:56):
the media ecosystem from the margins into the mainstream. But
in twenty thirteen that wasn't necessary anymore. People like Victoria
Tunsing didn't need to engage in scandal laundering to make
an impact. All they had to do was get on
Fox News and they would immediately be heard by millions
of people who would then post about it on social media,
(53:18):
and they would be heard by Republican congressmen, who, when
they weren't appearing on Fox News themselves, could turn the
network's outrage into official action. In my interview with Tunsing,
I asked her if she felt like her client, Greg Hicks,
had gotten what he wanted out of his time as
a whistleblower.
Speaker 4 (53:35):
You often ask Greg how he feels, but that that's
not our practice of law. Really, So you know, is
your client still alive and is he working and is
he relatively happy? Is the criteria I use.
Speaker 1 (53:50):
Well, but if your goal was to sort of help
chip away at this person that you felt was lying
and had done a terrible job and to keep them
from attaining more power, you guys did pretty well at that.
Speaker 4 (54:03):
I thought, Yeah, Well, I mean, you know, if Greg
had really done a good job. He'd be vice president
is of company right now, and then you know that's
you can ask him how he feels about it. You know,
if he'd do it again, I think he'd say yes.
But you don't know. I found a patient, you know,
I was in the emergency room. I got a patient,
(54:25):
and he walked out of the emergency room. So that's
how I look at it.
Speaker 1 (54:30):
It's true that Hicks is not the vice president of
a company, but after his testimony, he did manage to
get a job working for Devin Nunez, one of the
Republican congressmen who most voraciously chased the Bengazi scandal. As
Hicks told me, he knew his days of the State
Department were over.
Speaker 3 (54:48):
I felt that I had faced pretty serious retaliation and pressure.
Ultimately that led to my retirement from the State Department,
and in August of twenty sixteen, when it looked quite
likely that missus Clinton was going to become president, and
I had no desire to ever work for her again.
Speaker 1 (55:09):
And yet Hi says he never hated the Clintons, and that,
in fact, after his testimony, he stopped believing that they
had placed him under surveillance or that they were ever
considering having him killed.
Speaker 3 (55:21):
It's hard to think that people are just evil. I
think that missus Clinton exercised very poor judgment in a
lot of instances over this incident. Beyond that, you know
Vince Foster, who knows kill lists. That seems far gone
(55:45):
to me. I've never actually seen a list of names.
Show me the names, give me the facts. Tell me
why why the Clintons would have had all these people killed.
Speaker 13 (55:58):
Explain that to me. I don't.
Speaker 3 (55:59):
I don't understand that there's a lot of hatred for
them out there from a lot of.
Speaker 13 (56:05):
People that's not me.
Speaker 1 (56:24):
On the next and final episode of Fiasco, the FBI
captures a Libyan man accused of helping plan the Bengazi attack,
while a congressional investigation surfaces a devastating revelation about Hillary
Clinton email gate.
Speaker 3 (56:39):
Hillary Clinton has some explaining to do.
Speaker 13 (56:42):
Hillary Clinton email mess This story is something for everyone.
Speaker 1 (56:47):
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 Prolog 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 Madelin Kaplan. Our researcher
(57:11):
was Francis Carr. Our score was composed by Dan English,
Joe Valley and Noah Hecht. Additional music by Nick Sylvester,
Billy Libby and Joel Saint Julian. Our theme song is
by Spatial Relations Audio mixed by Rob Buyers, Michael Raphael
and Johnny Vince Evans. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks
at Chips and y Copyright Council. Provided by Peter Yassi
(57:34):
at Yasi Butler PLC. Thanks to Archive dot Org, Hannah Groach, Begley,
Mark Thompson and Mark Zaid. Special thanks to Lubinari and
thank you for listening. Binge the entire season of Fiasco
(57:59):
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 pluss. Screibers can access
ad free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content
for all Pushkin podcasts
Pushkin previously on fiasco. A number of conservative media outlets
were particularly genda.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
This is a political cover up of some kind of
intelligence officials acknowledged they originally got it wrong.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
I know the Ghazi Annex chief personally, and he's a
decent man.
Speaker 4 (00:46):
The House Foreign Affairs Committee on Benghazi kicks off at
the top of the hour.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Hillary Clinton's painted apparently hit her head and had that concussion.
Speaker 5 (00:53):
I bet that we might never hear her testimony. She
doesn't want to answer the question.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
When Alison Camarada was an anchor on Fox News, she
talked about Benghazi a lot.
Speaker 5 (01:07):
For what's been called Benghazi Gate. There was a lack
of security at the US consulate in Benghazi, but who
is to blame for not beefing it up? Was the
administration just clueless or was there a cover up?
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Joining us among other things, it was just a good,
rich story with a seemingly endless stream of angles to explore.
Speaker 5 (01:26):
There were some mysteries embedded in Benghazi that needed to
be answered, so that gave it legs for sure.
Speaker 6 (01:33):
There were four dead.
Speaker 5 (01:34):
Americans and that is obviously something that resonated with our viewers,
and they wanted justice, and we could beat the drum
of justice.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
At the time, Camarada was one of the co hosts
of Fox and Friends Weekend. She ended up leaving the
network in twenty fourteen, and she's been public with her
criticisms of Fox News in the years since. But during
the months after the Benghazi attack, Camarada spent her weekend
mornings dutifully beating the drums of justice alongside her Fox colleagues.
Speaker 5 (02:06):
That Chris Stevens was saying, we're under attack, We're under attack,
please help, And of course nothing was done to help them.
Four Americans dead, and we need justice for this, so
on wins.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
According to Camarata, Fox's relentless emphasis on ben Ghazi came
directly from the network's founder and chief executive, Roger Ales.
Speaker 5 (02:27):
Sometimes at Fox, Roger got to be in his bonnet
over certain stories, and we would do them time and
again and again and again. Ben Gazzi's right at the
top of that list. I don't know that it was
some grand strategy from the get go, but I just
think that he did naturally lean towards outrage.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Ales didn't personally dictate Fox's coverage at all times, but
he didn't need to because his producers knew what he wanted.
Speaker 6 (02:56):
By the time you became an executive producer at Fox,
you could channel Roger. It wasn't hard Obama, bad Muslims,
bad Hillary, bad Republicans, good Democrats, crazy like it wasn't
rocket science.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Before he created Fox News in nineteen ninety six, Ayles
spent decades in conservative politics, serving as a campaign advisor
to Richard Nixon, Mitch McConnell, and George H. W. Bush. Later,
he was the executive producer of a short lived TV
talk show starring Rush limbar Ardys and gentleman Best Rush
(03:32):
bar From the beginning, Ayle's positioned Fox News as a
counterbalance to what he called the communist broadcasting system CBS
and the Clinton News Network CNN.
Speaker 7 (03:44):
Fox News channel fair and balanced, where news is going,
where news should be.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
But in its early days, Fox's conservative opinion shows like
The O'Reilly Factor were kept at arm's length from its
news division.
Speaker 7 (03:56):
Few broadcasts take any chances these days, and most are
very politically correct. Well, We're going to try to be different,
stimulating and a bit daring.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
It was only gradually that Fox's identity as a platform
for the right became more holistic By the time the
Bengazi attack happened, the network was producing a mix of commentary, activism,
and propaganda.
Speaker 8 (04:26):
Welcome into Fox and Friends.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Fox and Friends Weekend, where Camarato worked, aired every Saturday
and Sunday from six to ten am.
Speaker 6 (04:33):
Well, I always saw Fox and Friends' Weekend as quite
of a morning zoo of political talk. I mean, I
sometimes called it talk radio in a skirt. I mean,
it was a variety show. It was mixing in the
really incendiary political stuff, but not for too long. We
(04:55):
would immediately in a toss, turn to and coming up
breaking news. Subway sandwiches. Foot long subs are only eleven
and a half inches long.
Speaker 5 (05:07):
Subway sandwiches foot long subs are only eleven and a
half inches long.
Speaker 6 (05:14):
I know, everyone, I fill your outage.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
There's gonna be Camarata says that despite being an anchor,
she didn't have much control over the actual content of
Fox and Friends. Because it aired so early in the morning,
a small team of producers would always work overnight to
build the next day's show.
Speaker 6 (05:33):
By the time I got in, there was already a rundown.
It was a built show. When I came in, I
was busy. You know, I was going and I was
getting into my outfit. I was getting into hair and makeup,
and then I had like probably from five fifteen till
I had to run to the set at five point
fifty to get miked up to dive in and study.
(05:56):
You know, that's not enough time. It just wasn't built
to ever do real research. It was basically headlines, talking points,
and you know, mixing it up.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
In January of twenty Thirteenillary Clinton was set to testify
before Congress about Benghazi for the first time. As it happened,
she was planning to leave the Obama administration about a
week later, which meant that her Benghazi testimony would be
one of her last public appearances as Secretary of State.
Speaker 5 (06:26):
While the White House preparing today for Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton to testify tomorrow regarding the deadly September eleventh
attack on our consulate in Libya, Secretary.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Clinton was there was there a lot of anticipation for
her appearance?
Speaker 6 (06:38):
Oh god, yes, I mean part of the Fox model
is just constant build up. It's teasing.
Speaker 5 (06:45):
Republicans are expected to grill her about what she knew
about the attack and when she knew it. Some have
charged that the administration deliberately tried to hide that the
ambush was the work of terrorists linked to al Qaeda.
Speaker 6 (06:57):
It's teasing what's going to happen tomorrow. It's teasing what's
going to happen this week in front of committee. It's
teasing Hillary Clinton's appearance. And that's not new what.
Speaker 8 (07:11):
She knew when she knew it.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Is this going to get answered today?
Speaker 2 (07:14):
She has had time to prepare, but she has an
awful lot to answer for.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
She's one of the top candidates for president in twenty sixteen,
so she can either help move on or she could
have a Susan roy Sunday Show moment.
Speaker 9 (07:24):
And not.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
The committee will come to order. Clinton appeared in front
of both the Senate and the House back to back.
She started her day shortly after nine am with a
prepared statement in which she took responsibility for making changes
of the State Department to prevent another tragedy.
Speaker 6 (07:43):
As I have.
Speaker 10 (07:43):
Said many times, I take responsibility, and nobody is more
committed to getting this right.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
For the most part, Clinton's questioners were fairly cordial.
Speaker 8 (07:53):
Thank you, Adam, Secretary, and wonderful to see you in
good health, and as combative as ever.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
There were two points that kept coming up over and
over again, and they generated the most intense moments of
the day. The first had to do with a case
cable sent to the State Department with Ambassador Stevens's approval
about a month before the attack. The cable had warned
about an increase in violent incidents in Benghazi and the
rise of anti American militias. Republicans wanted to know why
(08:25):
Clinton hadn't personally reviewed the cable and weighed in that
had I been president at the time and I found
that you did not read the cables from Benghazi, you
did not read the cables from bessaror Stevens, I would
have relieved you of your post.
Speaker 6 (08:38):
I think it's inexcusable.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
The thing is.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
The second point of focus was on the Obama administration's
original explanation of the Bengazi attack as a protest gone wrong.
A Republican senator from Wisconsin wanted to know why Clinton
hadn't immediately called the survivors of the attack to find
out whether or not there really had been a protest
that night.
Speaker 10 (08:57):
We were misled that there was supposedly protests, and then something
sprang out of that, and assault sprang out of that.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
Clinton, who up to this point had appeared even keeled
and in decent spirits, suddenly changed her tones, and they didn't.
Speaker 10 (09:10):
With all due respect, the fact is we had four
dead Americans.
Speaker 6 (09:14):
Was it because of a protest?
Speaker 10 (09:15):
Or was it because of guys out for a walk
when night, or decide they'd go kill some Americans?
Speaker 6 (09:19):
What difference at this point does it make?
Speaker 10 (09:22):
It is our job to figure out what happened and
do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Senator Now, honestly, this became the SoundBite of the day.
On the big broadcast networks, Clinton's testimony was described as
fiery and riveting.
Speaker 7 (09:38):
Today, this woman who has traveled the world as America's
top diplomat, came to the Hill ready for a fight,
and her.
Speaker 11 (09:46):
Long awaited appearance before Congress was remarkable.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Harrying Hasso questions all day.
Speaker 12 (09:51):
Clinton was also the political pro massaging big egos, sidestepping
attacks when she could when she couldn't, giving as good.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
As she got.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
But on Fox News, the clip of Clinton saying what
difference does it make? Was played as callous indifference toward
those who lost their lives in Bengazi.
Speaker 7 (10:10):
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's monumental gaff that may haunt
her for the rest of her political career.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Allison Camarada covered Quinton's testimony as a fill in host
on the regular weekday edition of Fox and.
Speaker 6 (10:21):
Friends mad As Hill.
Speaker 5 (10:23):
Secretary Clinton fires back at Congress in a battle over
ben Ghazi.
Speaker 10 (10:27):
What difference at this point does itn't make?
Speaker 5 (10:31):
Well, this morning, we may have an answer for what
difference it makes, and it may include three more dead Americans.
You're going to want to hear this, all right.
Speaker 6 (10:38):
Fox really was good at sloganeering and catchphrases and coming
up with a little outrage nugget to send viewers on
their way, So that one just came, you know, ready made.
They just zeroed in for days and days and weeks
and weeks on what difference does it make? As though
she was being callous, as though she was being cavalier. Basically,
(11:02):
they were trying to make it sound synonymous with who cares?
Speaker 10 (11:05):
What difference at this point does itn't make?
Speaker 13 (11:08):
It makes a lot of difference.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
You may notice Camarata uses the word they when talking
about Fox News. Part of the reason it might just
be that she doesn't work there anymore. But even at
the time, Camarada says she felt separate from the network
and not fully bought in, which I admit reminds me
of coming home in high school and telling my mom
it was my friends who had been smoking, not me.
(11:30):
But Camarada told me that she was never comfortable with
how her producers and co hosts talked about Bengazi, and
in particular, how they presented the Clinton sound bite. Over
the coming weeks. Camarada bristled at Fox's framing of what
she thought was an uncontroversial comment if she listened to
the whole thing, But Fox's producers often cut out right
(11:51):
after what difference at this point does it make?
Speaker 6 (11:53):
So they would end it right there instead of it
is our job to figure out what happened and do
everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again,
that's her next sentence, and they wouldn't always play that part.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Camarata decided to push back on air.
Speaker 5 (12:08):
Her point is that what is the label? What difference
does the label make? And her point, which then she
didn't answer, is where's the justice? Why hasn't it even
been prosecuted? We are our American was killed. They were
terrorists and had we gone.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
It was a quiet rebellion and pretty easy to miss
if you weren't looking for it. But Camarada told me
that every time she departed from the party line in
this way, she felt like she was risking her job.
Speaker 5 (12:35):
There was no winning that conversation with Roger. He had
his opinion, and you were supposed to sort of reflect
his opinion.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Looking back, Camarata describes Fox's Bengazi coverage as a kind
of feedback loop.
Speaker 5 (12:50):
There is a certain kind of self fulfilling prophecy when
it comes to outrage. We did train the audience to
become outraged.
Speaker 6 (12:57):
Often the scripts.
Speaker 5 (12:58):
Would say you'll be outraged right after a commercial. We
told people stick around for the outrage.
Speaker 6 (13:04):
We told them they would be outraged.
Speaker 5 (13:06):
We told them afterwards, were sure they are outraged, and
lo and behold, they came outraged.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
The right wing outrage machine was not invented by Fox News.
It had been around in various forms for decades, and
Hillary Clinton had long been one of its favorite targets. Now,
in the aftermath of the Benghazi attack, the machine was
about to kick into high gear. I'm Leon Nafok from
(13:31):
Prolog Projects and Pushkin Industries. This is fiasco Bengazi.
Speaker 4 (13:36):
He said, the government is lying to you. What they're
saying happened did not happen.
Speaker 5 (13:42):
Is the Obama administrations threatened Benghazi whistleblowers.
Speaker 13 (13:45):
I was literally afraid from my life.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
What do you mean, stand down?
Speaker 12 (13:48):
They're invading the place. Yeah. I think there's a direct
line from what happened in the nineteen nineties to twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
Episode five Greatest Hits, in which Benghazi transforms from an
Obama scandal into the ultimate Clinton scandal, as decades of
built up Clinton lore provide all parties with a roadmap,
a backstory, and a cudgel. We'll be right back. When
(14:19):
Hillary Clinton testified before Congress in January of twenty thirteen,
it was not her first time having to publicly address
a scandal. She had been fighting off various allegations ever
since her husband Bill first ran for president in nineteen
ninety two, long before Fox News even existed. The din
of controversy was a fact of life for the Clintons
(14:40):
and a source of endless frustration.
Speaker 12 (14:42):
Clinton was elected, and there were people in the right
wing who didn't accept that election as legitimate.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
This is David Brock. During the early days of Bill
Clinton's presidency. He was a young journalist working at a
conservative magazine called The American Spectator.
Speaker 12 (15:00):
And you know, in circles that I was in, they
were talking about impeaching him literally before he was even
sworn into office. So there was a machinery in place
to try to make that happen.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
As Brock tells it, the writing he did for The
American Spectator was part of an effort known internally as
the Arkansas Project. It was funded by a conservative billionaire
named Richard Mellen'scaife, and its purpose was to dig up
dirt on the Clintons from before they moved into the
White House.
Speaker 12 (15:30):
Anything was fair game. They were looking for anything they
could find that could help, at first to cause problems
for Clinton, and then it became more explicit mission to
get him out office.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Brock told me that at the time he genuinely thought
he was doing journalism, but he realized pretty quickly that
his patrons saw him more as a political operative, and
he embraced it. The outgoing message on Brock's answering machine
during Clinton's first term was I'm out trying to bring
down the president.
Speaker 12 (16:00):
That was the intention of the Arkansas project. It used
tactics of journalism, but it was more like political opposition
research without any scruples at all. It had no fealty
to facts or truth. If it was a myth that
could stick, that was fine. It was just to create
an atmosphere in which it was difficult for Clinton to
(16:23):
govern and to throw sand in the gears of any
progress that would be made under Clinton.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
In nineteen ninety three, Brock got a tip from a
major Republican donor. Apparently there were some Arkansas State troopers
who had served on Bill Clinton's security detail while he
was governor, and they had some salacious stories to tell
about what they'd seen.
Speaker 12 (16:45):
I went down to Arkansas. I spent hours and hours
debriefing the troopers. They were seemingly first hand witnesses to
these events.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
The troopers told Brock that they had helped then Governor
Clinton coordinate and cover up his extramarital.
Speaker 12 (17:01):
Affairs, basically being part of a political movement that wanted
to do damage to the Clintons. You know, I took
them at their word. I did not do a lot
of like checking beyond what they said.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
As Brock explained it to me, the main goal of
the story was to conjure the width of scandal so
that journalists in the mainstream media could pick up the scent.
The Spectator had a relatively modest circulation and they were
known to have an anti Clinton slant. But if they
could get coverage of the State Trooper story into a
more mainstream outlet, it would remove the air of bias
(17:38):
from the allegations and amplify the scandal to a massive audience.
Brock came to think of this process as scandal laundering.
Speaker 12 (17:47):
One of the goals that the Spectator was to try
to hook more established media onto some of our narratives.
You'd plant a seed and then it kind of grows
on all sorts of places, and by the time you're done,
it's on the evening news.
Speaker 4 (18:06):
This is CNN.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
When Brock was ready to go to press with his story,
but the State Troopers, the American Spectator made a point
of giving CNN a sneak peek.
Speaker 12 (18:16):
They went for it. They interviewed the troopers themselves the
day the piece was published, and the troopers were on
six o'clock evening news on CNN on a particular day
the story broke, Hilary Sawer.
Speaker 7 (18:29):
She told me, she said, I know who she is,
I know what she is here for get the whole
out of here.
Speaker 12 (18:34):
So it very quickly got into the bloodstream of the
mainstream media, which is what our goal was.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
The troopers say they helped Clinton pick up women up
to the day he left for Washington to become president.
The story became known as Troopergate. The scandal had been
duly laundered.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
One senior administration official complained that every time they have
to deny a new round of these kinds of allegations,
it gets harder.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Over the next few years, the American Spectator printed one
story after another suggesting that the Clintons were nothing less
than criminal masterminds.
Speaker 12 (19:08):
There were stories about Clinton being involved in drug grinning
out of an airport in Arkansas. There was some speculation
that the Clintons somehow were implicated in Vincent Foster's death,
which was a suicide, but was said to be something else.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
What Brock is referring to here is the so called
Clinton body count, a darkly absurd rumor alleging that the
Clintons have had multiple close associates murdered the best known
data point in this fantasy was always Vince Foster, a
longtime friend and colleague of the Clintons who worked in
the White House before taking his own life in nineteen
ninety three. After Foster's death, the allegation that the Clintons
(19:49):
had something to do with it gained so much traction
that it was discussed in congressional hearings. One of the
theories that sprouted from Foster's death was that he and
Hillary Clinton have been having an affair, but there were
many other theories too, and between nineteen ninety three and
nineteen ninety seven, at least five official investigations looked into them.
(20:10):
Each one came to the same conclusion, including one led
by independent counsel Ken Starr.
Speaker 7 (20:17):
The Whitewater Special prosecutor. Kenneth Starr issued his final report
today on the death of former White House Deputy Council
Vince Foster and reaffirmed that Foster was depressed and committed suicide.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
Bill Clinton had famously bragged on the campaign trail that
a vote for him was a vote for Hillary too.
Speaker 11 (20:35):
I always say that that my slogan might well be
a buy one, get one free.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
Unfortunately for Hillary that seemed to mean that when it
came to scandal, she and her husband would also be
treated as a pair. During just the first two years
of Clinton's presidency, Hillary was implicated in Troopergate, which you've
heard about, Travelgate, in which Hillary was accused of funneling
government business to a travel agent friend, and Whitewater, which
(21:01):
concerned an Arkansas real estate deal for which she spent
four hours in front of a federal grand jury.
Speaker 10 (21:06):
The White House today had little comment on the first
lady's grand jury appear runs, other than to say she
answered all questions and was not told she'd have to return.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
When reports first surfaced about her husband's affair with a
former White House intern, Hillary Clinton blamed a vast right
wing conspiracy.
Speaker 14 (21:22):
I mean, look at the very people who were involved
in this. They have popped up in other settings. The
great story here for anybody willing to find it and
write about it and explain it is this vast right
wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since
the day he announced for president.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
At the time, independent counsel Ken Starr dismissed the idea
as nonsense, while the media portrayed Clinton as the woman
who cried conspiracy won too many times.
Speaker 8 (21:54):
The first lady salvo appears to be a favorite Clinton tactic,
fired off in almost every scandal, from Jennifer Flowers to
Paula Jones to Whitewater.
Speaker 11 (22:03):
Instead of his Clinton raising her antenna and circling the
country to find the source of our problems, she can
look at her own family and she'll find them right there.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
The problem for the Clintons was that some of what
they were accused of turned out to be true. No,
they didn't have a kill list, but Bill Clinton did
have extramarital affairs that he consistently lied about. Also, the
Clinton's attempts to damage control in the face of scandal
often caused them to make decisions that looked suspicious and secretive.
Speaker 12 (22:35):
I mean, both things ended up being true. There was
an affair with Monkolinsky, and there was a best right
wing conspiracy. So I think people said this is like
a delusional type of defense, and that she had possibly
deluded herself into thinking that the Lensky affair didn't happen.
But what got lost there was that both things were true.
(22:56):
Just because the allegations of the affair ended up being correct.
The way that all that was dug up was part
of the wrongful scheme.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
Back in nineteen ninety four, Rockets started working on a
biography of Hillary Clinton. His friends all assumed it would
be a devastating takedown, but Brock found himself writing something
much milder. The book was almost generous to Clinton. Rock
called her intelligent, talented, ambitious, and very determined. After the
(23:27):
book was published, Brock found himself getting uninvited from dinner
parties and not getting booked by right wing radio hosts
like g Gordon Lyddy and Oliver North. This cold reception
wounded Brock and convinced him that his friends on the
right were just as unscrupulous about the truth as his
enemies on the left. Eventually, Brock came to regret his
(23:49):
work for the Arkansas Project, and in a piece for
Esquire magazine titled Confessions of a right Wing hit Man,
he described himself as having been bought and paid for
by the conservative movement. David Brock, the road warrior of
the right, is dead, he declared.
Speaker 12 (24:05):
Part of what happened was I felt complicit in the lying,
the separation that I made from the right wing, and
the conversion that I had wasn't really around ideology, it
was around ethics.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
In subsequent years, Brock made the most of his status
as an x right wing defector. In two thousand and four,
he founded Media Matters, a liberal watchdog group that scrutinized
the conservative media ecosystem. Brock had once been a part of.
That ecosystem had changed dramatically since the early nineties, mostly
due to the advent of Fox News. But when Hillary
(24:39):
Clinton became the focus of the Benghazi scandal, Brock got
deja vu.
Speaker 12 (24:44):
The phrase that was used was Hillary lied, four died,
and so the idea that Hillary was a liar, she
covered things up. That was one of the through lines
in Benghazi. They were convinced that Hillary was hiding something,
going back to the Whitewater scandal and Vince Foster and
all the other things. It had those same themes. And
(25:06):
then the fact that every allegation kept getting knocked down, debunked,
and disproven didn't seem to slow it down. The facts
didn't matter, and it was hard to cut through the
fog of disinformation.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Brock was ready to deploy Media Matters as a countervailing force.
In twenty thirteen, the website dedicated a huge percentage of
its resources to monitoring Fox News' coverage of Benghazi. Their
goal was to delegitimize Fox's coverage in the eyes of
mainstream journalists who might otherwise feel compelled to match it
or amplify.
Speaker 12 (25:41):
It, because you figure, you can't really change Fox itself,
but you could change how others viewed Fox so that
what happened with Whitewater didn't happen with Benghazi, that the
whole rest of the media became obsessed with it as well,
and then yeah, you'd never get out from under it.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Do you remember what your instructions were to your team
at Media Matters in terms of how to cover Benghazi.
Speaker 12 (26:05):
The main thing was, there's nothing too small to address.
Every minor charge, any minor misrepresentation could end up mushrooming
and becoming quote a thing. So we had to be
very careful and listen very carefully, and be very attentive
(26:28):
to every sort of jot and tittle of what they
were saying, because you never knew what would get traction.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Just nine days after delivering her congressional testimony, Hillary Clinton said,
farewell to the State Department.
Speaker 10 (26:44):
And I hope that you will continue to make yourselves,
make me and make our country proud. Thank you all,
and God bless you.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
But no one expected her to leave the spotlight for long.
With the twenty sixteen election coming up, it was widely
understood that Clinton would soon start running for the Democratic nomination,
and so Clinton's handling of ben Gotta remained in the news,
where the scandal would go on to sprout yet another
new head, and this time there would be whistleblowers.
Speaker 4 (27:18):
My husband and I were in Parpagnon, France. We were
right on the Mediterranean, and I awoke to my cell
phone with a big headline US ambassador murdered in Benghazi.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
This is Victoria Tunsing. She's a lawyer who served in
the Justice Department during the Reagan administration before going into
private practice and making herself the go to attorney for
various Republican causes. Tunsing and her husband, a fellow lawyer
named Joe Degeneva, became media stars during the nineties as
legal commentators. In nineteen ninety eight, the Washington Post reported
(27:57):
that the couple had appeared on TV or in news
stories talking about the Clinton Lewinsky scandal more than three
hundred times in one month.
Speaker 4 (28:05):
We have tapes where her voice to Lynda Tripp is
saying I had a sexual relationship, and most importantly, people
asked me to lie about it. Here is one more
person saying the president lied to me.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
After the Benghazi attack, Tunsen got a phone call that
made her want to get involved.
Speaker 4 (28:24):
I got a call the next day from a good
friend who I was supposed to meet in Paris, and
he says, I can't do it. These are my friends
who were murdered in Benghazi.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
According to Tunsing, her friend, a former lawyer. The CIA
then told her something she never forgot.
Speaker 4 (28:41):
He said, the government is lying to you. What they're
saying happened did not happen.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
When Tunsing got back to Washington, she put out a
call on Capitol Hill saying she was willing to work
pro bono on behalf of anyone involved in the Benghazi story.
Speaker 4 (28:56):
About a week later, I get a phone call, we
have a client for you to represent, and I find
out the person that needed representation was the DCM, called
the Deputy Chief of Mission, the number two person in
the embassy.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
The Deputy Chief of Mission in Tripoli was Greg Hicks.
You first heard from him in episode three when he
was trying to reach Chris Stevens by phone as the
attack in Benghazi was unfolding. Later, when Hicks returned to
the United States, he was asked to step down from
his position in Libya. He agreed, but when he started
looking for another job at the State Department, he found
(29:34):
that no one seemed interested in working with him.
Speaker 3 (29:37):
I walked the halls of the State Department looking for
a job. I would get an interview and there would
always be sad eyes, and they would listen and say,
you really have a great career. You've done a lot
of good things, and we could certainly use you in
this job, but we have another candidate. I'm sorry, and
you know, a couple of months later, I would look
(29:58):
at the available jobs list and it would still be open.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Hicks suspected that higher ups in the State Department were
blocking him from getting the jobs he was applying for.
He didn't know why exactly, but as far as as
he could figure, his problems could be traced back to
an incident involving a Republican Congressman, Jason Chaffits. This gets
slightly convoluted, so bear with me. Chafits was investigating Benghazi
(30:22):
as a member of the House Oversight Committee. Roughly a
month after the attack, he traveled to Libya's capital to
see the US embassy with his own eyes. Because of
Chaefitz's role in the House investigation, the State Department sent
one of its lawyers to sit in on all of
his conversations with embassy officials, but when Hicks took chafits
to meet with the local CIA station chief, the State
(30:45):
Department lawyer was not allowed to join because he didn't
have the necessary security clearance. Afterwards, Hicks says he received
a phone call from Hillary Clinton's chief of staff, Cheryl Mills,
who was well known as a loyal, longtime associate of
the Clintons.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
She spoke for This is Clinton in many circumstances, so
everyone in the department knew that if Cheryl Mills was calling,
you set up straight and listened very carefully, because something
is going to be imparted to you. I was shaking
(31:21):
in my boots.
Speaker 1 (31:23):
According to Hicks, Mills wanted to know what had happened
during Chaefitz's briefing with the CIA station chief, and though
Hicks says she never explicitly said, she was angry at
him for allowing the briefing to take place without the
State Department. Lawyer Hicks had no doubt she was furious.
Speaker 3 (31:40):
It was in the tone of her voice. She was very,
very upset, and so in my view, this was a
concern that Jason Chafitz may have gained information that would
be released into the public debate leading up to the
(32:00):
presidential election. That is my interpretation of what was going on.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
Later, when Hicks was back in Washington and struggling to
find a new position in the State Department, he thought
back to that phone call with Clinton's chief of staff
and concluded that it was the reason he was now
being blacklisted. Hicks thought he had marked himself in Clinton's
mind as someone who wasn't a team player, someone who
couldn't be counted on to defend the administration when called
(32:31):
to do so.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
I became to think that all of this was being
driven from Hillary Clinton's perspective, even though she was out
of the administration by then, but also by the Obama administration.
They were afraid of me, and then they were creating
even greater fears in my own mind that I was
a threat to them, and I felt they were a
threat to me. I absolutely felt they were a threat
(32:54):
to me. It just becomes so negative in your own
mind that what can I do? Everything I do, I'm
being squashed like a bug. And on top of that,
by this time, I also was beginning to believe that
I was under surveillance. Over time, as I was walking
(33:17):
my dog at night, I noticed that there was constantly
a truck park at the end of my cul de
sac with the lights on point that at my house,
and I was like, well, where did that truck come from?
Speaker 13 (33:29):
And what's he doing here?
Speaker 3 (33:32):
And so you begin to have tricks.
Speaker 13 (33:35):
Played in your mind.
Speaker 3 (33:36):
I don't know whether that was surveillance or not, but
I came.
Speaker 13 (33:41):
To believe that I was under surveillance.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
Hicks's new lawyer, Victoria Tunsing, wasn't surprised by her client's experience.
Speaker 4 (33:49):
This is what they do. Democrats have no problem doing
in a whistleblower. The whistleblower they don't like, they kill.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
Tonsing could personally relate to Hicks's fears. Back in nineteen
ninety eight, when she and her husband were appearing on
TV to talk about the Clinton Lewinsky scandal. They came
to believe the White House was targeting them.
Speaker 4 (34:09):
To when my husband and I were speaking out a
lot about the Clintons. They hired a private detective to
find out anything about us, but they couldn't find anything.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
At the time, Tunsing's husband made a similar claim during
an interview on Meet the Press.
Speaker 7 (34:26):
Deputies, Republican attorney Joe Degeneva, a commentator who defends Starr,
says he was told he's being investigated too.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
That is truly a frightening, frightening development. It was a
spectacular enough charge that the White House felt compelled to respond.
Speaker 7 (34:40):
You don't retain private investigators that go Snooper ran about prosecutors,
reporters or Joe Dejenneva.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Now, at the height of the Bengazi scandal, Tunsing's client
Greg Hicks, also suspected he was being watched, and as
he explained to me, the person he was thinking about
was Vince Foster. Did you fear for your life?
Speaker 13 (35:04):
I did when the surveillance started. I was very concerned.
Speaker 3 (35:08):
The Vince Foss story was well known. I knew of
what had happened to him, and I was concerned that
that I might be on a list for elimination.
Speaker 13 (35:21):
I was literally afraid from my life.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
You get to a point where just you become desperate,
and so at this point I felt my only way
out was to come forward and testify.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
And so in May of twenty thirteen, after more than
twenty five years as a State Department employee with no
public profile, Greg Hicks stepped into the spotlight. By this point,
Fox News had spent two weeks talking about the anonymous
whistleblowers getting ready to come out against the State Department.
As Hicks's representative, Victoria Tunsing made the most of the anticipation.
Speaker 15 (35:59):
Well, let me just tell you that, knowing the unclassified
information is, there are inconsistent facts with what the administer
has said.
Speaker 13 (36:10):
Can you sure any one of those with us?
Speaker 12 (36:12):
No, I can't be.
Speaker 4 (36:13):
I just can't, you know, be glad to come back here.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
But in early May it was announced that the House
Oversight Committee would hold a hearing to interview Hicks and
three others. Among them was a former marine in the
State Department's Bureau of Counter Terrorism, who conveniently was being
represented by Victoria Tunsing's husband. At Fox News, the emergence
of the whistleblowers was treated with unrestrained excitement.
Speaker 6 (36:37):
Well, guess what, there's four whistleblowers now.
Speaker 10 (36:39):
Who say that they have new information about Benghazi and
what exactly happened that night and the county is.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
The big ticket items expected from Hicks centered on two
separate points. First that the US military didn't do everything
it could to help the Americans in Benghazi, and second
that Hicks knew it was a terrorist attack immediately, even
as the Obama administration was going on about an anti
Islamic video. Tunsing promised fireworks on heraldo at large, she
(37:09):
and her husband and delivered what was essentially a promo
for their client's testimony.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
This purported testimony is a game changer. Is it fair
to say that your clients will debunk the notion that
the scurreless anti Muslim video is what precipitated the violence
in Benghazi without a doubt, without a doubt.
Speaker 4 (37:32):
This is cover up, one oh one, without a doubt.
That's why we got involved.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
Greg Hicks told me that having an advocate as aggressive
as Victoria Tunsing made him feel less afraid.
Speaker 3 (37:44):
It was a big watershed when I made the decision
to go forward and be a whistleblower, and with Victoria
as my attorney. Victoria is such a confident person in
such an accomplished lawyer that I just began to feel safer,
and I began to feel better that I was on
the right track, that I was doing the right thing.
(38:07):
She was instrumental in respect during my own natural self confidence.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
I asked Hicks if he ever worried that associating himself
with Tunsing, with her long record of anti Clinton activism,
would undermine his credibility as a witness. He told me
he had barely thought about it, even if others did.
Speaker 9 (38:26):
To an extent, I am fascinated by the sudden appearance
in the Benghazi story of Joseph Degeneva and Victoria Tensing,
who were two of the real stars of the anti
Clinton legal community in the nineteen nineties. When you want
to keep a scandal ginned up, you go to the pros.
Speaker 1 (38:41):
Eventually, in the days leading up to the whistleblower hearing,
Fox News built up the anticipation, much like they did
with Clinton's testimony in January.
Speaker 5 (38:49):
It was a well guarded secret. But we now know
the identities of the ben Ghazi whistleblowers, So will we
finally get answers about what happened?
Speaker 1 (38:58):
We have nuans Even Alison Camarada, the reluctant weekend host
of Fox and Friends was excited to hear the whistleblower's account.
Speaker 6 (39:05):
I thought, ooh good, this will be interesting. Like now
I'm going to hear what happened.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
Finally, the hearing had come to order. Greg Hicks test
to fight in front of the Oversight Committee on Wednesday,
May eighth, twenty thirteen. The hearing was titled Benghazi Exposing
Failure and Recognizing Courage. Hicks was billed as the star witness.
Speaker 3 (39:31):
I'm glad my bladder was much stronger in those days
because I literally sat in the same chair for six
and a half hours.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
In his opening statement, Hicks spent a full half hour
recounting his experience on the night of the attack. Under questioning,
he expressed his belief that if military planes had been
sent to Benghazi that night, it was possible they could
have deterred the mortar attack on the CIA annex. Hicks
also described his reaction when he saw Susan Rice on
the Sunday shows, saying the attack had grown spontaneously out
(40:03):
of a protest.
Speaker 3 (40:04):
I was stunned, my jaw dropped, and I was embarrassed.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
There was one detail that stood out from the rest
of Hicks's testimony. It had to do with a decision
made on the night of the attack by the US
military's Central Command for Africa AFRICAM for short. Hicks testified
that a team of four Special Forces officers based in
Tripoli had been ready to get on a plane to Benghazi,
only to be told by someone at AFRICAM not to go.
Speaker 3 (40:36):
Now.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
Once again, this gets a little tricky, but as you
may recall, one team of agents from Tripoli did fly
to Benghazi during the attack. In fact, one of them
was killed at the CIA Annex. The team Hicks was
talking about in his testimony was separate. They were getting
ready to fly to Benghazi much later, closer to six
a m. After the attack was essentially over. But Hicks
(40:59):
saw the decision to keep them in Tripoli as a
grave mistake. As he put it, there was every reason
to continue to believe that our personnel were in danger.
Here's how Congressman Jason Chafitz asked about afrikam's decision to
hold back the Special Forces in Tripoli.
Speaker 7 (41:16):
How did the personnel react at being told to stand down?
Speaker 16 (41:21):
They were furious. Well, I will quote Lieutenant Colonel Gibson.
He said, this is the first time in my career
that a diplomat has more balls than somebody in the military.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
Hicks himself never used the phrase stand down order, and
he told me that he never thought the term was accurate.
But during the hearing, Republicans used the phrase repeatedly.
Speaker 3 (41:44):
Where'd the standown order come from?
Speaker 1 (41:46):
I believe it came from, and Hicks did not correct them.
Speaker 16 (41:50):
Either Africom or South Africa, now I understanding is a general.
Speaker 1 (41:53):
When the hearing ended, Hicks felt like he had done
his part to bring the truth about Benghazi to the public.
Speaker 12 (41:59):
So with that, this hearing is closed, but this investigation
is not over.
Speaker 3 (42:06):
I remember walking out of the ray Burn Building feeling
like the weight of the world had lifted from my shoulders.
I felt very good about what I'd said and about
how the hearing had transpired.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
On MSNBC, the verdict was that Hicks's testimony had not
revealed much in the way of new informations. Fox News
was all geared up today to really capture the outrage.
It's been endless politicization, and today this was their blockbuster,
this was their watergate, and by two o'clock people were
like changing the chance but on Fox News, the big
(42:40):
takeaway was stand down order.
Speaker 3 (42:43):
They were told to stand down. What do you mean
stand down? They're invading the place.
Speaker 10 (42:47):
Who told the military to stand down?
Speaker 3 (42:49):
You're telling people to stand down?
Speaker 12 (42:51):
You have no idea when.
Speaker 3 (42:52):
The attack ends.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
Media matters. David Brock's website found that in the weeks
after Hicks's testimony, Fox's primetime programming mentioned the standown order
at least eighty five times. It didn't matter that the
team of Special Forces officers that was held back in
Tripoli wouldn't have gotten to bend Gaussie and time to
stand up to anyone. The fact that they could have
been sent and weren't was enough. Hicks's testimony reinforced an
(43:18):
idea that had been circulating in various forms since the
attack that the Obama administration had made a deliberate decision
not to rescue Chris Stevens and the others. Among the
Fox News anchors who talked about the standdown order was
Allison Camarata.
Speaker 5 (43:36):
Right, So, I mean a shocking revelation. That was a
particularly stunning moment on Wednesday at the hearings, because either
we don't have contingency plans in place, I mean, I
think it is an American's assumption that the reason that
we have military stationed around the world is for events
like this, that when something terrible is going down, that we,
(43:56):
in a moment's notice, can at least attempt a rescue
of our fellowtail.
Speaker 1 (44:03):
This is Camarata on Fox and Friends Weekend, raising questions
about the standdown order the Sunday after Hicks's hearing.
Speaker 5 (44:10):
Right now, the next question, of course, by the way,
should have been, or is now today, who gave that
order to stand down? Who was it that said don't
send help to our people who were under attack?
Speaker 6 (44:23):
Of who gave the stand down order? Became the catchphrase
that just kept on giving. It embodied all of it,
the outrage, the tragedy, the mystery. It just had it all.
It never got old. And I was very interested in
who gave the standown order. That was something that really
(44:46):
intrigued me and piqued my interest, and I wanted to
get to the bottom of it. And then during the
testimony it's clear that there was no standdown order given,
and that comes up and people debunk it, but it
never went away. At Fox, it was too valuable to
(45:09):
get rid of because that kept the viewers watching.
Speaker 1 (45:14):
The phrase standdown order went through a strange evolution over
the course of the Benghazi scandal. It was almost like
it got detached from any one specific situation and started
getting used to refer to a bunch of different decisions
that were made on the night of the attack. For instance,
you might recall from episode three that the Benghazi CIA
(45:34):
station chief hesitated to send his men to the diplomatic
compound when they first got the distress call, and that
eventually they overruled him and just took off. Fox News
was calling that a standdown order as early as October
of twenty twelve. Separately, there was the decision not to
send jets to Benghazi from Italy because it would have
taken them too long to get there. That was referred
(45:57):
to as a stand down order too. After Hicks's testimony,
the phrase started being used in reference to that six
a m decision in Tripoli, and against the backdrop of
the other stand down orders, it just kind of tract.
Speaker 13 (46:13):
And I'm curistic.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
Were you conscious of at the time that there was
a sort of conflation happening around this term stand doown order?
Speaker 6 (46:21):
You are way overthinking this. Once you have a handy slogan,
don't try to dissect it too closely, Like, all you
need to know is that somebody gave a standown order.
And maybe it's the CIA, maybe it's Hillary Clinton, maybe
it was President Obama, maybe it was Africom. But there
(46:44):
was a standown order. So the fact that it morphed
from one to the other, that's just a little consequence.
You just got to keep repeating it and repeating it
and repeating it.
Speaker 5 (46:55):
Right, There's still so many questions. I mean, who gave
the order to stand down instead of trying to help?
And now who is looking for the perpetrators? Why hasn't
anyone been prosecuted?
Speaker 6 (47:06):
Where is the justice?
Speaker 5 (47:07):
We allow this to happen without justice? Is that who
we are now as a country when we have this.
Speaker 1 (47:12):
Camarata's first show after the hearing coincided with Mother's Day.
To mark the occasion, Camarada's producers played a clip from
an interview with Patricia Smith, the mother of the IT
specialist who was killed in Benghazi, alongside Ambassador Stevens.
Speaker 8 (47:27):
I want to wish Hillary a happy Mother's Day. She's
got her child. I don't have mine because of her.
I know that In the.
Speaker 1 (47:35):
Months after the attack, Smith appeared on Fox News multiple
times speaking out about her son and her frustration with
those she believed were responsible for his death.
Speaker 8 (47:45):
But the government doesn't care. They don't care about us
people at all. All they have to do is tell
me what happened, and I would have gone away, but
they didn't even bother. I was an unimportant person and
now I'm an unimportant person that doesn't have a child
for Mother's Day, and I'm I feel it so deeply.
(48:06):
They cannot understand how I feel.
Speaker 5 (48:10):
That's heartbreaking, heartbreaking to hear on Mother's Day. But obviously
the victims' families are not satisfied and they want more answers.
Speaker 6 (48:17):
Her grief was raw. Her grief was raw, and it
never got less raw. She just became this kind of
go to victim. I guess that Fox could keep exploiting
and holding up as this personification of grief, and I
(48:38):
found it really uncomfortable. And I did hope that she
got answers, you know, I mean, I could never have
said on the air, Wow, we're really exploiting her. I
just think that I did the best I could.
Speaker 3 (48:57):
Was there a distance for you internally about that? And
did that contribute to your decision to leave?
Speaker 8 (49:02):
Oh?
Speaker 6 (49:02):
Every day, every day, But I mean it wasn't just Benghazi.
I mean every day I wrestled with being at Fox,
and I tried to leave many times, and Roger blocked me,
and I felt trapped. I still needed my paycheck. I'm
tap dancing pretty hard on the air, and I'm trying
to preserve my integrity. But you know, some days were
(49:26):
harder than others. I mean, it's just really unpleasant to
be part of that outrage factory. I didn't like it,
and I tried in my own meager ways to either
make it not an outrage factory, or to present a
different position, or to be the voice of reason, or
to add levity. I tried to deploy lots of different
(49:46):
coping mechanisms, and then at some point right after this,
they just ran out.
Speaker 1 (49:54):
We'll be right back. Camarata left Fox News in March
of twenty fourteen. At her new job at CNN, she
doesn't remember being asked to do any Benghazi coverage. The
fact that re a broader reluctance on the part of
the mainstream media to treat the attack as a scandal.
(50:15):
That's not to say that Fox was the only outlet
covering it. In just the month following the attack, The
New York Times put it on its front page eighteen times. Meanwhile,
two of the broadcast networks, CBS and ABC were so
eager to get in on the action that they ended
up airing stories that had to be retracted or substantially corrected.
Speaker 15 (50:34):
The most important thing to every person at sixty minutes
is the truth, and the truth is we made a mistake.
Speaker 1 (50:43):
Still, by far, the most expansive coverage of Benghazi came
from Fox News and other conservative outlets. According to David Brock,
this was a result of how much the media had
changed since the nineties and how much more awareness there
was and the part of mainstream journalists about how scandal
laundering worked.
Speaker 12 (51:01):
My sense of it was by that point, because Fox
News was beating the drums so hard on it, it
had the inverse effect, and there was more skepticism in
the main media about picking it up because it had
been such a Fox phenomenon, And so I think it
was very different than what went on in the nineties,
(51:23):
when the path to getting something from a place like
The Spectator onto CNN was much easier.
Speaker 1 (51:34):
Brock says that Benghazi was fueled by the same forces
and in many cases the same individuals that drove earlier
Clinton scandals like Whitewater and Troopergate.
Speaker 12 (51:45):
The Clinton scandals, in the end, in my opinion, end
up having very little to do with the details. You know,
I think there's a direct line from what happened in
the nineteen nineties to twenty sixteen, and there was always
something that was beyond just normal politics about the way
(52:07):
they went after the Clintons.
Speaker 1 (52:10):
What would you say was animating people like Victoria Tenzing.
Speaker 12 (52:14):
I can't say for her exactly, but I can say
that there was kind of a joy in the hunt.
I guess you could see that too, that they were
in times of triumph, deliriously happy when they were able
to score.
Speaker 1 (52:32):
It feels almost too pat to say the Bengazi scandal
was driven or propped up by a single news network,
like it shouldn't be possible for it to have been
so straightforward, And in fact, when Hillary Clinton was ensnared
in scandal much earlier in her career, it wasn't that
straightforward back then. In order for stories about Vince Foster
and Whitewater to gain traction, they needed to travel through
(52:56):
the media ecosystem from the margins into the mainstream. But
in twenty thirteen that wasn't necessary anymore. People like Victoria
Tunsing didn't need to engage in scandal laundering to make
an impact. All they had to do was get on
Fox News and they would immediately be heard by millions
of people who would then post about it on social media,
(53:18):
and they would be heard by Republican congressmen, who, when
they weren't appearing on Fox News themselves, could turn the
network's outrage into official action. In my interview with Tunsing,
I asked her if she felt like her client, Greg Hicks,
had gotten what he wanted out of his time as
a whistleblower.
Speaker 4 (53:35):
You often ask Greg how he feels, but that that's
not our practice of law. Really, So you know, is
your client still alive and is he working and is
he relatively happy? Is the criteria I use.
Speaker 1 (53:50):
Well, but if your goal was to sort of help
chip away at this person that you felt was lying
and had done a terrible job and to keep them
from attaining more power, you guys did pretty well at that.
Speaker 4 (54:03):
I thought, Yeah, Well, I mean, you know, if Greg
had really done a good job. He'd be vice president
is of company right now, and then you know that's
you can ask him how he feels about it. You know,
if he'd do it again, I think he'd say yes.
But you don't know. I found a patient, you know,
I was in the emergency room. I got a patient,
(54:25):
and he walked out of the emergency room. So that's
how I look at it.
Speaker 1 (54:30):
It's true that Hicks is not the vice president of
a company, but after his testimony, he did manage to
get a job working for Devin Nunez, one of the
Republican congressmen who most voraciously chased the Bengazi scandal. As
Hicks told me, he knew his days of the State
Department were over.
Speaker 3 (54:48):
I felt that I had faced pretty serious retaliation and pressure.
Ultimately that led to my retirement from the State Department,
and in August of twenty sixteen, when it looked quite
likely that missus Clinton was going to become president, and
I had no desire to ever work for her again.
Speaker 1 (55:09):
And yet Hi says he never hated the Clintons, and that,
in fact, after his testimony, he stopped believing that they
had placed him under surveillance or that they were ever
considering having him killed.
Speaker 3 (55:21):
It's hard to think that people are just evil. I
think that missus Clinton exercised very poor judgment in a
lot of instances over this incident. Beyond that, you know
Vince Foster, who knows kill lists. That seems far gone
(55:45):
to me. I've never actually seen a list of names.
Show me the names, give me the facts. Tell me
why why the Clintons would have had all these people killed.
Speaker 13 (55:58):
Explain that to me. I don't.
Speaker 3 (55:59):
I don't understand that there's a lot of hatred for
them out there from a lot of.
Speaker 13 (56:05):
People that's not me.
Speaker 1 (56:24):
On the next and final episode of Fiasco, the FBI
captures a Libyan man accused of helping plan the Bengazi attack,
while a congressional investigation surfaces a devastating revelation about Hillary
Clinton email gate.
Speaker 3 (56:39):
Hillary Clinton has some explaining to do.
Speaker 13 (56:42):
Hillary Clinton email mess This story is something for everyone.
Speaker 1 (56:47):
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 Prolog 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 Madelin Kaplan. Our researcher
(57:11):
was Francis Carr. Our score was composed by Dan English,
Joe Valley and Noah Hecht. Additional music by Nick Sylvester,
Billy Libby and Joel Saint Julian. Our theme song is
by Spatial Relations Audio mixed by Rob Buyers, Michael Raphael
and Johnny Vince Evans. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks
at Chips and y Copyright Council. Provided by Peter Yassi
(57:34):
at Yasi Butler PLC. Thanks to Archive dot Org, Hannah Groach, Begley,
Mark Thompson and Mark Zaid. Special thanks to Lubinari and
thank you for listening. Binge the entire season of Fiasco
(57:59):
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 pluss. Screibers can access
ad free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content
for all Pushkin podcasts
Popular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.