It's A Second Sunday Morning Bonus Podcast For 8-24-25-Part 2

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Michael Berry Show.

Speaker 2 (00:01):
Cheryl Atkinson is our guest. The book is Stonewalled. You
can pick it up anywhere. It is her story. According
to the book's cover, it is stonewalld my fight for
truth against the forces of obstruction, intimidation, and harassment in
Obama's Washington. She is a major part of the Fast

(00:25):
and Furious story, the Bengazi story. She has covered the
green energy scam, and she was personally spied on by
our government. She was inside CBS as well as CNN
and some other of the major news networks news organizations.

(00:46):
But her story about CBS and her willingness to tell
it is enlightening, to say the least. Odd programming note
for those of you in Portland joining us uh into
the show. We completed earlier today our portion of the

(01:08):
interview on Fast and Furious, and so you won't have
a chance to hear that, but I want to tell
you that if you do want to hear that, and
I don't say this often, you can go to our
website at Michael Berry dot com and you can go
to the podcast and pick up the eight a m.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
Hour.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
Because some of you probably know Cheryl Atkinson from her
Fast and furious experience and sort of breaking that story
and making it a household story, making it a making
it a story that we all focused on in the
in the in the noise. That is so many different
stories out there, So if you want that, go to
our podcast.

Speaker 1 (01:43):
And you can hear that interview.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
We are now talking about her involvement in the Benghazi story.
Cheryl Akinson. As you dove into that story, you say
you weren't getting answers to things you thought you could.
What was the first big question that wasn't being answered?
You talk about the lack of a response when we
have guys training to do that. What was the thing

(02:07):
that made you say, wait a second, there's something going
on here.

Speaker 3 (02:10):
Well this may sound silly, but at first I'm just
trying to get a handle on what happened that night
the facts, and the administration wouldn't even give us those.
They wouldn't tell us when the attacks began and when
the attacks ended. Three weeks into this, of course they
knew all of the timing with precision, and yet I
kept asking, Actually, at that point they had said there

(02:33):
was only one attack, So when did the attack end?
What was the timeline? So I started getting various timelines.
I kept asking them, why wouldn't they tell us when
it ended? I think in the end that's because they
were implying initially it only went on a short period
of time, because they didn't want us to know it
went on for so many hours that they could have
done some sort of rescue.

Speaker 1 (02:51):
And how many hours did it go on?

Speaker 3 (02:54):
I believe it was over six and a half in
the end, so it was plenty of time. That we
had so much many bases nearby that theoretically something could
have been mounted, including Special Forces Tier one assets that
were not terribly far away.

Speaker 2 (03:08):
Let's dive in one of the issues you first you
bring up that was Christopher Stevens, the ambassador. The administration
seemed to be suggesting that he'd sort of gone rogue,
that he went to Benghazi and had left the Capitol.
But you found that not to be true.

Speaker 3 (03:26):
That was another yes, another sort of warning sign or
something that alerted me there was more to the story.
There were a lot of whisper campaigns going on by
administration people who would say things not really on the record,
but wanted you to think something. And one of the
things I kept hearing that they wanted us to think, was, gee,
you know.

Speaker 4 (03:45):
I'm not sure.

Speaker 3 (03:45):
They would say, I'm not sure we even knew Chris
Stevens was going down to ben Ghazi, which struck me
as strange because I think at any given time they
probably do know where the ambassador of a nation is,
the ambassador of our nation representing an the country. And
in the end, yes, they did know. According to his
number two, they did know he was going down there.

(04:05):
There's sort of a whose where list that's distributed. They
knew well in advance that he planned to go down
there for a couple of days, and that there was
a list each day he was down there as well.

Speaker 2 (04:16):
Whether he was authorized to go or not was an issue.
You pointed out that there seemed to be some spin.
Another one was, as you write, on a difficult assignment
in Libya, Stephens wasn't the kind to whine or complain
when his security requests were denied. Given the choice to
go to Benghazi with the protection he had or not
go at all, he would always have chosen the former.

(04:38):
To sit behind the relative safety of the walls the
Posh Embassy in Tripoli would be no kind of job
for a man like him. It wouldn't be a job
worth having. Stevens served only three short months as the
US ambassador to Libya before being murdered by terrorist thugs.
Did Christopher Stevens ask for more security?

Speaker 1 (04:56):
That was denied over.

Speaker 3 (04:58):
And over, And so that's another contradiction. The administration tried
to imply that he hadn't. But the reason they're sort
of relying on processes or people's lack of understanding of
process is to make people believe that Chris Stevens would
go through the channels, sort of these backdoor channels and
conversations they had for extra security. He would write emails,

(05:21):
he would be told verbally that he was not going
to get extra security he and his staff, and so
they would try to troubleshoot it by modifying their requests.
So in the end, he and his regional security officer
repeatedly asked for more security and was denied security. But
and the administration came around to acknowledging that. But initially

(05:42):
they were implying as though he hadn't asked for more
and that he himself must have felt safe because there
he went to Benghazi. But those who knew him said,
it's not that he felt safe. They had questions every
day about security, but he certainly was not going to
just stay holed up and not do his job as
ambassadors simply because he couldn't get this security he felt
he needed.

Speaker 2 (06:01):
Cheryl Akinson is our guest. One of the other issues
that you point out was that people said, well, there
was no reason to assume we would be attacked on
nine to eleven. We hadn't been attacked since nine eleven one.
And you point out that Hillary Clinton made a note
about this was a big day, and so there seems

(06:22):
to be a disparity there. But let's specifically speak about Libya.
Were they aware there was a likely attack?

Speaker 3 (06:30):
I would say yes. There were many people who say
they were aware there was an impending attack. There are
security people on the ground who felt there was an
impending attack. There were explicit threats from al Qaeda that
said they were going to attack in a particular order
the Red Cross, the United Kingdom, the UK, and Benghazi
and the United States. And yes, they attacked the Red Cross,

(06:50):
and then they attacked the United Kingdom, and surely we
were next. I mean, people saw the writing on the wall.
The CIA had issued warnings not of a date and time,
But the CIA had issue warnings to the State Department
that there were dangers there. There were so many red flags,
and I outlined them in the book. I mean, one
after the other. One wonders what it would have taken
if this did not get their attention at headquarters of

(07:12):
the State Department, What on earth it would have taken?

Speaker 2 (07:14):
But aren't there all weren't Aren't there almost always security
attacks in a region like Libya. I mean, don't you
at some point become sort of fatigued and comfortable.

Speaker 3 (07:26):
Maybe that's true, But according to the security people who
operated there, this was unusual. This wasn't a normal operating
environment that you would expect in a place. It was
getting worse, not better, And yet it was being treated
by headquarters as if the security situation were getting better,
not worse, as if they just didn't want to believe
it was deteriorating quickly. The only theory I've heard from

(07:48):
officials who were stationed there is that the State Department
wanted to normalize things in Libya and make it appear
as though things were good and everything was getting better,
and they really didn't want to face the reality that
things were getting much worse.

Speaker 1 (08:00):
So if we just pretend then and help for the best.

Speaker 3 (08:04):
I mean, surely nobody wanted anybody to die. I think
they just hoped for the best.

Speaker 2 (08:08):
Well, and it was two months before in election, so
we do want to appear to be in control. Coming up,
Cheryl Atkinson is our guest in studio. The book is
called Stonewalled. We're going to go through exactly what she
believes happened September eleventh, twenty twelve in Benghazi.

Speaker 4 (08:25):
Stay tuned, you've got the Michael Berry Show.

Speaker 2 (08:35):
You were concerned at CBS since we're on the subject
of Benghazi when the guy who had been the station
chief or whatever, he had a role in Benghazi, and
then CBS hires him and brings him in, and you're thinking,
wait a second, is he here to spend.

Speaker 3 (08:57):
Maybe it's just the way I think, and this is
based on experience, but when people from administrations and other
places that want to influence the press are placed inside
the press, I do wonder how they end up there sometimes,
and I think we have to be especially careful as
members of the press. You're talking about Mike Morrell, who's

(09:19):
the former deputy director of the CIA, who was implicated
in Benghazi talking point changes who gave a contradictory testimony
and information about it. So he was very much at
the center of the controversy, and yet was hired by
CBS some months ago as a consultant before I left CBS,

(09:39):
and at the same time had also just been hired
as a paid employee at a PR strategy firm dominated
by Hillary Clinton loyalists, which was not disclosed that paid.
What I see as a potential conflict of interest was
not disclosed when we used him on the air, and
I think in my view, we had to disclose. We
had our responsibility disclose it to disparage him, to protect CBS,

(10:01):
so that the viewers know we've disclosed information they can
use to judge how they want to view the commentary
that he gives. But I was not my view was
not shared that we owed the viewers that disclosure.

Speaker 2 (10:14):
Let's talk about what happened in Benghazi layout for people
that may not understand the overview of what happened that day,
September eleventh, twenty twelve.

Speaker 3 (10:26):
It's been a while since I looked at the timeline,
but Ambassador Stevens met late in the day with the
Turkish ambassador. And as the ambassador said goodbye and left
and Stevens went back into the compound, they fell under
attack by mobs that swarmed a mob that swarmed the mission.

(10:49):
It was not an official embassy, but a mission down there,
and for some reason, his guards, which my understanding is
they were all rookies. This was their first assignment on
diplomatic security. Because the experienced guys had left and the
special teams had left. They didn't even have their weapons
with them. The people who were there previous to them
so that they never they slept with their weapons because

(11:09):
they understood what a precarious situation it was. So it's
unclear why these guys didn't even have their guns with them,
but they were separated from the guns they needed. They
had to make their way to another building. The mob
started a fire.

Speaker 2 (11:25):
Let's tell the word mob, because there are varying accounts
as to how sophisticated this group was. One account was
that when they showed up, they managed to flip some
of the people that were supposed to be in Stevens's
defense Locally that the US government or the CIA or
Stevens's group had contracted with local folks to protect and
that in fact they were al Qaeda elements.

Speaker 3 (11:47):
Well, what the State Department does is it relies a
lot of times on local security. Especially as it was
pulling out our security in Libya. They were saying, rely
on the locals, Rely on the locals. Well, that can
be a dangerous thing according to those who worked there,
because the loyalties of the locals are sometimes not always known.
And there was this brigade that was supposed to locals

(12:09):
that were supposed to help protect our guys there that
pretty much up and ran when this happened and didn't
provide the protection it was hoped that they would provide,
and then our guys there were just a couple didn't
have their weapons. Ambassador Stevens was overcome by smoke. Yes,
there is an open question, and it's been posed to
me by people who were there. The idea that people

(12:31):
we had been working with Libyans that the United States
had been working with in a friendly fashion, were some
of them among those who ended up plotting against us.
And I wonder, although I don't know, is that why
the government never released the surveillance video of the mob attacking.
Initially we were promised that we would be able to

(12:51):
see pictures of this, that this was public information, we'd
be able to see about Thanksgiving the year that it happened.
And then the video was never released, and they want
us to see the faces and the details of those
people that stormed the compound. Part of me wondered, is
it because some people involved would recognize those as people
the United States perhaps had worked with previously.

Speaker 1 (13:13):
That's your worst suspicion.

Speaker 3 (13:16):
Uh, yeah, that's about my worst suspicion. And I do
know we were doing business as a country. I was
told by sources with Libyans who had in the past
opposed US, people who had worked been affiliated with al
Qaeda affiliates in the past, but were now considered friendly

(13:36):
to our current cause. So it's very complicated over there.

Speaker 2 (13:40):
There are also numerous sources that have said through reports
that there was Syrian gun running, that there was gun
running to I guess Syrian rebels being coordinated across Northern Africa,
and that this was the pipeline.

Speaker 3 (13:55):
I think that that's probably true. I have information that says,
you know, guns were being run through there to Syria.
The thing that I don't personally have is confirmation of
what the United States specific role, if any was, were
we directly involved in facilitating that or did we know
of it? Or were we working people with people who

(14:16):
were doing it. I don't have any evidence that answers
that question.

Speaker 1 (14:19):
So Ambassador Stevens died of.

Speaker 5 (14:21):
Smoke inhalation, right, that's what we think.

Speaker 2 (14:24):
There are reports that his body was then dragged into
town and that things were done to it.

Speaker 1 (14:34):
What do you know of that.

Speaker 4 (14:36):
My best source on that.

Speaker 3 (14:39):
Says an autopsy was performed and that that did not happen.

Speaker 4 (14:43):
But I don't know that.

Speaker 3 (14:43):
That's that's just a source, it's not a firsthand source.

Speaker 2 (14:47):
Why do you think more Americans didn't die? I mean,
you have this mob and you're basically unarmed, and they've
got you held captive, nowhere to go.

Speaker 4 (15:02):
Well, I hadn't really thought about that.

Speaker 3 (15:03):
I mean, they did fire mortars, and the mortars were
very damaging. But did they run out of mortars or
did they just stop firing. I don't know the answer
to the question. I hadn't really thought about that. But
by that time, hopefully I'd like to think that the
Libyan government had been called in to try to interfere
and help provide some support when we were stuck like.

Speaker 2 (15:25):
That under a worst case scenario. We have one minute
in this segment. Cheryl Atkinson is our guest. The book
is stonewalled. Why don't we know where President Obama was?
When this is a guy that we always see the
pictures of him in the war room. Why don't we know?

Speaker 3 (15:39):
This is the biggest question I think I have that
we're entitled to know what our commander in chief did
the night that Americans were under attack on foreign soil,
and we don't even have a clue as to the
first you know, the basic steps he took specifically through
the night, even a general timeline like they gave us
for the bin Laden rated. We have nothing, And of

(16:02):
course that's always a signal that there's why is there
a reason that they're keeping that secret? We don't know,
but there must be a reason.

Speaker 2 (16:08):
Pure conspiracy. You're not giving it any weight. What is
the wildest conspiracy you've heard as.

Speaker 1 (16:13):
To where he was?

Speaker 3 (16:15):
I really haven't heard a conspiracy. I think he was
in the White House. I think that he probably there's
a chance he was more involved in making decisions that
turned out to be the wrong decisions, and they wouldn't
want us to know something like that. The other alternative
is he was so uninvolved completely at all, that that
too could be controversial.

Speaker 2 (16:32):
More with Cheryl Atkinson, the book is stonewalled coming up.

Speaker 1 (16:43):
The Michael Barry Show continues, continues.

Speaker 2 (16:46):
The election of president could arguably have been said to
come down to one pivotal debate. I'll remind you, folks
that Romney absolutely wiped the floor with Barack Obama. And
then there was that pivotal debate. Now you remember it
was in Denver that Al Gore later said, well, Obama

(17:07):
wasn't ready because he'd gone to Nevada and he was
oxygen deprived. And then there was the Denver debate where
he was lackluster, and then came the debate, and Ryl
Atkinson writes about it in her book Sixty Minutes. Correspondent
Steve Crost Steve Croft is at the White House for

(17:27):
a previously scheduled interview and asked the President about his
wording on Benghazi.

Speaker 1 (17:31):
Steve Cross says.

Speaker 5 (17:33):
Crofts, this is September twelfth, the day after, mister President,
this morning, you went out of your way to avoid
the use of the word terrorism in connection with the
Liby attack.

Speaker 1 (17:44):
President Obama says, right, do you believe.

Speaker 3 (17:47):
Okay, stop there, because that's so important. Croft is saying
to the President. His interpretation is after listening in the
Rose Garden the next day, that you, mister Obama, did
not call Benghazi an act of terrorism caused by terrorists.
And the President says.

Speaker 1 (18:03):
Right, can I go yes?

Speaker 2 (18:08):
I feel like I'm being bamboozled. Steve Croft follows with,
do you believe that this was a terrorist attack? You
didn't say terrorism, correct? Do you believe that this was
a terrorist attack? Do have to stop again? Go ahead,
President Obama. Well, it's too early to know exactly how
this came about, what group was involved.

Speaker 1 (18:28):
But stop this.

Speaker 4 (18:31):
We now know from documents release.

Speaker 1 (18:33):
Why are you laughing? Remote Ramote is enjoying us.

Speaker 3 (18:36):
We now know and we didn't know then, and I
you know, I'm not sure I knew exactly when I
wrote that part in the book, but we know now
that the government had already our government told Libya in
an email that Ansar al Sharia was responsible and was
a terrorist at attack. So even as the President is
saying this to Steve Croft the next day, internally they

(18:56):
had already determined. It seems to me definitively that it
was and who was responsible.

Speaker 4 (19:01):
Despite what he's saying in the.

Speaker 2 (19:02):
Interview, lying he knows it's terrorism. Worst case scenario, He
and everyone else had been aware. They didn't respond, well,
I guess we could take that part of it. They're
aware that terrorism was going to occur. It happened on
nine to eleven, so it's obvious that's what it was.
They saw what was happening. Why not call it terrorism?

Speaker 4 (19:24):
They have to answer that question.

Speaker 1 (19:25):
I've never understood. Of course, it was terribly.

Speaker 4 (19:28):
I think the best.

Speaker 3 (19:31):
Answer to that just an educated answer based on the evidence.
And it would still be a mistake if they would
do it for this reason. But was as you know,
he had campaigned on the idea that al Qaeda was
on the run and there had been no terrorist attacks,
and the idea that's so close to the election, they
knew immediately. Gosh, this attack occurred in a place where
the CIA had issued a warning, and people are going

(19:54):
to say we should have known, and people are going
to say it's terrorism. What happened to your campaign? You
know Platue that said terrorists are on the run. I
think there was a political decision likely that said that
would not be good at this stage.

Speaker 2 (20:08):
You go on to write that brief part of the
interview isn't big news at the time and doesn't even
make the air on CBS News, so it doesn't even
get aired. But weeks later, there's a reason to take
another look at it. When President Obama is debating the
Republican candidate for President Mitt Romney. In that debate on
October sixteenth, mister Obama claims that in the Rose Garden

(20:29):
on September twelfth, the very day that we're talking about,
he definitively called Benghazi an act of terror. Remember that's
not what he said in the interview with Croft.

Speaker 1 (20:41):
I think that's huge, especially when Candy Crowley weighs in
on his behalf.

Speaker 3 (20:47):
The CNN reporter moderating the debate, jumped in and declared
that Obama was right and Romney was wrong on this point. Now,
the catches I didn't know, and America didn't know, and
I think most people at CBS didn't know that we
had that interview with President Obama that would have proven
Romney was correct, because we sat on it, and even

(21:07):
after the debate, the managers and other officials who knew
about this interview. Who should have rolled it out because
that would have served our viewers, that would have served
the public, That would have answered a big question. Even then,
they didn't air it. They didn't let us know that
we even.

Speaker 4 (21:23):
Had that clip.

Speaker 1 (21:24):
How did you find out you had the clip?

Speaker 3 (21:26):
The only way I found out that clip existed was
the Friday before the election. Weeks later, it sort of
leaked out. Another correspondent called me. There were several of
us who learned of this because it was talk inside CBS.
There were people who knew of the interview who couldn't
understand why we hadn't aired it. And finally it leaked
outside of sixty Minutes and the people that had previously

(21:49):
been alerted to it at evening news and the clip
was read to me by the transcript by another correspondent,
and we both were just like, Wow, this is huge.
Why did and we air this? Why didn't we know
about it? So?

Speaker 2 (22:03):
At Clear Channel now iHeart our audio is loaded into
one system. Any of the shows have access to that audio.
Sixty Minutes is a different show than you were typically
involved with. Is that shared across a platform across the company?

Speaker 3 (22:18):
Here's what happened when sixty minutes conducted the interview, and
it was not news, particularly that day, because there wasn't
the question over how that attack would be termed. But
they provided that entire transcript, according to the evidence I saw,
they provided that transcript to all the folks of the
Evening News, Fishbowl and certain managers, so there was a

(22:38):
wide distribution list that knew what had been said. And
after the debate, this is the part that I think
really bothered me. Several of us who continue to report
on Benghazi were fed a piece of that interview, but
not the operative part that we talked about, another piece
of the interview, which is the first time I even
knew we had an interview, and we were told to

(23:00):
air that in a context that was dictated to us
by New York that gave the impression that Romney was
wrong and Obama was right. In other words, it was
used out of context to steer the public opinion in
a way, you know, in a direction that did not
accurately reflect the interview. Once we saw the whole thing
the Friday before the election.

Speaker 1 (23:22):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (23:23):
More of our conversation with Cheryl Atkinson in studio. The
book is called STONEWALLD and you can probably get it
at your nearest bookstore. I bought almost all the ones
at West Gray and Shepherd up, but I think there
was one left. And what was Cheryl Atkinson of Stonewaald
coming up next? The Michael Berry Show continues, it appears

(23:51):
I don't want to put words in your mouth that
you're saying CBS knew that the White House was covering up.
I think whether he called it terror or not, that
first day is not the most important thing of the
presidential election. I think they are far more important things, like.

Speaker 1 (24:05):
Where he was.

Speaker 2 (24:07):
But it is clear that for some reason, they are
lying about it. It is clear that CBS knows it
because they have the tape and refuse to even give
it to you.

Speaker 1 (24:17):
It seems to be a.

Speaker 2 (24:18):
Coordinated effort between the CBS senior staff and the White
House to prevent the public from knowing this. And I
have to bring in the Brothers roads at this point.
I mean, you've got one guy that's a senior CBS
guy and one guy that's close to Obama. They're brothers.

(24:38):
It's too much to be a coincidence.

Speaker 3 (24:41):
It's hard to know what conversations took place at high
levels because I'm not privy to them. You're talking about
CBS News President David Rhodes, brother of Ben Rhoades, who's
top advisor at the White House.

Speaker 1 (24:52):
Who and who wrote the talking points.

Speaker 3 (24:54):
It was implicated in talking Points matters and also was
largely with being part of the architecture for the Arab Spring,
which actually turned into terrorism spring. So there is that connection.
I don't know if it's a coordinated effort between the
White House and the people who perhaps ideologically support the

(25:15):
president let that interfere with their journalism. The only thing
that makes me wonder is I kept mulling over in
my head once I found out about the interview and
what had been said. How did the White House know
we weren't going to use that tape? How did they
know that the President at that debate could speak with
confidence and say something that contradicted what he knows he

(25:37):
told Steve Croft and the Rose Garden the next day,
And how could he do that and know that we
weren't going to pull out the tape which was.

Speaker 2 (25:43):
And why did Candy Crowley, who's not even with CBS,
with CNN step in and contradict Romney And people don't
remember it's the page seven retraction four hours later admitted
that she was wrong, but the nation was in bed
by then, and that was a pivotal point. Romney had
accused him of falling short on the term terrorism. Obama confidently,

(26:06):
brazenly says check the tape, and Candy Crowley, the independent referee,
says foul on you, and we go to bed thinking
Romney got schooled.

Speaker 3 (26:15):
And Romney lost his confidence. That was a key point,
because he came into that very confident. He lost its confidence.
I don't think he ever raised the Benghazi issue again
after that in the campaign.

Speaker 4 (26:26):
He'd been smacked down. I'm with you.

Speaker 3 (26:29):
I don't understand why the words terrorism and whether they
used it were necessarily so important, except they, apparently the
administration thought it was they made advanced.

Speaker 2 (26:42):
With the right because they're defending against what they know,
not what we know.

Speaker 3 (26:47):
They're now saying, you know, who cares what's in the terminology?
And my answer to that is you cared. You're the
ones using the alternate terminology.

Speaker 2 (26:57):
The news media was part of offering the narrative that
it was some video that some guy in Egypt had
created that had upset the people of Libya and northern
Africa for that matter, and that was the talking Points
memo and everything that was involved with that, and Hillary
went out and defended that.

Speaker 1 (27:18):
What is your takeaway from that whole experience, Well a
couple things.

Speaker 3 (27:21):
I just thought this was kind of funny because I
said to my producer, you know, once we knew the
video was not the trigger and that was a pre
planned attack, I said, there is somebody now questioning, somebody
connected to the administration, questioning anybody they think was involved
in the attack, trying to make one of them say
they saw the video, because if they can just say

(27:41):
there was a little piece of the video in the motivation,
they would feel like that helped make their story seem truer.
And indeed they've said that in the last couple of months, well,
some of the mobsters had seen the video and it
was exactly as predicted. The question really is how and

(28:02):
who came up with that idea and how is it disseminated.
That's still the thing. We don't know that it would
be blamed publicly on the video rather than on what
they internally were saying to one another and what the
internal books these.

Speaker 2 (28:14):
Body in a newsroom. I mean, these people might be liberals.
They might be committed to his cause and devoted to it,
but they're not stupid. They had to know it wasn't
the video.

Speaker 4 (28:27):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (28:27):
It was hard to say initially what we see so
clearly now because we have documents and witnesses. So at
first I think some people did think it was the video,
and they were making much ado about it at the time.
If you recall another question that hasn't been answered that
I posed to the White House and a Missus Clinton,
when initially they were telling victims' families we're going to

(28:47):
find whoever made that awful video, instead of saying we're
going to find the terrorists that attacked your loved ones,
which would make more sense. I've asked, well, what was
the infraction? What were you going to find that guy about?
What you going to charge him with? When all he
did was make a legal video that you don't like.
What was your idea in your head of what you
were going to charge this guy with? And they won't

(29:09):
answer that question because there was nothing he had done
that was charge a chargeable offense on any level.

Speaker 1 (29:14):
In Bookstone Good Sorry.

Speaker 3 (29:16):
Ironically, this guy who I've spoken to, nicol and Nicoola,
who made the video, describes himself as a very avid
Christian who supported Ambassador Stevens and was actually fighting against
He didn't think his video, he said, was anti Muslim.
It was anti Muslim extremist, against the bad kind of
things that happen that give Muslims a bad name, which

(29:37):
would put him very much on the same page as
supposedly the administration, and yet he was hung out to dry.

Speaker 2 (29:43):
In the book Stonewalled, we have a minute and a
half left, you talk about those fateful words that you
don't think Hillary will ever be able to forget. What
difference does it make? Talk for a minute or so
if you would, about Hillary's role in all of this,
including the distraction campaign afterwards, she's.

Speaker 3 (30:00):
Very adept at trying to make sure I think, once
she saw how damaging this would be, that this would
not float and follow her she hoped into a presidential campaign.
So that's what a lot of that was about on
her part, I think, and in her book that she
put out in the last couple of months, there's a
lot of attempts to, I think, rewrite history and rewrite

(30:21):
a story, make it seem as though they never didn't
say it. Wasn't terrorism. We always thought it was terrorism,
which is certainly not the case. And a lot of
other attempts in the book to kind of reinvent and
rewrite the things which are different now than what they
said initially.

Speaker 2 (30:40):
I would say, and I think that's really an attempt
to say, this is old news. So we don't get
an answer. Remember, she falls and there's the concussion, and
now it's old news. Why are we still talking about it?
Can't we just move forward? As a result of all this,
Cheryl Atkinson was subjected to so confirmed cases of invasions

(31:03):
of her personal computer. Her home phone was monitor Horrible
things happen. We will talk about that experience in her
going very public with it and whether her station, her network,
CBS stood behind her. Spoiler alert they did. All that
and more coming up next with Cheryl Atkinson.

Speaker 1 (31:24):
If you liked the.

Speaker 2 (31:24):
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