Jordan questions Hillary Clinton about Benghazi terrorist attack
Rep. Jordan specifically questioned Sec. Clinton about the construction of talking points used by former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice on numerous Sunday morning talk shows to blame the terrorist attack on spontaneous protestors outraged about a YouTube video, instead of the planned attack that it was.
During his first question-and-answer period Rep. Jordan made the following comments:
"Twenty-seven minutes after you've told everyone it's a video, while Americans are still fighting because the attack is still going on, your top people are talking politics. Seems to me that night you had three options, Secretary. You could tell the truth like you did with your family, like you did with the Libyan president, like you did with the Egyptian prime minister – tell them it was a terrorist attack.
"You could say, ‘You know what? We're not quite sure. Don't really know for sure.' I don't think the evidence is there, I think it's all in the first one, but you could have done that.
"But, you picked the third option. You picked the video narrative. You picked the one with no evidence and you did it because Libya was supposed to be, as Mr. Roskam pointed out, this great success story for the Obama White House and Clinton State Department. And a key campaign theme that year was, ‘GM's alive, Bin Laden's dead, Al Qaeda's on the run.' And now you have a terrorist attack. It's a terrorist attack in Libya. It's just 56 days before an election. You could live with the protest about a video, that won't hurt you. But a terrorist attack will. So, you can't be square with the American people. Tell your family it's a terrorist attack, not the American people. You can tell the president of Libya it's a terrorist attack, but not the American people. You can tell the Egyptian prime minister it's a terrorist attack, but you can't tell your own people the truth.
"Madam Secretary, Americans can live with the fact that good people sometimes give their lives for this country. They don't like it, they mourn for those families, they pray for those families, but they can live with it. But what they can't take, what they can't live with, is when their government's not square with them."
VIDEO of Rep. Jordan's first Q/A with Clinton: part one – https://youtu.be/bA4eVphJRkY; part two – https://youtu.be/Hgtux2hZNdk
VIDEO of Rep. Jordan's second Q/A with Clinton: part one – https://youtu.be/nMi7_EjzCic; part two – https://youtu.be/K1oH2R1klwQ
VIDEO of Rep. Jordan's third Q/A with Clinton: part one – https://youtu.be/2qtp07s3RRw; part two – https://youtu.be/er41nmaOKvg
PHOTO of Rep. Jordan during Clinton hearing: https://flic.kr/p/zPBxv9
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