Eliana Johnson @ NRO:
The most hostile moment of this morning’s hearing on Benghazi came when Senator Ron Johnson pressed Secretary Clinton on the Obama administration’s ever-changing narrative about what caused the attack on our consulate.
“Do you disagree with me that a simple phone call to those evacuees [from the consulate] to determine what happened wouldn’t have ascertained immediately that there was no protest?” Johnson asked. “That was a piece of information that could have been easily, easily obtained within hours, if not days.” Clinton replied that the “last thing” she wanted to do was to “interfere with any other process that was already going on.” Right, that sounds like an awful thing to do.
Her patience exhausted, or so it seemed, Clinton said at last that whether we have “four dead Americans” as a result of “a protest” or “guys out for a walk one night who decided they’d go kill some Americans” doesn’t matter, and that it’s less important today why the attack was perpetrated than to bring the perpetrators “to justice.”
Setting aside Clinton’s bizarre decision to assign varying weights to these matters, her response is uncharacteristically flippant for someone of her stature. Isn’t it essentialwhy four Americans were murdered, and why this information wasn’t promptly or accurately conveyed to the American people? Wasn’t answering that question one of the central purposes of today’s hearing?