A Republican congressman is claiming that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton so vehemently denied that the Benghazi attack on September 11, 2012, was a terrorist strike that she "screamed" at a congressman in a private briefing just two days later.
As David Martosko of London's Daily Mail newspaper reported on Friday (h/t Doug Powers):
An Illinois Republican congressman told constituents at a town hall meeting on Wednesday that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton screamed at a fellow member of Congress two days after a U.S. diplomatic station in Benghazi, Libya was destroyed, merely for saying aloud that the attack was carried out by terrorist groups..
The Obama administration later acknowledged that reality.
But White House officials initially maintained that the deaths of four Americans and the firebomb attack on the State Department mission was the result of a spontaneous protest against a low-budget YouTube film that was critical of the Muslim prophet Muhammad.
'Two days after this attack,' said Rep. Adam Kinzinger, 'we were in a briefing with Hillary Clinton and she screamed at a member of Congress who’d dare suggest that this was a terrorist attack.'
'Now we find out that while it was happening, they knew it was a terrorist attack. These are answers that we're going to get to the bottom of.'
Kinzinger's office told National Review Online that the meeting he referred to was a classified briefing held for all members of Congress.The congressman appeared on the Fox News Channel on Friday, recalling Clinton 'basically, in a very loud, angry voice, [saying] "It's irresponsible to even suggest this is a terror attack. This is a YouTube video. We know that there are protests all over, and we need to be very careful how we're saying this" -- and basically chided this member of Congress.'
Of course, the media would not be in the wrong to take this claim with a grain of salt -- ultimately it's impossible to confirm this incident -- but that said, it's hard to believe that if Benghazi had occurred in a Republican administration with say Condoleezza Rice at the helm at Foggy Bottom, that a Democratic congressman's claims would be a bigger news story in the national media than this has been.
