A Bombshell

In testimony before the Select Committee on Benghazi yesterday, Hillary Clinton did well. She was calm, projected an apparent command of the facts as she presented them, and produced no notable sound bites that will come back to haunt her. I suspect that her supporters are ecstatic and her handlers are pleased. There's only one fundamental problem—all of her testimony is suspect, because at its core, we now know to an absolute certainty that she knowingly lied in the days following the attack.

The Democrats on the committee were quick to accuse Trey Gowdy and the GOP members of partisan politics. That's rich, coming from a group that asked no substantive questions and acted as  hyperpartisan protectors of Hillary throughout the proceedings.

The GOP questioners got bogged down in too much detail that was, while important from an investigative point of view, sleep-inducing for the general public and far beyond the low information voters who make up a significant portion of Clinton's support. Other important questions remain unanswered. Hillary effectively obfuscated, filibustered, and took tangents that she knew would lead nowhere.From her point of view, that's a successful outcome.

There was one bombshell, but the trained hamsters in the media will ignore it. (For example, instead of leading with the bombshell, the New York Times emphasized the predictable partisan bickering that occurred during questioning.

The bombshell focused on a core question: Why did the administration lie about the cause of the attack and the people who perpetrated it? From the beginning, even casual observers realized that the Obama administration's repeated claim that the Benghazi attack was driven by spontaneous reaction to an anti-Muslim video was absurd. In fact, so absurd that it was insulting to those who listened while it was promulgated by Obama, Clinton, Susan Rice and many other administration spokespeople.

Once the truth was admitted over a week after Benghazi, the media willfully lost interest, and damage to Obama's presidential run was minimal. The administration, true to form, blamed the lies on the fog of war, conflicting intelligence reports, and any other excuse that would muddy the water.

To the bombshell. The committee uncovered emails written on the evening of the attack from Hillary to family members and close associates, including the Egyptian ambassador. In the emails she clearly stated that the attack was pre-planned by terrorists from an "al Qaeda-like group."

But publicly, she lied and attributed the attack to a video review gone bad. The "why?" is easy. To protect a president who was running for reelection on the slogan “Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive.” The implication, al Qaeda was crippled and the American economy was on the comeback. Turns out neither implication was true.

Kim Strassel reports:

Thanks to Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi testimony on Thursday, we now understand why the former secretary of state never wanted anyone to see her emails and why the State Department sat on documents. Turns out those emails and papers show that the Obama administration deliberately misled the nation about the deadly events in Libya on Sept. 11, 2012.

Don’t forget how we came to this point. Mrs. Clinton complained in her testimony on Capitol Hill that past Congresses had never made the overseas deaths of U.S. officials a “partisan” issue. That’s because those past deaths had never inspired an administration to concoct a wild excuse for their occurrence, in an apparent attempt to avoid blame for a terror attack in a presidential re-election year.

The early hints that this is exactly what happened after the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans cast doubt on every White House-issued “fact” about the fiasco and led to the establishment of Rep. Trey Gowdy’s select committee.

What that House committee did Thursday was finally expose the initial deception.

But in a way, all of this is old news. It was obvious from the beginning that Obama administration lied—knowingly, cynically, and repeatedly about Benghazi. Now Clinton's emails prove it beyond any doubt.

And because Obama and his Team of 2s lied about the perpetrators and the cause of the attack, there's no reason to believe their claims about any other of important questions that remain unanswered. To paraphrase a well worn progressive slogan, 'Hillary lied about how four Americans died.'

UPDATE:
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And this rather telling assessment from K.T. McFarland:

It was a masterful performance. She showed enormous discipline and nearly super-human stamina.

She let nothing slip. But in the end she let everything slip. She got a perfect score, but failed the test.

She didn't mean to, but she showed us a glimpse into her soul.

It was chilling.

We now know that when Secretary Clinton met the plane carrying the bodies of the four Americans who died at Benghazi that the Obama administration had initially lied about what happened.

She stood over the flag-draped coffins of four dead Americans knowing that the first narrative blamed their deaths on an Internet video, which caused a demonstration outside the consulate to turn into a deadly attack, when she already knew the truth.

She looked into the eyes of the families of the fallen heroes knowing all about that.

She always knew they died from a planned terrorist attack from an Al Qaeda-like group. That's what she told her family and foreign leaders according to newly released emails.

So why support the false narrative at the start? Because the Obama administration had an election to win eight weeks later, and a terrorist attack that killed four Americans didn't fit into that plan.

I have, for many years now, contended that the "soul" of this administration is rotten to the core. For them, it's not about what's best for their country, it's about what's best for them, for consolidating power, for promoting memes that purposely divide us, for demonizing opposing views. The "glimpse" that McFarland mentions shows us the ugly face of dishonesty.