GOP lays into Clinton’s Benghazi record with back-to-back speeches

Republicans on Monday night featured a series of back-to-back speeches hammering Hillary Clinton over the terrorist attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya.

Patricia Smith, the mother of Benghazi victim Sean Smith, said she blames Clinton “personally for the death of my son.”

{mosads}“She lied to me and then called me a liar,” Smith said of the former secretary of State and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, with tears in her eyes.

“How could she do this to me? How could she do this to any American family? Donald Trump is everything Hillary Clinton is not. He is blunt, direct, and strong.”

Directly following Smith’s speech, Benghazi survivors Mark Geist and John Tiegen took the stage to rehash the events on Sept. 11, 2012, in extensive detail.

“At approximately 9:35 p.m., we got a call that the consulate was under attack,” Tiegen said. “We immediately grabbed our weapons and armed up. … But on three separate occasions, we were told to wait, and the chief of base told us to stand down.”

“Hillary Clinton failed to protect her people on the ground,” Geist said.

Geist and Tiegen made the “stand-down” claim in a book they co-wrote. The Clinton campaign noted that multiple congressional investigations into the Benghazi attacks found no evidence that a stand-down order was ever given.

“All of the numerous official sources analyzing the military response … have concluded that the military did everything it could, given the circumstances, in their response to the attacks. Even Republicans have openly acknowledged [the Department of Defense’s] inability to ‘respond immediately to every conceivable global contingency.’ “

Tiegen and Geist spoke for 22 minutes at the Republican National Convention, with delegates appearing to lose their full attention at times.