Bogus plagiarism narrative distracts from Benghazi message

The national media is loving it. They didn’t know how to deal with the serious issues being raised by speaker after speaker at the Republican convention last night. That is, until they were saved by a blogger, who pointed out some vague similarities between two sentences in Melania Trump’s class act prime-time speech and a speech by Michelle Obama

How were they to dismiss the impassioned account of Patricia Smith, mother of State Department communications officer Sean Smith, sent to his death in Benghazi because Hillary Clinton failed to heed requests for additional security?

{mosads}“I blame Hillary Clinton, personally, for the death of my son,” Mrs. Smith said. “The last time I talked to Sean, the night before the terrorist attack, he told me, ‘Mom, I am going to die.’ All security had been pulled” from the facility. “Nobody seemed to listen, nobody seemed to care,” she said.

That’s a serious charge, delivered with powerful emotion — a made for television moment. Now the left-stream media can safely ignore it to focus on a phony plagiarism charge.

How was the media to deal with the searing indictment of our national security posture by former Defense Intelligence Agency chief, Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, who reminded Americans that “war isn’t about political correctness” and “war is not about bathrooms?” Oh, that’s right. “People are leaving because Melania is done,” the lefties gloated. Saved by the bell.

It really was a bad night for the national media. They had to face a gritty, prime-time account by two of the GRS security officers from the CIA Annex in Benghazi of their 13 hour fight against scores of attackers, bravery that ultimately saved more than thirty American lives.

John Tiegen, Mark Geist and their comrades had no hope of reinforcements arriving during the fight – because Hillary Clinton was sitting on her hands for two critical hours in a White House gab fest, and ultimately ordered U.S. military assets to stand down. 

The nit the hacks on the left found this time was a comment by John Tiegen about how ridiculous his comrade looked with gauze hanging out of his shattered eardrum while he was shooting bad guys. That is so offensive, they whined. Somebody should change the diapers of these intellectual toddlers who pass themselves off as reporters. 

Even MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews realized last night that the nation is crying out for leadership. Leadership that won’t shy away from a battle, that won’t go play golf when it’s time to make tough decisions. And that is why Benghazi is such a seminal issue for all Americans in this election.

Mrs. Clinton received the proverbial 3 AM phone call, and she failed the test. Her failure is all the more telling since the call actually came at 4:05 in the afternoon, when she had all the time in the world, and all her staff around her to help her figure out what to do.

By 7 PM that evening, Washington time, the Pentagon had identified military units around the globe that could respond. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s chief of staff emailed his counterpart in Mrs. Clinton’s office to let her know that these assets were “being spun up as we speak.”

All they needed to deploy was Mrs. Clinton’s go-ahead. (As Secretary of State, ultimately responsible for the Benghazi facility, those units could not move without her approval).

Instead of signing off on the deployments, Mrs. Clinton joined a two-hour secure video teleconference with a bunch of political hacks at the White House. When she finally emerged at 9:30 PM, she gave orders to slow-roll the military response, and to focus on the YouTube video she had decided — falsely — to blame for the attacks.

The Benghazi Select Committee found that despite clear orders from President Obama and Defense Secretary Panetta, “nothing was sent to Benghazi, and nothing was en route to Libya at the time the last two Americans were killed almost 8 hours after the attacks began.” 

Instead, Mrs. Clinton wound up her vast public relations machine and created a diversion, a big lie aimed at deceiving the American people. It’s all the fault of a YouTube video, she told the American people.

As I reveal in a new book, even when it became clear that the YouTube video had nothing to do with Benghazi, Mrs. Clinton and her consigliere, Sid Blumenthal, continued to pump the story, so Americans wouldn’t start to probe the gun running and other black operations going on in Benghazi.

Now Benghazi is roaring back into the news, and so the national media is looking for a diversion — anything, no matter how phony — to divert our attention away from the truth.

Leadership matters. Truth matters. Elections matter.

Timmerman is a Donald Trump supporter. He was the 2012 Republican Congressional nominee for MD-8 and is the author of Deception: The Making of the YouTube Video Hillary & Obama Blamed for Benghazi, forthcoming from Post Hill Press in July.

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