Clinton Pins Benghazi Responsibility on Ambassador

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton brushed aside emails Thursday that showed she privately told family and world leaders that the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi was a terrorist assault, and said Ambassador Christopher Stevens was responsible for his own decisions regarding skimpy security ahead of his death.

Testifying to the House Select Committee on Benghazi, a composed and controlled Mrs. Clinton said she was involved in the big decisions of deploying Stevens to Libya and pressing President Obama to lead the war effort that ousted Moammar Gadhafi. But she deflected responsibility for much of what went wrong, saying the ambassador’s requests for more protection, which were denied, were handled at levels beneath her.

Mrs. Clinton also revealed that she gave orders for her lawyer and aides to go through her emails, but she did not “look over their shoulder” and didn’t know exactly how they decided which emails were work-related business. And she declined to agree to release any emails recovered from her server.

In a hearing that lasted more than eight hours, Mrs. Clinton escaped without the kind of major gaffe that plagued her 2013 appearance before the Senate.

But she seemed unsure of whether she spoke with Stevens in the months between swearing him in as ambassador and the attack, in which he died of smoke inhalation. (Read more from “Clinton Pins Benghazi Responsibility on Ambassador” HERE)

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