Remember the alleged threat of Y2K wrecking
computers and disrupting the world at the outset of 2000?
Remember all the talk of a cataclysmic disaster we'd face when the planet aligned itself with the sun and the center of the Milky Way galaxy on Dec. 21, 2012?
Well, in fitting with those types of utter duds unworthy of the hoopla, we now have Congressman Dana Rohrabacher.
The Orange County congressman angrily promised he was going to “interrogate” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today on Benghazi and prove, what he told CNN's Anderson Cooper in November: That President Barack Obama's response to the lethal terrorist attack on American diplomats in Libya was a lie and a crime “worse than Watergate.”
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“The arrogance and dishonesty reflected in all of this is a little bit breathtaking,” Rohrabacher told Cooper.
Today, the Costa Mesa Republican had his five minutes on the national stage to grill Clinton face to face and expose for the world the truthfulness of his conspiracy theories about Obama and Benghazi . . . and . . . he fell on his face.
Wasting his own time, Rohrabacher first talked about Congress having the right to investigate government matters (nobody said it didn't) and that he was offended anyone would suggest that House Republicans were hypocrites for complaining about weak embassy security (though the House had cut Clinton's budget request for embassy security).
With nearly half of his time then gone, he finally got to a question.
“When did you talk to the president [about the Benghazi attack]?”
“I talked to the president at the end of the day, but I had been in constant contact and communication with the national security advisor,” replied Clinton. “I'd been on secure video conferences with high level officials in the White House.”
Clinton 1, Rohrabacher 0.
From the strained look on his face, the congressman must have known that his time to unmask Obama's lies were close to ending and so he fired off his second question: “At anytime did you see the initial attack on a monitor . . . or the president?”
That was it? Even Clinton appeared bored.
“Congressman, there was no monitor, there was no real time,” she said. “We got the surveillance videos some weeks later. That was the first time we saw any video of the attack.”
Clinton 2, Rohrabacher 0.
“As you were dealing with the crisis as it went on did you think or act on the basis that this was a film protest gone out of control and when you briefed the president did you tell him that or did you tell him what Admiral [Michael] Mullen suggests, that you knew by then that this was a well planned and executed terrorist attack–which was the president told?”
Clinton calmly replied, “First of all, I said the very next morning that it was an attack by heavily armed militants. The president said that morning that it was an act of terror. At the same time, I was dealing with protests against facilities that were clearly connected to that video.”
Rohrabacher then interrupted Clinton to try to bolster his conspiracy theory. He suggested that she gave the right answer to the American people about the attack, not because it was correct and honest, but in sneaky furtherance of Obama's conspiracy to trick the public about events.
Huh?
“Let's just say that you noted that, uh, it can be, people do this [give the correct, honest answer], so that you can say that you said it,” reasoned a flustered Rohrabacher, who went on to suggest that Clinton and Obama “over and over again” said that a poorly made, anti-Islam movie caused the attack.
But, though he's claimed otherwise over and over, Orange County's senior career politician has no such evidence that either Clinton or Obama ever made that assertion.
Game, set, match to Clinton.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.