In a recent interview on Fox News, Josh Rogin, the senior correspondent for national security and politics for The Daily Beast, was unsparing in his criticism of Hillary Clinton’s record of negligence and incompetence during her tenure as Obama’s Secretary of State.
He appeared on Fox Saturday with Tucker Carlson to discuss Clinton’s decision not to add Boko Haram to the State
Department’s official list of foreign terrorist organizations, even as the group was becoming increasingly violent and officials from other departments in the Obama administration were pressing her to do so.
“Hillary Clinton fought her own CIA over designating Boko Haram a terrorist organization. Why would she do that?” Carlson asked Rogin.
It wasn’t just the CIA, Rogin corrected Carlson. Other agencies pressuring for the terrorist designation included “the FBI, the Justice Department, some White House officials, and some officials inside her own department. He said the basic reason for her refusal was “because the Nigerian government didn’t want her to do it, and she yielded to them.”
Rogin claimed that US law enforcement agencies who saw Boko Haram attack the UN building in the Nigerian Capital in 2011 were telling her, “this is a terrorist organization, we have to do something about it.”
Rogin continued, “General Ham said we need the tools and authorities this designation gives us to go after this group, and she didn’t want to do it. So now she’s very clear that Boko Haram is a group of terrorists, but a lot of people have been saying that for a very long time.”
“It speaks to her claim that she’s at the forefront of protecting women, and girls in conflict. But it also speaks to her handling of international terrorism, which has been called into big question following her handling of the attack in Benghazi,” Rogin said.
“The criticism in Benghazi is that she didn’t call it a terrorist attack soon enough, that she blamed the video, and that she didn’t realize that al-Qaeda was metastasizing, growing into North Africa. Well, here is another example of al-Qaeda spreading into North Africa and the administration being asleep at the wheel. Their narrative was al-Qaeda is on the run, and apparently al-Qaeda is not on the run,” Rogin added.
Rogin said Clinton’s office didn’t respond to his request for comment because, “what can they say?”
He predicted that this topic would come back to haunt Clinton should she choose to run for president in 2016. “The fact that she did this is indisputable; she has not come up with a justification. If she runs, you can be sure that the calls for to explain herself will continue because she’s not going to be able to remain silent on this issue forever,” Rogin concluded.
Via The Washington Free Beacon:
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