Hillary Clinton Was Looking For A Movie About Libya On Day of Benghazi Attack

The Associated Press
The Associated Press

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was looking for a Harvey Weinstein movie about Libya on the day of the Benghazi terrorist attack in Libya.

Clinton might have wanted to see the film because she was in it herself.

At 5:50 AM on the morning of September 11, 2012, Clinton sent an email to her top aide Huma Abedin and also to another person whose name was redacted in an email release with the subject line “Request.”

“Can you get us a copy of Bernard Henri-Levi’s [sic] film about Libya?” Clinton asked. “I think Harvey made it and showed it at Cannes last spring.”

Clinton was clearly referring to Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood super-producer. “Cannes” is a ritzy film festival held each year in the south of France.

Clinton was referring to a documentary called “The Oath of Tobruk,” which scholar Bernard-Henri Levy directed during the Arab Spring as revolution enveloped Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya. Levy was a supporter of U.S. intervention in Libya like the kind that Clinton spearheaded, which is widely seen to have forged further instability in the African country.

Clinton is in the film talking about gender issues.

“US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recounts how she personally told the NTC chief that she hoped Libyan women would be allowed to play a role in the new Libya,” according to a france24.com description of the movie.

The French documentary was short on facts but big on hubris, according to a review in Variety.

“Levy is France’s media star philosopher, a peculiarly Gallic creation whose immaculate tailoring and savvy self-promotion make him the darling of celeb rags and higher institutions. With ‘Tobruk,’ he’s finally been subsumed by his own ego, placing himself front and center of Libya’s revolution and barely acknowledging other forces. Such self-aggrandizement will play to only acolytes at home,” Variety wrote. “Though the Weinsteins picked up the docu pre-Cannes, it’s unlikely even PBS will run such a baldly skewed piece of reportage.”

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