Hillary: Benghazi Victim Mother ‘Absolutely Wrong’ to Call Me a Liar

Wednesday at the CNN Democratic presidential debate, candidate Hillary Clinton said Patricia Smith, the mother of Sean Smith, who died in the 2012 Benghazi terror attack is “absolutely wrong” for saying Clinton lied to her about the attack being a spontaneous protest because of an anti-Muslim YouTube video.

Partial transcript as follows:

RAMOS:  Secretary Clinton, on the night of the attacks in Benghazi, you sent an e-mail to your daughter Chelsea saying that al qaeda was responsible for the killing of the Americans, however some of the families claim you lied to them, the mother of the information officer. Listen.

VIDEO: Hillary and Obama and Panetta and Biden and Susan Rice all told me it was a video when they knew it was not the video. They said they would call me and let me know what the outcome was.

RAMOS: Secretary Clinton, did you lie to them?

CLINTON: I feel a great deal of sympathy for the families of the four brave Americans that we lost at Benghazi, and I certainly can’t even imagine the grief that she has for losing her son, but she’s wrong. She’s absolutely wrong. I and everybody in the administration, all the people she named, the president, the vice president, Susan Rice, we were scrambling to get information that was changing literally by the hour, and when we had information, we made it public. But then sometimes we had to go back and say we have new information that contradicts it. So I testified for 11 hours. Anybody who watched that and listened to it knows that I answered every question that I was asked and when it was over, the Republicans had to admit they didn’t learn anything. Why? Because there had already been one independent investigation, there had been seven or eight congressional investigations, mostly led by Republicans who all reached the same conclusions, that there were lessons to learned. And this is not the first time we lost Americans in a terrorist attack. We lost 3,000 people on 9/11. We lost Americans serving in embassies in Tanzania and Kenya when my husband was president. We lost 250 Americans when Ronald Reagan was president in Beirut. At no other time were those tragedies politicized. Instead people said, let’s learn the lesson and save lives. That’s when I did.

Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN

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