Pushkin previously on fiasco.

A number of conservative media outlets were particularly genda.

This is a political cover up of some kind of intelligence officials acknowledged they originally got it wrong.

I know the Ghazi Annex chief personally, and he's a decent man.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee on Benghazi kicks off at the top of the hour.

Hillary Clinton's painted apparently hit her head and had that concussion.

I bet that we might never hear her testimony.

She doesn't want to answer the question.

When Alison Camarada was an anchor on Fox News, she talked about Benghazi a lot.

For what's been called Benghazi Gate.

There was a lack of security at the US consulate in Benghazi, but who is to blame for not beefing it up?

Was the administration just clueless or was there a cover up?

Joining us among other things, it was just a good, rich story with a seemingly endless stream of angles to explore.

There were some mysteries embedded in Benghazi that needed to be answered, so that gave it legs for sure.

There were four dead.

Americans and that is obviously something that resonated with our viewers, and they wanted justice, and we could beat the drum of justice.

At the time, Camarada was one of the co hosts of Fox and Friends Weekend.

She ended up leaving the network in twenty fourteen, and she's been public with her criticisms of Fox News in the years since.

But during the months after the Benghazi attack, Camarada spent her weekend mornings dutifully beating the drums of justice alongside her Fox colleagues.

That Chris Stevens was saying, we're under attack, We're under attack, please help, And of course nothing was done to help them.

Four Americans dead, and we need justice for this, so on wins.

According to Camarata, Fox's relentless emphasis on ben Ghazi came directly from the network's founder and chief executive, Roger Ales.

Sometimes at Fox, Roger got to be in his bonnet over certain stories, and we would do them time and again and again and again.

Ben Gazzi's right at the top of that list.

I don't know that it was some grand strategy from the get go, but I just think that he did naturally lean towards outrage.

Ales didn't personally dictate Fox's coverage at all times, but he didn't need to because his producers knew what he wanted.

By the time you became an executive producer at Fox, you could channel Roger.

It wasn't hard Obama, bad Muslims, bad Hillary, bad Republicans, good Democrats, crazy like it wasn't rocket science.

Before he created Fox News in nineteen ninety six, Ayles spent decades in conservative politics, serving as a campaign advisor to Richard Nixon, Mitch McConnell, and George H.

W.

Bush.

Later, he was the executive producer of a short lived TV talk show starring Rush limbar Ardys and gentleman Best Rush bar From the beginning, Ayle's positioned Fox News as a counterbalance to what he called the communist broadcasting system CBS and the Clinton News Network CNN.

Fox News channel fair and balanced, where news is going, where news should be.

But in its early days, Fox's conservative opinion shows like The O'Reilly Factor were kept at arm's length from its news division.

Few broadcasts take any chances these days, and most are very politically correct.

Well, We're going to try to be different, stimulating and a bit daring.

It was only gradually that Fox's identity as a platform for the right became more holistic By the time the Bengazi attack happened, the network was producing a mix of commentary, activism, and propaganda.

Welcome into Fox and Friends.

Fox and Friends Weekend, where Camarato worked, aired every Saturday and Sunday from six to ten am.

Well, I always saw Fox and Friends' Weekend as quite of a morning zoo of political talk.

I mean, I sometimes called it talk radio in a skirt.

I mean, it was a variety show.

It was mixing in the really incendiary political stuff, but not for too long.

We would immediately in a toss, turn to and coming up breaking news.

Subway sandwiches.

Foot long subs are only eleven and a half inches long.

Subway sandwiches foot long subs are only eleven and a half inches long.

I know, everyone, I fill your outage.

There's gonna be Camarata says that despite being an anchor, she didn't have much control over the actual content of Fox and Friends.

Because it aired so early in the morning, a small team of producers would always work overnight to build the next day's show.

By the time I got in, there was already a rundown.

It was a built show.

When I came in, I was busy.

You know, I was going and I was getting into my outfit.

I was getting into hair and makeup, and then I had like probably from five fifteen till I had to run to the set at five point fifty to get miked up to dive in and study.

You know, that's not enough time.

It just wasn't built to ever do real research.

It was basically headlines, talking points, and you know, mixing it up.

In January of twenty Thirteenillary Clinton was set to testify before Congress about Benghazi for the first time.

As it happened, she was planning to leave the Obama administration about a week later, which meant that her Benghazi testimony would be one of her last public appearances as Secretary of State.

While the White House preparing today for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to testify tomorrow regarding the deadly September eleventh attack on our consulate in Libya, Secretary.

Clinton was there was there a lot of anticipation for her appearance?

Oh god, yes, I mean part of the Fox model is just constant build up.

It's teasing.

Republicans are expected to grill her about what she knew about the attack and when she knew it.

Some have charged that the administration deliberately tried to hide that the ambush was the work of terrorists linked to al Qaeda.

It's teasing what's going to happen tomorrow.

It's teasing what's going to happen this week in front of committee.

It's teasing Hillary Clinton's appearance.

And that's not new what.

She knew when she knew it.

Is this going to get answered today?

She has had time to prepare, but she has an awful lot to answer for.

She's one of the top candidates for president in twenty sixteen, so she can either help move on or she could have a Susan roy Sunday Show moment.

And not.

The committee will come to order.

Clinton appeared in front of both the Senate and the House back to back.

She started her day shortly after nine am with a prepared statement in which she took responsibility for making changes of the State Department to prevent another tragedy.

As I have.

Said many times, I take responsibility, and nobody is more committed to getting this right.

For the most part, Clinton's questioners were fairly cordial.

Thank you, Adam, Secretary, and wonderful to see you in good health, and as combative as ever.

There were two points that kept coming up over and over again, and they generated the most intense moments of the day.

The first had to do with a case cable sent to the State Department with Ambassador Stevens's approval about a month before the attack.

The cable had warned about an increase in violent incidents in Benghazi and the rise of anti American militias.

Republicans wanted to know why Clinton hadn't personally reviewed the cable and weighed in that had I been president at the time and I found that you did not read the cables from Benghazi, you did not read the cables from bessaror Stevens, I would have relieved you of your post.

I think it's inexcusable.

The thing is.

The second point of focus was on the Obama administration's original explanation of the Bengazi attack as a protest gone wrong.

A Republican senator from Wisconsin wanted to know why Clinton hadn't immediately called the survivors of the attack to find out whether or not there really had been a protest that night.

We were misled that there was supposedly protests, and then something sprang out of that, and assault sprang out of that.

Clinton, who up to this point had appeared even keeled and in decent spirits, suddenly changed her tones, and they didn't.

With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans.

Was it because of a protest?

Or was it because of guys out for a walk when night, or decide they'd go kill some Americans?

What difference at this point does it make?

It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again.

Senator Now, honestly, this became the SoundBite of the day.

On the big broadcast networks, Clinton's testimony was described as fiery and riveting.

Today, this woman who has traveled the world as America's top diplomat, came to the Hill ready for a fight, and her.

Long awaited appearance before Congress was remarkable.

Harrying Hasso questions all day.

Clinton was also the political pro massaging big egos, sidestepping attacks when she could when she couldn't, giving as good.

As she got.

But on Fox News, the clip of Clinton saying what difference does it make?

Was played as callous indifference toward those who lost their lives in Bengazi.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's monumental gaff that may haunt her for the rest of her political career.

Allison Camarada covered Quinton's testimony as a fill in host on the regular weekday edition of Fox and.

Friends mad As Hill.

Secretary Clinton fires back at Congress in a battle over ben Ghazi.

What difference at this point does itn't make?

Well, this morning, we may have an answer for what difference it makes, and it may include three more dead Americans.

You're going to want to hear this, all right.

Fox really was good at sloganeering and catchphrases and coming up with a little outrage nugget to send viewers on their way, So that one just came, you know, ready made.

They just zeroed in for days and days and weeks and weeks on what difference does it make?

As though she was being callous, as though she was being cavalier.

Basically, they were trying to make it sound synonymous with who cares?

What difference at this point does itn't make?

It makes a lot of difference.

You may notice Camarata uses the word they when talking about Fox News.

Part of the reason it might just be that she doesn't work there anymore.

But even at the time, Camarada says she felt separate from the network and not fully bought in, which I admit reminds me of coming home in high school and telling my mom it was my friends who had been smoking, not me.

But Camarada told me that she was never comfortable with how her producers and co hosts talked about Bengazi, and in particular, how they presented the Clinton sound bite.

Over the coming weeks.

Camarada bristled at Fox's framing of what she thought was an uncontroversial comment if she listened to the whole thing, But Fox's producers often cut out right after what difference at this point does it make?

So they would end it right there instead of it is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, that's her next sentence, and they wouldn't always play that part.

Camarata decided to push back on air.

Her point is that what is the label?

What difference does the label make?

And her point, which then she didn't answer, is where's the justice?

Why hasn't it even been prosecuted?

We are our American was killed.

They were terrorists and had we gone.

It was a quiet rebellion and pretty easy to miss if you weren't looking for it.

But Camarada told me that every time she departed from the party line in this way, she felt like she was risking her job.

There was no winning that conversation with Roger.

He had his opinion, and you were supposed to sort of reflect his opinion.

Looking back, Camarata describes Fox's Bengazi coverage as a kind of feedback loop.

There is a certain kind of self fulfilling prophecy when it comes to outrage.

We did train the audience to become outraged.

Often the scripts.

Would say you'll be outraged right after a commercial.

We told people stick around for the outrage.

We told them they would be outraged.

We told them afterwards, were sure they are outraged, and lo and behold, they came outraged.

The right wing outrage machine was not invented by Fox News.

It had been around in various forms for decades, and Hillary Clinton had long been one of its favorite targets.

Now, in the aftermath of the Benghazi attack, the machine was about to kick into high gear.

I'm Leon Nafok from Prolog Projects and Pushkin Industries.

This is fiasco Bengazi.

He said, the government is lying to you.

What they're saying happened did not happen.

Is the Obama administrations threatened Benghazi whistleblowers.

I was literally afraid from my life.

What do you mean, stand down?

They're invading the place.

Yeah.

I think there's a direct line from what happened in the nineteen nineties to twenty sixteen.

Episode five Greatest Hits, in which Benghazi transforms from an Obama scandal into the ultimate Clinton scandal, as decades of built up Clinton lore provide all parties with a roadmap, a backstory, and a cudgel.

We'll be right back.

When Hillary Clinton testified before Congress in January of twenty thirteen, it was not her first time having to publicly address a scandal.

She had been fighting off various allegations ever since her husband Bill first ran for president in nineteen ninety two, long before Fox News even existed.

The din of controversy was a fact of life for the Clintons and a source of endless frustration.

Clinton was elected, and there were people in the right wing who didn't accept that election as legitimate.

This is David Brock.

During the early days of Bill Clinton's presidency.

He was a young journalist working at a conservative magazine called The American Spectator.

And you know, in circles that I was in, they were talking about impeaching him literally before he was even sworn into office.

So there was a machinery in place to try to make that happen.

As Brock tells it, the writing he did for The American Spectator was part of an effort known internally as the Arkansas Project.

It was funded by a conservative billionaire named Richard Mellen'scaife, and its purpose was to dig up dirt on the Clintons from before they moved into the White House.

Anything was fair game.

They were looking for anything they could find that could help, at first to cause problems for Clinton, and then it became more explicit mission to get him out office.

Brock told me that at the time he genuinely thought he was doing journalism, but he realized pretty quickly that his patrons saw him more as a political operative, and he embraced it.

The outgoing message on Brock's answering machine during Clinton's first term was I'm out trying to bring down the president.

That was the intention of the Arkansas project.

It used tactics of journalism, but it was more like political opposition research without any scruples at all.

It had no fealty to facts or truth.

If it was a myth that could stick, that was fine.

It was just to create an atmosphere in which it was difficult for Clinton to govern and to throw sand in the gears of any progress that would be made under Clinton.

In nineteen ninety three, Brock got a tip from a major Republican donor.

Apparently there were some Arkansas State troopers who had served on Bill Clinton's security detail while he was governor, and they had some salacious stories to tell about what they'd seen.

I went down to Arkansas.

I spent hours and hours debriefing the troopers.

They were seemingly first hand witnesses to these events.

The troopers told Brock that they had helped then Governor Clinton coordinate and cover up his extramarital.

Affairs, basically being part of a political movement that wanted to do damage to the Clintons.

You know, I took them at their word.

I did not do a lot of like checking beyond what they said.

As Brock explained it to me, the main goal of the story was to conjure the width of scandal so that journalists in the mainstream media could pick up the scent.

The Spectator had a relatively modest circulation and they were known to have an anti Clinton slant.

But if they could get coverage of the State Trooper story into a more mainstream outlet, it would remove the air of bias from the allegations and amplify the scandal to a massive audience.

Brock came to think of this process as scandal laundering.

One of the goals that the Spectator was to try to hook more established media onto some of our narratives.

You'd plant a seed and then it kind of grows on all sorts of places, and by the time you're done, it's on the evening news.

This is CNN.

When Brock was ready to go to press with his story, but the State Troopers, the American Spectator made a point of giving CNN a sneak peek.

They went for it.

They interviewed the troopers themselves the day the piece was published, and the troopers were on six o'clock evening news on CNN on a particular day the story broke, Hilary Sawer.

She told me, she said, I know who she is, I know what she is here for get the whole out of here.

So it very quickly got into the bloodstream of the mainstream media, which is what our goal was.

The troopers say they helped Clinton pick up women up to the day he left for Washington to become president.

The story became known as Troopergate.

The scandal had been duly laundered.

One senior administration official complained that every time they have to deny a new round of these kinds of allegations, it gets harder.

Over the next few years, the American Spectator printed one story after another suggesting that the Clintons were nothing less than criminal masterminds.

There were stories about Clinton being involved in drug grinning out of an airport in Arkansas.

There was some speculation that the Clintons somehow were implicated in Vincent Foster's death, which was a suicide, but was said to be something else.

What Brock is referring to here is the so called Clinton body count, a darkly absurd rumor alleging that the Clintons have had multiple close associates murdered the best known data point in this fantasy was always Vince Foster, a longtime friend and colleague of the Clintons who worked in the White House before taking his own life in nineteen ninety three.

After Foster's death, the allegation that the Clintons had something to do with it gained so much traction that it was discussed in congressional hearings.

One of the theories that sprouted from Foster's death was that he and Hillary Clinton have been having an affair, but there were many other theories too, and between nineteen ninety three and nineteen ninety seven, at least five official investigations looked into them.

Each one came to the same conclusion, including one led by independent counsel Ken Starr.

The Whitewater Special prosecutor.

Kenneth Starr issued his final report today on the death of former White House Deputy Council Vince Foster and reaffirmed that Foster was depressed and committed suicide.

Bill Clinton had famously bragged on the campaign trail that a vote for him was a vote for Hillary too.

I always say that that my slogan might well be a buy one, get one free.

Unfortunately for Hillary that seemed to mean that when it came to scandal, she and her husband would also be treated as a pair.

During just the first two years of Clinton's presidency, Hillary was implicated in Troopergate, which you've heard about, Travelgate, in which Hillary was accused of funneling government business to a travel agent friend, and Whitewater, which concerned an Arkansas real estate deal for which she spent four hours in front of a federal grand jury.

The White House today had little comment on the first lady's grand jury appear runs, other than to say she answered all questions and was not told she'd have to return.

When reports first surfaced about her husband's affair with a former White House intern, Hillary Clinton blamed a vast right wing conspiracy.

I mean, look at the very people who were involved in this.

They have popped up in other settings.

The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.

At the time, independent counsel Ken Starr dismissed the idea as nonsense, while the media portrayed Clinton as the woman who cried conspiracy won too many times.

The first lady salvo appears to be a favorite Clinton tactic, fired off in almost every scandal, from Jennifer Flowers to Paula Jones to Whitewater.

Instead of his Clinton raising her antenna and circling the country to find the source of our problems, she can look at her own family and she'll find them right there.

The problem for the Clintons was that some of what they were accused of turned out to be true.

No, they didn't have a kill list, but Bill Clinton did have extramarital affairs that he consistently lied about.

Also, the Clinton's attempts to damage control in the face of scandal often caused them to make decisions that looked suspicious and secretive.

I mean, both things ended up being true.

There was an affair with Monkolinsky, and there was a best right wing conspiracy.

So I think people said this is like a delusional type of defense, and that she had possibly deluded herself into thinking that the Lensky affair didn't happen.

But what got lost there was that both things were true.

Just because the allegations of the affair ended up being correct.

The way that all that was dug up was part of the wrongful scheme.

Back in nineteen ninety four, Rockets started working on a biography of Hillary Clinton.

His friends all assumed it would be a devastating takedown, but Brock found himself writing something much milder.

The book was almost generous to Clinton.

Rock called her intelligent, talented, ambitious, and very determined.

After the book was published, Brock found himself getting uninvited from dinner parties and not getting booked by right wing radio hosts like g Gordon Lyddy and Oliver North.

This cold reception wounded Brock and convinced him that his friends on the right were just as unscrupulous about the truth as his enemies on the left.

Eventually, Brock came to regret his work for the Arkansas Project, and in a piece for Esquire magazine titled Confessions of a right Wing hit Man, he described himself as having been bought and paid for by the conservative movement.

David Brock, the road warrior of the right, is dead, he declared.

Part of what happened was I felt complicit in the lying, the separation that I made from the right wing, and the conversion that I had wasn't really around ideology, it was around ethics.

In subsequent years, Brock made the most of his status as an x right wing defector.

In two thousand and four, he founded Media Matters, a liberal watchdog group that scrutinized the conservative media ecosystem.

Brock had once been a part of.

That ecosystem had changed dramatically since the early nineties, mostly due to the advent of Fox News.

But when Hillary Clinton became the focus of the Benghazi scandal, Brock got deja vu.

The phrase that was used was Hillary lied, four died, and so the idea that Hillary was a liar, she covered things up.

That was one of the through lines in Benghazi.

They were convinced that Hillary was hiding something, going back to the Whitewater scandal and Vince Foster and all the other things.

It had those same themes.

And then the fact that every allegation kept getting knocked down, debunked, and disproven didn't seem to slow it down.

The facts didn't matter, and it was hard to cut through the fog of disinformation.

Brock was ready to deploy Media Matters as a countervailing force.

In twenty thirteen, the website dedicated a huge percentage of its resources to monitoring Fox News' coverage of Benghazi.

Their goal was to delegitimize Fox's coverage in the eyes of mainstream journalists who might otherwise feel compelled to match it or amplify.

It, because you figure, you can't really change Fox itself, but you could change how others viewed Fox so that what happened with Whitewater didn't happen with Benghazi, that the whole rest of the media became obsessed with it as well, and then yeah, you'd never get out from under it.

Do you remember what your instructions were to your team at Media Matters in terms of how to cover Benghazi.

The main thing was, there's nothing too small to address.

Every minor charge, any minor misrepresentation could end up mushrooming and becoming quote a thing.

So we had to be very careful and listen very carefully, and be very attentive to every sort of jot and tittle of what they were saying, because you never knew what would get traction.

Just nine days after delivering her congressional testimony, Hillary Clinton said, farewell to the State Department.

And I hope that you will continue to make yourselves, make me and make our country proud.

Thank you all, and God bless you.

But no one expected her to leave the spotlight for long.

With the twenty sixteen election coming up, it was widely understood that Clinton would soon start running for the Democratic nomination, and so Clinton's handling of ben Gotta remained in the news, where the scandal would go on to sprout yet another new head, and this time there would be whistleblowers.

My husband and I were in Parpagnon, France.

We were right on the Mediterranean, and I awoke to my cell phone with a big headline US ambassador murdered in Benghazi.

This is Victoria Tunsing.

She's a lawyer who served in the Justice Department during the Reagan administration before going into private practice and making herself the go to attorney for various Republican causes.

Tunsing and her husband, a fellow lawyer named Joe Degeneva, became media stars during the nineties as legal commentators.

In nineteen ninety eight, the Washington Post reported that the couple had appeared on TV or in news stories talking about the Clinton Lewinsky scandal more than three hundred times in one month.

We have tapes where her voice to Lynda Tripp is saying I had a sexual relationship, and most importantly, people asked me to lie about it.

Here is one more person saying the president lied to me.

After the Benghazi attack, Tunsen got a phone call that made her want to get involved.

I got a call the next day from a good friend who I was supposed to meet in Paris, and he says, I can't do it.

These are my friends who were murdered in Benghazi.

According to Tunsing, her friend, a former lawyer.

The CIA then told her something she never forgot.

He said, the government is lying to you.

What they're saying happened did not happen.

When Tunsing got back to Washington, she put out a call on Capitol Hill saying she was willing to work pro bono on behalf of anyone involved in the Benghazi story.

About a week later, I get a phone call, we have a client for you to represent, and I find out the person that needed representation was the DCM, called the Deputy Chief of Mission, the number two person in the embassy.

The Deputy Chief of Mission in Tripoli was Greg Hicks.

You first heard from him in episode three when he was trying to reach Chris Stevens by phone as the attack in Benghazi was unfolding.

Later, when Hicks returned to the United States, he was asked to step down from his position in Libya.

He agreed, but when he started looking for another job at the State Department, he found that no one seemed interested in working with him.

I walked the halls of the State Department looking for a job.

I would get an interview and there would always be sad eyes, and they would listen and say, you really have a great career.

You've done a lot of good things, and we could certainly use you in this job, but we have another candidate.

I'm sorry, and you know, a couple of months later, I would look at the available jobs list and it would still be open.

Hicks suspected that higher ups in the State Department were blocking him from getting the jobs he was applying for.

He didn't know why exactly, but as far as as he could figure, his problems could be traced back to an incident involving a Republican Congressman, Jason Chaffits.

This gets slightly convoluted, so bear with me.

Chafits was investigating Benghazi as a member of the House Oversight Committee.

Roughly a month after the attack, he traveled to Libya's capital to see the US embassy with his own eyes.

Because of Chaefitz's role in the House investigation, the State Department sent one of its lawyers to sit in on all of his conversations with embassy officials, but when Hicks took chafits to meet with the local CIA station chief, the State Department lawyer was not allowed to join because he didn't have the necessary security clearance.

Afterwards, Hicks says he received a phone call from Hillary Clinton's chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, who was well known as a loyal, longtime associate of the Clintons.

She spoke for This is Clinton in many circumstances, so everyone in the department knew that if Cheryl Mills was calling, you set up straight and listened very carefully, because something is going to be imparted to you.

I was shaking in my boots.

According to Hicks, Mills wanted to know what had happened during Chaefitz's briefing with the CIA station chief, and though Hicks says she never explicitly said, she was angry at him for allowing the briefing to take place without the State Department.

Lawyer Hicks had no doubt she was furious.

It was in the tone of her voice.

She was very, very upset, and so in my view, this was a concern that Jason Chafitz may have gained information that would be released into the public debate leading up to the presidential election.

That is my interpretation of what was going on.

Later, when Hicks was back in Washington and struggling to find a new position in the State Department, he thought back to that phone call with Clinton's chief of staff and concluded that it was the reason he was now being blacklisted.

Hicks thought he had marked himself in Clinton's mind as someone who wasn't a team player, someone who couldn't be counted on to defend the administration when called to do so.

I became to think that all of this was being driven from Hillary Clinton's perspective, even though she was out of the administration by then, but also by the Obama administration.

They were afraid of me, and then they were creating even greater fears in my own mind that I was a threat to them, and I felt they were a threat to me.

I absolutely felt they were a threat to me.

It just becomes so negative in your own mind that what can I do?

Everything I do, I'm being squashed like a bug.

And on top of that, by this time, I also was beginning to believe that I was under surveillance.

Over time, as I was walking my dog at night, I noticed that there was constantly a truck park at the end of my cul de sac with the lights on point that at my house, and I was like, well, where did that truck come from?

And what's he doing here?

And so you begin to have tricks.

Played in your mind.

I don't know whether that was surveillance or not, but I came.

To believe that I was under surveillance.

Hicks's new lawyer, Victoria Tunsing, wasn't surprised by her client's experience.

This is what they do.

Democrats have no problem doing in a whistleblower.

The whistleblower they don't like, they kill.

Tonsing could personally relate to Hicks's fears.

Back in nineteen ninety eight, when she and her husband were appearing on TV to talk about the Clinton Lewinsky scandal.

They came to believe the White House was targeting them.

To when my husband and I were speaking out a lot about the Clintons.

They hired a private detective to find out anything about us, but they couldn't find anything.

At the time, Tunsing's husband made a similar claim during an interview on Meet the Press.

Deputies, Republican attorney Joe Degeneva, a commentator who defends Starr, says he was told he's being investigated too.

That is truly a frightening, frightening development.

It was a spectacular enough charge that the White House felt compelled to respond.

You don't retain private investigators that go Snooper ran about prosecutors, reporters or Joe Dejenneva.

Now, at the height of the Bengazi scandal, Tunsing's client Greg Hicks, also suspected he was being watched, and as he explained to me, the person he was thinking about was Vince Foster.

Did you fear for your life?

I did when the surveillance started.

I was very concerned.

The Vince Foss story was well known.

I knew of what had happened to him, and I was concerned that that I might be on a list for elimination.

I was literally afraid from my life.

You get to a point where just you become desperate, and so at this point I felt my only way out was to come forward and testify.

And so in May of twenty thirteen, after more than twenty five years as a State Department employee with no public profile, Greg Hicks stepped into the spotlight.

By this point, Fox News had spent two weeks talking about the anonymous whistleblowers getting ready to come out against the State Department.

As Hicks's representative, Victoria Tunsing made the most of the anticipation.

Well, let me just tell you that, knowing the unclassified information is, there are inconsistent facts with what the administer has said.

Can you sure any one of those with us?

No, I can't be.

I just can't, you know, be glad to come back here.

But in early May it was announced that the House Oversight Committee would hold a hearing to interview Hicks and three others.

Among them was a former marine in the State Department's Bureau of Counter Terrorism, who conveniently was being represented by Victoria Tunsing's husband.

At Fox News, the emergence of the whistleblowers was treated with unrestrained excitement.

Well, guess what, there's four whistleblowers now.

Who say that they have new information about Benghazi and what exactly happened that night and the county is.

The big ticket items expected from Hicks centered on two separate points.

First that the US military didn't do everything it could to help the Americans in Benghazi, and second that Hicks knew it was a terrorist attack immediately, even as the Obama administration was going on about an anti Islamic video.

Tunsing promised fireworks on heraldo at large, she and her husband and delivered what was essentially a promo for their client's testimony.

This purported testimony is a game changer.

Is it fair to say that your clients will debunk the notion that the scurreless anti Muslim video is what precipitated the violence in Benghazi without a doubt, without a doubt.

This is cover up, one oh one, without a doubt.

That's why we got involved.

Greg Hicks told me that having an advocate as aggressive as Victoria Tunsing made him feel less afraid.

It was a big watershed when I made the decision to go forward and be a whistleblower, and with Victoria as my attorney.

Victoria is such a confident person in such an accomplished lawyer that I just began to feel safer, and I began to feel better that I was on the right track, that I was doing the right thing.

She was instrumental in respect during my own natural self confidence.

I asked Hicks if he ever worried that associating himself with Tunsing, with her long record of anti Clinton activism, would undermine his credibility as a witness.

He told me he had barely thought about it, even if others did.

To an extent, I am fascinated by the sudden appearance in the Benghazi story of Joseph Degeneva and Victoria Tensing, who were two of the real stars of the anti Clinton legal community in the nineteen nineties.

When you want to keep a scandal ginned up, you go to the pros.

Eventually, in the days leading up to the whistleblower hearing, Fox News built up the anticipation, much like they did with Clinton's testimony in January.

It was a well guarded secret.

But we now know the identities of the ben Ghazi whistleblowers, So will we finally get answers about what happened?

We have nuans Even Alison Camarada, the reluctant weekend host of Fox and Friends was excited to hear the whistleblower's account.

I thought, ooh good, this will be interesting.

Like now I'm going to hear what happened.

Finally, the hearing had come to order.

Greg Hicks test to fight in front of the Oversight Committee on Wednesday, May eighth, twenty thirteen.

The hearing was titled Benghazi Exposing Failure and Recognizing Courage.

Hicks was billed as the star witness.

I'm glad my bladder was much stronger in those days because I literally sat in the same chair for six and a half hours.

In his opening statement, Hicks spent a full half hour recounting his experience on the night of the attack.

Under questioning, he expressed his belief that if military planes had been sent to Benghazi that night, it was possible they could have deterred the mortar attack on the CIA annex.

Hicks also described his reaction when he saw Susan Rice on the Sunday shows, saying the attack had grown spontaneously out of a protest.

I was stunned, my jaw dropped, and I was embarrassed.

There was one detail that stood out from the rest of Hicks's testimony.

It had to do with a decision made on the night of the attack by the US military's Central Command for Africa AFRICAM for short.

Hicks testified that a team of four Special Forces officers based in Tripoli had been ready to get on a plane to Benghazi, only to be told by someone at AFRICAM not to go.

Now.

Once again, this gets a little tricky, but as you may recall, one team of agents from Tripoli did fly to Benghazi during the attack.

In fact, one of them was killed at the CIA Annex.

The team Hicks was talking about in his testimony was separate.

They were getting ready to fly to Benghazi much later, closer to six a m.

After the attack was essentially over.

But Hicks saw the decision to keep them in Tripoli as a grave mistake.

As he put it, there was every reason to continue to believe that our personnel were in danger.

Here's how Congressman Jason Chafitz asked about afrikam's decision to hold back the Special Forces in Tripoli.

How did the personnel react at being told to stand down?

They were furious.

Well, I will quote Lieutenant Colonel Gibson.

He said, this is the first time in my career that a diplomat has more balls than somebody in the military.

Hicks himself never used the phrase stand down order, and he told me that he never thought the term was accurate.

But during the hearing, Republicans used the phrase repeatedly.

Where'd the standown order come from?

I believe it came from, and Hicks did not correct them.

Either Africom or South Africa, now I understanding is a general.

When the hearing ended, Hicks felt like he had done his part to bring the truth about Benghazi to the public.

So with that, this hearing is closed, but this investigation is not over.

I remember walking out of the ray Burn Building feeling like the weight of the world had lifted from my shoulders.

I felt very good about what I'd said and about how the hearing had transpired.

On MSNBC, the verdict was that Hicks's testimony had not revealed much in the way of new informations.

Fox News was all geared up today to really capture the outrage.

It's been endless politicization, and today this was their blockbuster, this was their watergate, and by two o'clock people were like changing the chance but on Fox News, the big takeaway was stand down order.

They were told to stand down.

What do you mean stand down?

They're invading the place.

Who told the military to stand down?

You're telling people to stand down?

You have no idea when.

The attack ends.

Media matters.

David Brock's website found that in the weeks after Hicks's testimony, Fox's primetime programming mentioned the standown order at least eighty five times.

It didn't matter that the team of Special Forces officers that was held back in Tripoli wouldn't have gotten to bend Gaussie and time to stand up to anyone.

The fact that they could have been sent and weren't was enough.

Hicks's testimony reinforced an idea that had been circulating in various forms since the attack that the Obama administration had made a deliberate decision not to rescue Chris Stevens and the others.

Among the Fox News anchors who talked about the standdown order was Allison Camarata.

Right, So, I mean a shocking revelation.

That was a particularly stunning moment on Wednesday at the hearings, because either we don't have contingency plans in place, I mean, I think it is an American's assumption that the reason that we have military stationed around the world is for events like this, that when something terrible is going down, that we, in a moment's notice, can at least attempt a rescue of our fellowtail.

This is Camarata on Fox and Friends Weekend, raising questions about the standdown order the Sunday after Hicks's hearing.

Right now, the next question, of course, by the way, should have been, or is now today, who gave that order to stand down?

Who was it that said don't send help to our people who were under attack?

Of who gave the stand down order?

Became the catchphrase that just kept on giving.

It embodied all of it, the outrage, the tragedy, the mystery.

It just had it all.

It never got old.

And I was very interested in who gave the standown order.

That was something that really intrigued me and piqued my interest, and I wanted to get to the bottom of it.

And then during the testimony it's clear that there was no standdown order given, and that comes up and people debunk it, but it never went away.

At Fox, it was too valuable to get rid of because that kept the viewers watching.

The phrase standdown order went through a strange evolution over the course of the Benghazi scandal.

It was almost like it got detached from any one specific situation and started getting used to refer to a bunch of different decisions that were made on the night of the attack.

For instance, you might recall from episode three that the Benghazi CIA station chief hesitated to send his men to the diplomatic compound when they first got the distress call, and that eventually they overruled him and just took off.

Fox News was calling that a standdown order as early as October of twenty twelve.

Separately, there was the decision not to send jets to Benghazi from Italy because it would have taken them too long to get there.

That was referred to as a stand down order too.

After Hicks's testimony, the phrase started being used in reference to that six a m decision in Tripoli, and against the backdrop of the other stand down orders, it just kind of tract.

And I'm curistic.

Were you conscious of at the time that there was a sort of conflation happening around this term stand doown order?

You are way overthinking this.

Once you have a handy slogan, don't try to dissect it too closely, Like, all you need to know is that somebody gave a standown order.

And maybe it's the CIA, maybe it's Hillary Clinton, maybe it was President Obama, maybe it was Africom.

But there was a standown order.

So the fact that it morphed from one to the other, that's just a little consequence.

You just got to keep repeating it and repeating it and repeating it.

Right, There's still so many questions.

I mean, who gave the order to stand down instead of trying to help?

And now who is looking for the perpetrators?

Why hasn't anyone been prosecuted?

Where is the justice?

We allow this to happen without justice?

Is that who we are now as a country when we have this.

Camarata's first show after the hearing coincided with Mother's Day.

To mark the occasion, Camarada's producers played a clip from an interview with Patricia Smith, the mother of the IT specialist who was killed in Benghazi, alongside Ambassador Stevens.

I want to wish Hillary a happy Mother's Day.

She's got her child.

I don't have mine because of her.

I know that In the.

Months after the attack, Smith appeared on Fox News multiple times speaking out about her son and her frustration with those she believed were responsible for his death.

But the government doesn't care.

They don't care about us people at all.

All they have to do is tell me what happened, and I would have gone away, but they didn't even bother.

I was an unimportant person and now I'm an unimportant person that doesn't have a child for Mother's Day, and I'm I feel it so deeply.

They cannot understand how I feel.

That's heartbreaking, heartbreaking to hear on Mother's Day.

But obviously the victims' families are not satisfied and they want more answers.

Her grief was raw.

Her grief was raw, and it never got less raw.

She just became this kind of go to victim.

I guess that Fox could keep exploiting and holding up as this personification of grief, and I found it really uncomfortable.

And I did hope that she got answers, you know, I mean, I could never have said on the air, Wow, we're really exploiting her.

I just think that I did the best I could.

Was there a distance for you internally about that?

And did that contribute to your decision to leave?

Oh?

Every day, every day, But I mean it wasn't just Benghazi.

I mean every day I wrestled with being at Fox, and I tried to leave many times, and Roger blocked me, and I felt trapped.

I still needed my paycheck.

I'm tap dancing pretty hard on the air, and I'm trying to preserve my integrity.

But you know, some days were harder than others.

I mean, it's just really unpleasant to be part of that outrage factory.

I didn't like it, and I tried in my own meager ways to either make it not an outrage factory, or to present a different position, or to be the voice of reason, or to add levity.

I tried to deploy lots of different coping mechanisms, and then at some point right after this, they just ran out.

We'll be right back.

Camarata left Fox News in March of twenty fourteen.

At her new job at CNN, she doesn't remember being asked to do any Benghazi coverage.

The fact that re a broader reluctance on the part of the mainstream media to treat the attack as a scandal.

That's not to say that Fox was the only outlet covering it.

In just the month following the attack, The New York Times put it on its front page eighteen times.

Meanwhile, two of the broadcast networks, CBS and ABC were so eager to get in on the action that they ended up airing stories that had to be retracted or substantially corrected.

The most important thing to every person at sixty minutes is the truth, and the truth is we made a mistake.

Still, by far, the most expansive coverage of Benghazi came from Fox News and other conservative outlets.

According to David Brock, this was a result of how much the media had changed since the nineties and how much more awareness there was and the part of mainstream journalists about how scandal laundering worked.

My sense of it was by that point, because Fox News was beating the drums so hard on it, it had the inverse effect, and there was more skepticism in the main media about picking it up because it had been such a Fox phenomenon, And so I think it was very different than what went on in the nineties, when the path to getting something from a place like The Spectator onto CNN was much easier.

Brock says that Benghazi was fueled by the same forces and in many cases the same individuals that drove earlier Clinton scandals like Whitewater and Troopergate.

The Clinton scandals, in the end, in my opinion, end up having very little to do with the details.

You know, I think there's a direct line from what happened in the nineteen nineties to twenty sixteen, and there was always something that was beyond just normal politics about the way they went after the Clintons.

What would you say was animating people like Victoria Tenzing.

I can't say for her exactly, but I can say that there was kind of a joy in the hunt.

I guess you could see that too, that they were in times of triumph, deliriously happy when they were able to score.

It feels almost too pat to say the Bengazi scandal was driven or propped up by a single news network, like it shouldn't be possible for it to have been so straightforward, And in fact, when Hillary Clinton was ensnared in scandal much earlier in her career, it wasn't that straightforward back then.

In order for stories about Vince Foster and Whitewater to gain traction, they needed to travel through the media ecosystem from the margins into the mainstream.

But in twenty thirteen that wasn't necessary anymore.

People like Victoria Tunsing didn't need to engage in scandal laundering to make an impact.

All they had to do was get on Fox News and they would immediately be heard by millions of people who would then post about it on social media, and they would be heard by Republican congressmen, who, when they weren't appearing on Fox News themselves, could turn the network's outrage into official action.

In my interview with Tunsing, I asked her if she felt like her client, Greg Hicks, had gotten what he wanted out of his time as a whistleblower.

You often ask Greg how he feels, but that that's not our practice of law.

Really, So you know, is your client still alive and is he working and is he relatively happy?

Is the criteria I use.

Well, but if your goal was to sort of help chip away at this person that you felt was lying and had done a terrible job and to keep them from attaining more power, you guys did pretty well at that.

I thought, Yeah, Well, I mean, you know, if Greg had really done a good job.

He'd be vice president is of company right now, and then you know that's you can ask him how he feels about it.

You know, if he'd do it again, I think he'd say yes.

But you don't know.

I found a patient, you know, I was in the emergency room.

I got a patient, and he walked out of the emergency room.

So that's how I look at it.

It's true that Hicks is not the vice president of a company, but after his testimony, he did manage to get a job working for Devin Nunez, one of the Republican congressmen who most voraciously chased the Bengazi scandal.

As Hicks told me, he knew his days of the State Department were over.

I felt that I had faced pretty serious retaliation and pressure.

Ultimately that led to my retirement from the State Department, and in August of twenty sixteen, when it looked quite likely that missus Clinton was going to become president, and I had no desire to ever work for her again.

And yet Hi says he never hated the Clintons, and that, in fact, after his testimony, he stopped believing that they had placed him under surveillance or that they were ever considering having him killed.

It's hard to think that people are just evil.

I think that missus Clinton exercised very poor judgment in a lot of instances over this incident.

Beyond that, you know Vince Foster, who knows kill lists.

That seems far gone to me.

I've never actually seen a list of names.

Show me the names, give me the facts.

Tell me why why the Clintons would have had all these people killed.

Explain that to me.

I don't.

I don't understand that there's a lot of hatred for them out there from a lot of.

People that's not me.

On the next and final episode of Fiasco, the FBI captures a Libyan man accused of helping plan the Bengazi attack, while a congressional investigation surfaces a devastating revelation about Hillary Clinton email gate.

Hillary Clinton has some explaining to do.

Hillary Clinton email mess This story is something for everyone.

For a list of books, articles, and documentaries we used in our research, follow the link in our show notes.

Fiasco is a production of Prolog Projects, and it's distributed by Pushkin Industries.

The show is produced by Andrew Parsons, Ulla Kulpa, Sam Lee and Me Leon Mayfock, with editorial support from Sam Graham Felsen and Madelin Kaplan.

Our researcher was Francis Carr.

Our score was composed by Dan English, Joe Valley and Noah Hecht.

Additional music by Nick Sylvester, Billy Libby and Joel Saint Julian.

Our theme song is by Spatial Relations Audio mixed by Rob Buyers, Michael Raphael and Johnny Vince Evans.

Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips and y Copyright Council.

Provided by Peter Yassi at Yasi Butler PLC.

Thanks to Archive dot Org, Hannah Groach, Begley, Mark Thompson and Mark Zaid.

Special thanks to Lubinari and thank you for listening.

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