Benghazi: Episode 5 - Greatest Hits

This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey there, my name is Jody Avergan. Have you noticed the present day, it feels pretty rocky? Well, I think history can help. What's more, this little country of ours, the United States, it's turning 250 soon. So how did we get here? On this day, historians Nicole Hammer and Kelly Carter Jackson and I sit down to look at stories from the past, silly, surprising, deeply relevant, that feel like they have something to teach us about today. This day, three times a week, you can find it wherever you're listening right now. Bushkin. Previously on Fiasco, a number of conservative media outlets were particularly gendered. This is a political cover-up of some kind. Intelligence officials acknowledge they originally got it wrong. I know the Gazi 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 fainted, 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. An Allison Camarata was an anchor on Fox News. She talked about Benghazi a lot. 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, Camarata was one of the co-hosts of Fox and Friends Weekend. She ended up leaving the network in 2014 and she's been public with her criticisms of Fox News in the years since. But during the months after the Benghazi attack, Camarata spent her weekend mornings, dutifully beating the drums of justice alongside her Fox colleagues. 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 Wednesday. According to Camarata, Fox's relentless emphasis on Benghazi came directly from the network's founder and chief executive, Roger Ailes. 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. Benghazi is 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. Ailes didn't personally dictate Fox's coverage at all times. 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 1996, Ailes 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. From the beginning, Ailes positioned Fox News as a counterbalance to what he called the Communist Broadcasting System, CBS and the Clinton News Network, CNN. Where news should be? But in its early days, Fox's conservative opinion shows like the O'Reilly factor were kept at arms 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. But at the same time, it was only gradually that Fox's identity as a platform for the right became more holistic. By the time the Benghazi attack happened, the network was producing a mix of commentary, activism and propaganda. Welcome in the Fox and Friends weekend where Camarada worked, paired every Saturday and Sunday from 6 to 10 a.m. Well, I always saw Fox and Friends weekend as kind 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, footlong subs are only 11 and a half inches long. Subway sandwiches, footlong subs are only 11 and a half inches long. I know everyone. I feel your outrage. Camarada 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 515 till I had to run to the set at 550 to get mic'd 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 2013, Hillary 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 11 attack on our consulate in Libya. 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 news. 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 2016, so she can either help move on or she could have a Susan Roy Sunday show moment and not. Clinton appeared in front of both the Senate and the House back to back. She started her day shortly after 9am with a prepared statement in which she took responsibility for making changes at 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, Madam Secretary, and it's wonderful to see you and 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 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. But I've been president at the time and I've found that you did not read the cables from Benghazi. You did not read the cables from Ambassador Stevens. I would have believed you have your post. I think it's inexcusable. The second point of focus was on the Obama administration's original explanation of the Benghazi attack as a protest gone wrong. Or 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. And they were supposedly protested and then something sprang out of that and assault sprang out of that. Clinton, who up to this point, had appeared even keeled and indecent spirits suddenly changed her tone. And they didn't know that. 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 one night who decided 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. This became the sound bite 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. Paring hostile questions all day, Clinton was also the political pro, massaging big egos, quiet stepping attacks when she could, when she couldn't, giving as good as she got. But on Fox News, the clip of Clinton saying what differences it make was played as callus indifference toward those who lost their lives in Benghazi. To the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton's monumental gaff that may haunt her for the rest of her political career. Allison Camarada covered Clinton's testimony as a fill-in host on the regular weekday edition of Fox and Friends. Mad as Hill, Secretary Clinton fires back a Congress in a battle over Benghazi. What difference at this point does it 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. Fox really was good at slogan-earing 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 callus, as though she was being cavalier. Basically, they were trying to make it sound synonymous with who cares. What difference at this point does it make? It makes a lot of difference. You may notice Camarada uses the word they when talking about Fox News. Part of the reason it might just be this doesn't work there anymore. 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 Benghazi, and in particular how they presented the Clinton sound bite. Over the coming weeks, Camarada bristle that Fox's framing of what she thought was an uncontroversial comment if you listen 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. Camarada decided to push back on air. Well 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 been prosecuted? We are Americans. But it was killed. The label wasn't done. 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, Camarada describes Fox's Benghazi 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 to stick around for the outrage. We told them they would be outraged. We told them afterwards we're sure they are outraged and lo and behold, they became 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 Nefak. From prologue projects and push-in industries, this is Fiasco, Benghazi. He said the government is lying to you. What they're saying happened did not happen. The Obama administration's threatening Benghazi whistleblowers. I was literally afraid for my life. What do you mean, stand down. They're invading the place. I think there's a direct line from what happened in the 1990s to 2016. Episode five, greatest hits. In which Benghazi transforms from an Obama scandal into the ultimate Clinton scandal. These decades of built up Clinton lore provide all parties with a roadmap, backstory, and a cudgel. We'll be right back. Hey there, my name is Jody Avergan. Have you noticed the present day, it feels pretty rocky. Well I think history can help. What's more, this little country of ours, the United States, it's turning 250 soon. So how did we get here? In this day, historians Nicole Hammer and Kelly Carter Jackson and I sit down to look at stories from the past, silly, surprising, deeply relevant that feel like they have something to teach us about today. This day, three times a week, you can find it wherever you're listening right now. When Hillary Clinton testified before Congress in January of 2013, 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 1992. Long before Fox News even existed, the day of controversy was a fact of life for the Clinton's and the 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 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 Mellon-Scafe. 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 cause problems for Clinton. And then it became more explicit mission to get him out of 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 fieldity 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 1993, 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 error 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 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 a story about 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, so it was the clock evening news on CNN. On a particular day, the story broke. Hillary Saur. She told me she said, I know who she is. I know what she is here for. Get the whore 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-granting out of an airport in Arkansas. There was 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 1993. 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. In between 1993 and 1997, at least five official investigations looked into them. Each one came to the same conclusion, including one led by independent counsel Ken Star. The Whitewater Special Prosecutor Ken Star issued his final report today on the death of former White House deputy counsel 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 my slogan might well be 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 trooper gates, which you've heard about, travel gate in which Hillary was accused of funneling government business to a travel agent friend and whitewater, which concerned an Arkansas re-state 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 appearance 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 Star dismissed the idea as nonsense. While the media portrayed Clinton as the woman who cried conspiracy one too many times. The first lady's salvo appears to be a favorite Clinton tactic. Fire it off in almost every scandal from Jennifer Flowers to Paula Jones to Whitewater. Instead of us clinton raising her antenna and circling the country to find the source of our problems, I think 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 Clintons' attempts at 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 Monica Linsky and there was a vast 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 Linsky 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 1994, Brock had started working on a biography of Hillary Clinton. His friends all assumed it would be a devastating take down. But Brock found himself writing something much milder. The book was almost generous to Clinton. Brock 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 Liddy 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 Hitman, 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 ex-right-wing defector. In 2004, 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 90s, 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 for died. And so the idea that Hillary was a liar, she covered things up, that was one of the throughlines in Benghazi, they were convinced that Hillary was hiding something. Going back to the white water 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 and 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 counter-vailing force. In 2013, the website dedicated a huge percentage of its resources to monitoring Fox News' coverage of Benghazi. Their goal was to de-legitimize Fox's coverage and 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 white water didn't happen with Benghazi, that the whole rest of the media became obsessed with it as well. And then 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 tiddle of what they were saying because you never knew what would get traction. 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 2016 election coming up, it was widely understood that Clinton would soon start running for the Democratic nomination. So, Clinton's handling of Benghazi 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 Parpanol, 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 Tonsing. 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. Tonsing in her husband, a fellow lawyer named Joe DeGeneva, became media stars during the 90s as legal commentators. In 1998, the Washington Post reported that the couple had appeared on TV or in news stories talking about the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal more than 300 times in one month. We have tapes where her voice to Linda Trip 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, Tonsing 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 Tonsing, her friend, a former lawyer at 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 Tonsing 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. Well, 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 D.C. 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 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. 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 you could figure, his problems could be traced back to an incident involving a Republican Congressman, Jason Chafetz. This gets slightly convoluted, so bear with me. Chafetz 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 U.S. Embassy with his own eyes. Because of Chafetz'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 Chafetz 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, long-time associate of the Clintons. She spoke for Mrs. Clinton in many circumstances. So everyone in the Department knew that if Cheryl Mills was calling you, sit up straight and listen 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 Chafetz'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 Chafetz 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 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 pointed 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' new lawyer, Victoria Tonsing, 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' fears. Back in 1998, 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 too. 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, Tonsing's husband made a similar claim during an interview on Meet the Press. Republican attorney Joe DeGeneva, a commentator who defends Star, 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. We don't retain private investigators that go snoop around about prosecutors, reporters, or Joe DeGeneva. Now, at the height of the Benghazi scandal, Tonsing'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 Foster story was well known. I knew of it, what had happened to him. And I was concerned that I might be on a list for elimination. I was literally afraid for my life. You get to a point where 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 2013, after more than 25 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 Tonsing 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 administration has said. Can you share any one of those with us? No, I can't because I just can't. You know, we're 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 Counterterrorism, who conveniently was being represented by Victoria Tonsing's husband. At Fox News, the emergence of the whistleblowers was treated with unrestrained excitement. I guess what? There's four whistleblowers now who say that they have new information about Benghazi, and what exactly happened that night and the caveat 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. Tonsing promised fireworks. On Heraldo at large, she and her husband delivered what was essentially a promo for their clients' testimony. This purported testimony is a game changer. Is it fair to say that your clients will debunk the notion that the scurrilous anti-Muslim video is what precipitated the violence in Benghazi? Without a doubt. Without a doubt. This is cover-up 101. Without a doubt, that's why we got involved. Greg Hicks told me that having an advocate as aggressive as Victoria Tonsing 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 was such a confident person and 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 restoring my own natural self-confidence. I asked Hicks if he ever worried that associating himself with Tonsing 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. I'm fascinated by the sudden appearance in the Benghazi story of Joseph DeGeneva and Victoria Tonsing who were two of the real stars of the anti-Clinton legal community in the 1990s. When you want to keep a scandal, ginned up, you go to the pro's 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 Benghazi whistleblowers. So will we finally get answers about what happened? We have new incidents. Even Allison 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 has come to order. The Oreg Hicks testified in front of the oversight committee on Wednesday, May 8, 2013. 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 the first time. 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' testimony. It had to do with a decision made on the night of the attack with the U.S. military's central command for Africa, Afrika 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 Afrika 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 6am, 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 Chafetz asked about Afrika's decision to hold back the special forces in Tripoli. How did the personnel react to it 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 stand down order come from? And Hicks did not correct them. Either Afrika or South Africa. 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 Rayburn building, feeling like the weight of the world had lifted from my shoulders. I felt very good about what I had 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 information. So Fox News was all geared up today to really capture the outrage. It's been an endless politicization. And today, this was their blockbuster, this was their watergate, and by two o'clock people were like changing the chat. 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 stand down order at least 85 times. It didn't matter that the team of Special Forces officers that was held back and triply wouldn't have gotten to Benghazi in 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 stand down order was Allison Kamarata. Right, so I mean 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 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 fellow. This is Kamarata on Fox and Friends weekend raising questions about the stand down order the Sunday after Hicks is hearing. 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? 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 stand down order that was something that really intrigued me and peaked my interest and I wanted to get to the bottom of it and then during the testimony it's clear that there was no stand down 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 stand down 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 3 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 stand down order as early as October of 2012. 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' testimony, the phrase started being used in reference to that 6am decision in Tripoli and against the backdrop of the other stand down orders, it just kind of tracked. I'm just curious, were you conscious of at the time that there was a sort of conflation happening around this term stand down order? You are way overthinking this. Once you have a handy slogan, don't try to dissect it too closely. All you need to know is that somebody gave a stand down order and maybe it's the CIA, maybe it's Hillary Clinton, maybe it was President Obama. Maybe it was Afro-com, but there was a stand down 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. There's still so many questions. 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? Cameradas first show after the hearing coincided with Mother's Day. To mark the occasion, Cameradas 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. 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 had 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 feel it's so deeply. They cannot understand how I feel. That's heartbreaking. Heartbreaking to hear on Mother's Day. But obviously the victim's 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. 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? 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. Hey there. My name is Jody Avergan. Have you noticed the present day? It feels pretty rocky. Well, I think history can help. What's more, this little country of ours, the United States, it's turning 250 soon. So how did we get here? Today, historians Nicole Hammer and Kelly Carter Jackson and I sit down to look at stories from the past, silly, surprising, deeply relevant that feel like they have something to teach us about today. This day, three times a week, you can find it wherever you're listening right now. Camerata left Fox News in March of 2014 at her new job at CNN. She doesn't remember being asked to do any Benghazi coverage. A fact that reflected 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 18 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 60 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 90s. And how much more awareness there was in 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 almost 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 90s when they passed 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 details. I think there's a direct line from what happened in the 1990s to 2016. And there was always something that was beyond just normal politics about the way they went after the Clinton's. What would you say was animating people like Victoria Tensing? 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 Benghazi 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 2013, that wasn't necessary anymore. People like Victoria Tensing 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 Tensing, 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's not our practice of law, really. So is your client still alive and is he working and is he reveled safely happy is the criteria I use? Well, but if your goal is 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. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, if Greg had really done a good job, he'd be vice president of some company right now. And then, you know, that's, you can ask him how he feels about it. If he'd do it again, I think he'd say yes, but maybe not 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 Devon Nunes. One of the Republican congressmen who most voraciously chased the Benghazi 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 in August of 2016 when it looked quite likely that Mrs. Clinton was going to become president. And I had no desire to ever work for her again. And yet, Hicks 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 Mrs. 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 I don't understand that. There's a lot of hatred for them out there from a lot of people. That's not that's not me. On the next and final episode of Fiasco, the FBI captures a Libyan man accused of helping plan the Benghazi 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 has 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 prologue projects and it's distributed by Pushkin Industries. The show is produced by Andrew Parsons, Ula Culpa, Sam Lee and me, Leon Mayfac, with editorial support from Sam Graham Felsen and Madeline 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 St. Julian. Our theme song is by Spatial Relations, audio mix by Rob Buyers, Michael Rayfield and John Evans. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips and Y. Copyright Council provided by Peter Yassi at Yassi Butler, PLLC. Thanks to archive.org, Hannah Grogebeggley, Mark Thompson and Mark Zayn. Special thanks to Luminary. And thank you for listening. Binge the entire season of Fiasco, Benghazi, ad free by subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Sign up on the Fiasco Show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus. Pushkin Plus subscribers can access ad free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges and bonus content for all Pushkin podcasts. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.