Fox News has repeatedly defended the claims of an alleged Benghazi “witness” who appeared in a discredited CBS report about the 2012 attack -- even after he accused the network of lying about his request for money.

An October 27 60 Minutes report featured an interview with “Morgan Jones,” a pseudonym for private security contractor Dylan Davies, who claimed to have scaled a wall of the Benghazi diplomatic compound while it was under attack and struck a terrorist with his rifle. This claim differed from the account Davies gave to his employer for an incident report, obtained by The Washington Post, which stated that he “could not get anywhere near” the compound that night. Davies later claimed in a November 2 interview with The Daily Beast that he had lied in the incident report.

Fox dismissed these inconsistencies in order to defend Davies as a “credible” source. On November 4, Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade claimed that the incident report was leaked to “discredit a seemingly very credible witness about those attacks,” and on November 5, Kilmeade asked Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to explain why it's significant that Davies was “outed in The Washington Post as he comes forward with a different version of the reality on the ground that night.”

Not only did Fox continue promoting Davies' claims by glossing over the fact that he had lied, but the network has also ignored Davies' accusation that Fox News smeared him after reporter Adam Housley said on October 28 that Davies asked the network for money (emphasis added):

HOUSLEY: He reaffirms, really, what we've been reporting. In fact, Jenna, some of our reports for FoxNews.com last fall included this 60 Minutes' witness' account. He spoke to me on the phone a number of times and then we stopped speaking to him when he asked for money. But what he does do in his 60 Minutes appearance last night is once again kind of reaffirm the fact that this attack was vicious. That is was pre-planned. That they knew from the very beginnings of this attack this was not some random situation, this was a pre-planned attack.

In his Daily Beast interview, Davies denied the accusation that he asked Fox News for money:

Davies said he believed there was a coordinated campaign to smear him. This week, Media Matters, a progressive media watchdog, sent a public letter to CBS News asking it to retract the 60 Minutes Benghazi piece on the basis of the Washington Post article. On the Fox News Channel, reporter Adam Housley claimed on air this week that Davies asked for money in exchange for an interview. Davies denied this charge. 60 Minutes has stood by its reporting.

It appears that Fox News is more interested in pushing the Benghazi hoax than in defending its own credibility.

For more on conservative media myths about the September 2012 attack, read The Benghazi Hoax, the new e-book by Media Matters' David Brock and Ari Rabin-Havt.