Fox News hosts criticized a distorted version of Hillary Clinton's congressional testimony on the 2012 Benghazi attacks, falsely suggesting that the former secretary of state had been indifferent to the cause of the attack.

On December 10, the hosts of Outnumbered recalled former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's January 2013 congressional testimony in a discussion on the day's hearing of the Republican-led House Select Committee on Benghazi. Co-host Andrea Tantaros alleged Clinton said, “It doesn't really make a difference what happened on that night” of the attack, and continued, “whether it was men out for a walk.” Co-host Kennedy agreed, suggesting Clinton's “strange and insulting line of reflection” evidenced indifference to the lives lost in the attacks. Kennedy went on, "[I]t actually makes a very big difference. If you've got a systemic problem with Al Qaeda who's ready to attack a vulnerable U.S. embassy, then yeah, that's vastly different than a couple people that just get together with some incendiary devices." 

That's an egregious stretch of Clinton's remarks.

During her congressional testimony, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) asked Clinton about the State Department's role in editing Obama administration talking points to remove a reference to the Benghazi attackers' motive. In response, she dismissed the relevance of debating who edited a government memo, saying, "[T]he 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 and decided they'd go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make?" She emphasized, “It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again.”

Fox figures have tirelessly attempted to scandalize Clinton's innocuous response, even jumping off the remarks to imagine her hypothetical assassination. The distortion has proved too egregious even for other members of the right-wing media -- Weekly Standard writer (and Fox contributor) Stephen Hayes called out his fellow conservatives for misrepresenting her remarks, saying Clinton's critics have “badly mischaracterized the now infamous question.” According to Hayes, Clinton's “question, which came in the middle of a heated back-and-forth with U.S. senator Ron Johnson, was not so much a declaration of indifference as it was an attempt to redirect the questioning from its focus on the hours before the attacks to preventing similar attacks in the future.”