Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler debunked Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio's false claim during the CNBC presidential debate that Hillary Clinton “got exposed as a liar” during her testimony before the House Select Committee On Benghazi for supposedly misleading the public about the cause of the Benghazi attacks. Kessler asserted that Rubio “does not have enough evidence to label Clinton a liar,” explaining that changing “reports from the intelligence community 'caused confusion and influenced the public statements' of policymakers” in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.

During the October 28 CNBC Republican presidential debate, candidate Rubio claimed that Hillary Clinton “got exposed as a liar” about the cause of the Benghazi attacks by admitting “she had sent emails to her family” attributing the attack to “Al Qaeda-like elements” while “telling the families of those victims and the American people that it was because of a video.” Rubio's allegation originated with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) in Clinton's October 22 appearance in front of the House Special Committee on Benghazi, and has been repeatedly hailed by Fox News as a “smoking gun” despite having been debunked by numerous media outlets for disregarding how intelligence evolved in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.

Kessler wrote October 30 that “one find[s] little support for Rubio's claim,” asserting that Rubio “does not have enough evidence to label Clinton a liar.” Kessler explained that contrary to Rubio's suggestion that Clinton made “a deliberate effort to deceive...evidence suggests there were few hard answers available then to policymakers” which "'caused confusion and influenced the public statements.'" Kessler also noted “that a Senate report [Rubio] signed documented that the CIA assessment changed several times and was not set in stone until more than ten days after the attacks”:

These were pretty strong words uttered by Rubio at the third GOP debate, and they give us an opportunity to explore what was said by then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in the week after the 2012 attacks in Benghazi that left four Americans dead, including the U.S. ambassador.

[...]

The House Intelligence Committee, in its 2014 report on the incident, said “there was a stream of contradictory and conflicting intelligence that came in after the attacks.”

The CIA's deputy director, Michael Morell, testified that the first time he learned there had not been a protest at the diplomatic facility was after receiving an e-mail from the Libya station chief on Sept. 15, three days after the attack.

[...]

(Morell's testimony contradicts Rubio's claim on CNN on Oct. 29, the morning after the debate, that “there was never a shred of evidence presented to anyone that this was spontaneous. And the CIA understood that.” On CBS, Rubio also claimed that it was “not accurate” that the CIA changed its assessment, which is also wrong.)

[...]

A similar conclusion was reached by the Senate Intelligence Committee (of which Rubio is a member) in its report on Benghazi: “Intelligence analysts inaccurately referred to the presence of a protest at the Mission facility before the attack based on open source information and limited intelligence, without sufficient intelligence or eyewitness statements to corroborate that assertion. The IC took too long to correct these erroneous reports, which caused confusion and influenced the public statements.”

[...]

Looking at Clinton's public statements, it is clear she was very careful to keep the attacks separate from the video; the two incidents do not appear in the same sentence (unlike the controversial televised remarks by then-U.N. ambassador Susan Rice).

[...]

Focusing just on the public statements made by Clinton -- as opposed to the rest of the administration --one find little support for Rubio's claim that Clinton told the American people that the attacks were because of a video. She certainly spoke about the video, but always in the context of the protests that were occurring across the Middle East.

[....]

Rubio is wrong when he says the CIA assessment did not change, given that a Senate report he signed documented that the CIA assessment changed several times and was not set in stone until more than ten days after the attacks.

[...]

Can Rubio really attribute this to a “lie” rather than the fog of war? A “lie” suggests a deliberate effort to deceive, while the documentary evidence suggests there were few hard answers available then to policymakers. Even the Senate report signed by Rubio says the reports from the intelligence community “caused confusion and influenced the public statements” of policymakers.

Rubio is certainly within his rights to point out Clinton's contradictory statements -- and the remarks of the family members give us pause -- but he does not have enough evidence to label Clinton a liar.

Two Pinocchios