Fox News host Andrea Tantaros completely fabricated a passage from Hillary Clinton's forthcoming memoir, claiming that the former secretary of state wrote that she “doesn't care” about the details of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens' death during the Benghazi attacks. Widely reported excerpts from Clinton's book contradict Tantaros's attack.
On the June 2 segment of Outnumbered, co-host Andrea Tantaros attacked Clinton based on the recently released excerpt of her new book Hard Choices, which discussed the attack on Benghazi that led to the death of Stevens and three others during the September 2012 attacks on diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya. After proclaiming that the book was “disingenuous,” Tantaros launched into an assault on Clinton, claiming that she wrote in the book that “she didn't care about” how Stevens was murdered or who had done it (emphasis added):
TANTAROS: And also, for her to just disregard how Ambassador Stevens got killed -- in that same chapter she says, “Well it doesn't really matter what led up to it. It's like the intruder getting into your house. It is what happened afterwards.” That was supposedly a friend of hers. If it were a friend of mine, and I were Secretary of State, I would care about how he was murdered in the first place, and certainly about still bringing whoever did it to justice. And she in the book says she doesn't care about either one.
According to Politico's exclusive report on the excerpt, the truth is almost exactly the opposite. Not only did Clinton take personal responsibility for the attack, but she also expressed her grief at the loss of her colleague while explaining that her highly publicized and often mischaracterized “what difference does it make” remark was pulled out of context:
Early on in the chapter, she describes her grief over losing U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his diplomatic colleagues -- “a punch in the gut,” she writes -- and says she takes responsibility.
The deaths of “fearless public servants in the line of duty was a crushing blow,” Clinton writes. “As Secretary I was the one ultimately responsible for my people's safety, and I never felt that responsibility more deeply than I did that day.”
Clinton also addresses her much-seized-upon remark before a congressional committee in January 2013, when she used the phrase “what difference at this point does it make.” Republicans have claimed it betrayed Clinton's lack of interest in getting to the bottom of the attack. Clinton writes that her words were blatantly twisted.
“In yet another example of the terrible politicization of this tragedy, many have conveniently chosen to interpret” that phrase “to mean that I was somehow minimizing the tragedy of Benghazi. Of course that's not what I said,” she writes. “Nothing could be further from the truth. And many of those trying to make hay of it know that, but don't care.”
She adds, "My point was simple: If someone breaks into your home and takes your family hostage, how much time are you going to spend focused on how the intruder spent his day as opposed to how best to rescue your loved ones and then prevent it from happening again?
Tantaros's false assertion is just the latest attempt by Fox to to spin the former Secretary of State's words in order to fit its debunked Benghazi narratives and undermine Clinton's efforts to correct the record.