Why did Trump say — with no evidence — that "Hillary Clinton soundly slept in her bed" during the Benghazi attack?

A few days ago, NBC's Lester Holt confronted Donald Trump about his statement, in a speech, that during the Benghazi attack, Ambassador Chris Stevens "was left helpless to die as Hillary Clinton soundly slept in her bed."

Trump's response was: "Were you there? Were you there? Were you with her?" That is, he goes on the offensive. Instead of taking any responsibility for substantiating his charge, he acts like he can get away with saying anything that other people don't step up and disprove.

And Holt lets him get away with that ridiculous debate move. Accepting the defensive position, Holt says: "She has testified before the committee that she wasn't asleep, it happened during the daytime. There's no evidence."

Trump's response is scattershot, mixing the idea that she could have been literally asleep with the argument that "sleep" was really more of a metaphor:  "It happened all during the day and the story was going on for a long period of time...  and she was asleep at the wheel, whether she was sleeping or not, who knows if she was sleeping..."

My first reaction was: ridiculous! But then I heard something yesterday on "Fox News Sunday" and flipped into thinking that the very ridiculousness of it is a devious trick. Chris Wallace confronted Newt Gingrich about the "soundly slept in her bed" quote:

WALLACE: Now, Mr. Speaker, you can certainly argue about how Hillary Clinton handled Benghazi. But the fact is, the attack happened at 3:00 or 4:00 here in the afternoon in Washington. And she was working late into the night. As I say, there's plenty to attack her on. But why not stick to the facts?

GINGRICH: Well, first of all, I've had different people say different things about what she did that night and what her instructions were. Second --

WALLACE: She wasn't asleep is the point.

GINGRICH: OK. She certainly --

WALLACE: Maybe she should have been, but she wasn't.

The transcript notes "laughter" over Wallace's little joke. And Gingrich jumps past any controversy over whether Hillary was sleeping and sleeping soundly and in her bed. And here's where I want you to see what I saw, that "soundly slept in her bed" is a trap.

GINGRICH: OK. I think that on a lot of things people can argue about that Trump says and that Hillary says, but the objective fact is there were over 600 requests for security from Libya. Now, that number came from the chairman of the intelligence committee, not from Donald Trump. They were ignored. The fact is that in the end, there was no effective effort to respond. The fact is, she clearly lied about why it occurred. And again, you had families of the people who were killed who say she lied to them. So, I think this is a debate — they can get into details of picking a fight with Donald Trump. This is a debate I think they're not going to win, because on the larger framing of the debate, the country is overwhelming going to be with Trump....

That is, Hillary Clinton doesn't want to go into the subject of Benghazi. She'd like to close the door on it or view it from a distance as part of her vast collection of experience. But Trump is laying out a particular detail — that she soundly slept in her bed — a provocative lie that Hillary and her proxies will be tempted to try to correct. If they go there, then the specifics of Benghazi are getting talked about again, and it's not good for Hillary.

She and her supporters may think that it's worth it, because it's such a great opportunity to show people Trump's reckless disregard for the truth, but I think he thinks he's placing the winning bet, because: 1. Attention to Benghazi hurts her, 2. He seems to be okay with brazenly standing his ground, and 3. There's the path of retreat to metaphor: She was "asleep at the wheel," unaware and inept, even if awake.

As Chris Wallace's joke had it: What she did was worse than if she'd been sleeping. She should have been sleeping. Benghazi might have worked out better if she'd been out of the picture. That's where that conversation ends up going. So I'm speculating that he threw out a blatant fiction as an irresistible conversation starter.

"Shifting blame to our dead ambassador is wrong on the facts."

"I know — I was there."

Blaming Hillary Clinton for Benghazi.

From Amy Davidson's piece in The New Yorker (boldface added):

The talking-points controversy was always strangely misdirected—in part because, as this report makes clear, there is a lot that was substantively wrong with the way things were managed in Benghazi. That is true particularly if the subject of discussion is Hillary Clinton. She does not come out well in this report, in any part, although the Republican minority is more florid in its criticisms. The State Department made mistakes when she was its leader. One of the findings is that nothing changed even when “tripwires” meant to prompt an increase in security or suspension in operations had been crossed, and people in the Department knew it.

Why not? She doesn’t really have an answer; in the past, she has deflected questions by pointing out that Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, who died in Benghazi, was someone she knew well and cared about; there is no doubt that he was. Despite her performance at a hearing last year, when she wondered why exactly what happened really mattered, callous indifference is not the answer here.... But her reluctance to change course may have been influenced by her heavy investment in the decision to take military action in Libya; the former defense secretary Robert Gates writes in his new memoir that hers was the voice that swayed the balance. (Joe Biden was on the other side.) Libya was one of the things she had managed in her stint as Secretary of State, for which she had been so praised. Also, again, Libya was supposed to be something we were done with; now it will be a question Hillary Clinton has to contend with in 2016, and, in fairness, rightly so.

Hillary has used her close association with Stevens as a reason not to blame her for what happened. She cared, specifically and personally, about him. But he cared about himself too, and he comes in for blame in that report for the circumstances of his own death. It looks to me — and, please, argue with me and correct me if I'm wrong — as though the idea of Libya was to win without putting our military personnel in the line of fire, and having seemingly won using that approach, Hillary Clinton and Christopher Stevens wanted to avoid needing to send our personnel in to provide security. They chose, for the sake of that image, to use Libyans for security, and that risk did not work out.

"For there to have been a demonstration on Chris Stevens's front door and him not to have reported it is unbelievable."

"I never reported a demonstration; I reported an attack on the consulate. Chris - Chris's last report, if you want to say his final report - is, 'Greg, we are under attack,'" said Greg Hicks, who was "the highest-ranking U.S. official in Libya after the strike." This was quoted on yesterday's "Face the Nation," where the guest was Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who chairs the the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, before which Hicks will testify this week.

"...I've never been as embarrassed in my life, in my career, as on that day," Hicks continued in his interview with investigators. "The net impact of what has transpired is, [Rice,] the spokesperson of the most powerful country in the world, has basically said that the president of Libya is either a liar of doesn't know what he's talking about. ....My jaw hit the floor as I watched this....

"You can't insult a foreign leader in a greater way than happened literally here, just those few days later," Issa said. "Ambassadors know that the one thing you can't do is contradict your host, especially at a time when you need their cooperation. This was a fatal error to our relationship, at least for a period of time. And we can't find the purpose. [Secretary of State Hillary Clinton] should have been among - above all else - the person who was on the same sheet of music with the Libyan government, and she wasn't."

Watch this segment of the show:



Here's the very meaty transcript.

Hillary time!

Here. Testifying on Benghazi to the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. 

ADDED, 8:31 A.M.: Hillary has a fairly authentic crying quality in her voice as she speaks of embracing the families of those who died in the attack. That comes just after she says in a steely voice that those who serve in countries like Libya know they are going into a dangerous place and cannot work "in a bunker." Risk comes with the territory, and Chris Stevens fully understood where he was going and what he would face.

"Just hours before he died in a terrorist attack at the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Ambassador Chris Stevens sent a cable to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton..."

"... painting a chaotic, violent portrait of the eastern Libya city and warning that local militias were threatening to pull the security they afforded U.S. officials."

Militia leaders told U.S. officials just two days before the attack that they were angered by U.S. support of a particular candidate for Libyan prime minister and warned “they would not continue to guarantee security in Benghazi, a critical function they asserted they were currently providing,” Stevens wrote in the cable the morning of Sept. 11, 2012.

"Over the weekend, the newest, and by far the most disturbing, revelations surrounding the Benghazi attack were revealed."

An item at FrontPageMag.com:

Several sources have pointed to the possibility that a major CIA gun-running operation aimed at arming anti-Assad Al-Qaeda-affiliated forces was in danger of being exposed. If true, the information casts an even more devastating pall over the Benghazi terrorist attack and the administration’s botched handling of the region.

The decision to stand down as the Benghazi terrorist attack was underway was met with extreme opposition from the inside. The Washington Times's James Robbins, citing a source inside the military, reveals that General Carter Ham, commander of U.S. Africa Command, who got the same emails requesting help received by the White House, put a rapid response team together and notified the Pentagon it was ready to go. He was ordered to stay put. “His response was to screw it, he was going to help anyhow,” writes Robbins. “Within 30 seconds to a minute after making the move to respond, his second in command apprehended General Ham and told him that he was now relieved of his command.”

If true, Ham has apparently decided he wants no part of the responsibility for the decision not to help those in harm’s way. He is not alone. As the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol revealed late Friday, a spokesperson, “presumably at the direction of CIA director David Petraeus,” released the following statement: "No one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate.”

"If the President was truly not aware of this rising threat level in Benghazi, then we have lost confidence in his national security team..."

A statement by U.S. Senators John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH):

“We have just learned that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has claimed full responsibility for any failure to secure our people and our Consulate in Benghazi prior to the attack of September 11, 2012. This is a laudable gesture, especially when the White House is trying to avoid any responsibility whatsoever.

“However, we must remember that the events of September 11 were preceded by an escalating pattern of attacks this year in Benghazi, including a bomb that was thrown into our Consulate in April, another explosive device that was detonated outside of our Consulate in June, and an assassination attempt on the British Ambassador. If the President was truly not aware of this rising threat level in Benghazi, then we have lost confidence in his national security team, whose responsibility it is to keep the President informed. But if the President was aware of these earlier attacks in Benghazi prior to the events of September 11, 2012, then he bears full responsibility for any security failures that occurred. The security of Americans serving our nation everywhere in the world is ultimately the job of the Commander-in-Chief. The buck stops there.

“Furthermore, there is the separate issue of the insistence by members of the Administration, including the President himself, that the attack in Benghazi was the result of a spontaneous demonstration triggered by a hateful video, long after it had become clear that the real cause was a terrorist attack. The President also bears responsibility for this portrayal of the attack, and we continue to believe that the American people deserve to know why the Administration acted as it did.”

Exactly.

VP debate substance: "Biden contradicts State Department on Benghazi security."

Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy:

"We weren't told they wanted more security. We did not know they wanted more security there," Biden said.

In fact, two security officials who worked for the State Department in Libya at the time testified Thursday that they repeatedly requested more security and two State Department officials admitted they had denied those requests.

"All of us at post were in sync that we wanted these resources," the top regional security officer in Libya over the summer, Eric Nordstrom, testified. "In those conversations, I was specifically told [by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Charlene Lamb] ‘You cannot request an SST extension.' I determined I was told that because there would be too much political cost. We went ahead and requested it anyway."

Nordstrom was so critical of the State Department's reluctance to respond to his calls for more security that he said, "For me, the Taliban is on the inside of the building."

"We felt great frustration that those requests were ignored or just never met," testified Lt. Col. Andrew Wood, a Utah National Guardsman who was leading a security team in Libya until August.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) released the unclassified cables containing those requests.

Was Biden ignorant of all this, was he lying at the debate, or did he mean to assert that the State Department officials were lying?

The Libya question opened the debate. Let's look at the transcript:

The State Department tells the Benghazi story — devoid of mobs angry at that video.

ABC reports:

Asked about the initial reports of the protests, the official said that while "others" in the administration may have said there were protests, the State Department did not.

"That was not our conclusion," the official said. "I'm not saying that we had a conclusion."

ADDED: Lots of links at Instapundit (which sounds like the most generic teaser ever, but specifically on this story, check it out).

Let's not get too distracted by the State Department spokeman's saying "Fuck Off" and "Have a good life"...

... to that BuzzFeed reporter, Michael Hastings. There's so much more of immensely great importance in their email exchange about what that spokesman — Phillippe Reines — had been trying to get us to think about CNN's use of the Chris Stevens journal, found at the site of the murder in Benghazi, after our diplomatic personnel fled the scene.

Hastings emailed an excellent set of questions:

Why didn't the State Department search the consulate and find AMB Steven's diary first? What other potential valuable intelligence was left behind that could have been picked up by apparently anyone searching the grounds? Was any classified or top secret material also left? Do you still feel that there was adequate security at the compound, considering it was not only overrun but sensitive personal effects and possibly other intelligence remained out for anyone passing through to pick up? Your statement on CNN sounded pretty defensive--do you think it's the media's responsibility to help secure State Department assets overseas after they've been attacked?

And Reines couldn't or wouldn't answer these questions. He continued those pretty defensive efforts to shift the focus to CNN. When Hastings pressed him, Reines resorted to "Fuck Off" and "Have a good life." Those nasty comebacks shouldn't be the story. They should direct us to the set of questions. Those are great questions, and the State Department will not answer them. Without answers, they feel like questions that answer themselves.

"US State Dept. blasts CNN report on Christopher Stevens' diary."

Why? Because it contravened the wishes of the family.

CNN broke a pledge to the late ambassador's family that it wouldn't report on the diary, said State Department spokesman Philippe Reines, a senior adviser to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton...

The public has a right to know what CNN learned from "multiple sources" about fears and warnings of a terror threat before the Benghazi attack, the channel said, "which are now raising questions about why the State Department didn't do more to protect Ambassador Stevens and other U.S. personnel."...

"Whose first instinct is to remove from a crime scene the diary of a man killed along with three other Americans serving our country, read it, transcribe it, email it around your newsroom for others to read" and then call the family?" Reines asked.

I'm glad CNN did this. The State Department — it's obvious, isn't it? — wanted to suppress this information, and CNN got it out. This is a major international event, and I don't accept privatizing it.  Yes, there is a grieving family, but the State Department, which calls CNN "disgusting," is hiding behind that family. That's disgusting.

In its online story, CNN said it found the journal on the "floor of the largely unsecured consulate compound where he was fatally wounded."

Why wasn't the crime scene secured? If CNN hadn't taken the journal, where would it be now? Having taken it, they shouldn't read it? Having read it, they shouldn't use it? 

Asked to comment on CNN's report that Stevens was concerned about a "hit list," Reines referred to a news conference last Thursday at which Clinton was asked about it. 

"I have absolutely no information or reason to believe that there's any basis for that," Clinton had said.

Why didn't Clinton know anything? Or was she lying? I'm sick of this suppression. Our ambassador was assassinated, the State Department has been lying or dissembling, and we're asked to be distracted by the family's wishes... as asserted by the State Department in cover-your-ass mode... or worse.

ADDED: Did CNN "pledge" to the family that it wouldn't use the information from the journal in its reporting? I'm trying to find the answer to that question (as I simply don't trust the State Department's choice of words). Here's what the WSJ has:

CNN said on its website that it notified the Stevens family "within hours" that it had the journal. The Stevens family then reached out to the State Department, which arranged a telephone conference call between members of the family and CNN. In that call, the family asked the news organization to return the journal and to not publish or broadcast any of its contents, according to a Stevens family member and State Department officials.

Family members and State Department officials said CNN agreed during the Sept. 14 conference call to hold off on using the diary until the family had a chance to review its contents.

Family members and State Department officials said CNN agreed... What did CNN "agree" to? This isn't in quotes, so it's hard to judge what was agreed to. CNN didn't quote the journal or say it had it. They did use the material to build a report that had more than one source. It seems as though the State Department leaned on CNN, and I don't know what the family's concern was — perhaps more personal things in the journal. Or was the family dutifully backing the State Department — which didn't want to reveal the security lapses?

"Some of that information was found in a personal journal of Ambassador Stevens in his handwriting," Mr. Cooper told viewers [on his Friday show]. "We came upon the journal through our reporting and notified the family. At their request, we returned that journal to them. We reported what we found newsworthy in the ambassador's writings."

That implies that they did not report other things that they did not find newsworthy.

CNN added in a statement on its website, "For CNN, the ambassador's writings served as tips about the situation in Libya, and in Benghazi in particular. CNN took the newsworthy tips and corroborated them with other sources."

If the argument is that CNN broke an agreement, I want precision and I don't see it. I repeat that I'm glad CNN got this information to us and didn't supinely pass along the State Department's talking points (which were wrong).

"I'm pretty sure Obama owes Nakoula an apology."

Indeed.

We're barraged by new distractions, so let's catch things that are slipping down the memory hole. It's not just Nakoula. It's Chris Stevens. Our ambassador was murdered, and he was murdered after he was targeted and he was not given security.

Shame on those who disrespected Nakoula's freedom of speech. Their faults are apparent and need to be remembered. But what happened to Chris Stevens? I don't trust that we've learned the whole story. Why wasn't he protected? Was he an inconvenient man? We saw such an effort to create static around his death. Look — riots over here, here, and here! Offensive video on the internet! Man with a "towel" around his face! And hey check out the most important thing that happened all week: Romney said "47%" to some people back in May!

The very fact that we're thinking about Nakoula — and futzing with Romney rhetoric — makes me feel that Chris Stevens got stuffed down the memory hole.

Who wanted that forgetting and why?