Tomorrow congressional testimony could put Hillary Clinton’s presidential chances in 2016 to rest,
Gregory Hicks, one of the key witnesses who will testify on the Benghazi tragedy Wednesday in Congress has one tough lawyer representing him.
Victoria Toensing is suggesting that perhaps State Department officials have been threatening her client with retaliation should he continue his insistence, under oath, that the assault on the U.S. Consulate in Libya was known to be a terrorist attack “from the get-go.”
Toensing insists that federal officials knew from the start of the attack on the consulate that the raid was planned by terrorists, not a mass protest over a video.
As Ms. Toesning suggested on “The Steve Malzberg Show” on Newsmax TV, “What they do (State Department) is they say, ‘You know that job assignment that you had scheduled in June? It just got eliminated.'”
With the four consulate employees being murdered, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, Gregory Hicks became the senior State Department official on the ground at the scene.
In fact, the day of the attack Sept. 11, 2012, Hicks was informed by Ambassador Christopher Stevens himself that the embassy was under siege. A short time later, Stevens and three other Americans were murdered. As Toesning put it, “He’d gotten a call from the ambassador. The ambassador said to him, ‘Greg, we’re under attack..’ and then it cut off.”
“I think everybody in the mission thought it was a terrorist attack from the beginning,” Hicks said in an interview. Ironically, his testimony will be in direct conflict with that of UN Ambassador Susan Rice who described the assault as nothing more than a spur of the moment attack.
Hicks will be one of several eyewitnesses testifying before Rep. Darrell Issa’s House Oversight Committee.
The Benghazi murders, has now escalated to either a “scandal” or “cover-up.” The story has been simmering for eight months, although White House spokesman Jay Carney described the attack as “a long time ago.
The Obama administration would like to put the entire matter to rest, but with a feisty chairman of the committee like Darrell Issa, that is not likely. Many critics and eyewitnesses believe the State Department has tried to cover up the fact there was lax security in place at the embassy.
No one has a bigger stake in the entire affair than former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who has aspirations to run for president in 2016.
