Newly minted weekend host Al Sharpton abruptly stopped conversation Sunday on Hillary Clinton and her Benghazi testimony when one of his guests said Clinton and other Obama administration members had lied about the cause of the terrorist attack, NewsBusters reported.
Per usual, Sharpton's discussion panel was not balanced, with Republican strategist Jessica Proud finding herself debating Sharpton, far-left columnist Joan Walsh, and strategist Tara Dowdell, who earlier complained about a "politically orchestrated effort" to hurt Clinton.
Proud discussed the security failings surrounding the consulate and then went into the revelation from Clinton's testimony brought forth through questioning by Rep. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), who showed through emails that Clinton clearly knew right away it was a planned terrorist attack and not the result of an anti-Muslim video. Nevertheless, Clinton, President Obama and other officials all peddled the line that the attack had resulted from reaction to that video in the ensuing days.
"The second piece, which is the larger one, is the fact that both she and Susan Rice and President Obama lied about the cause of the attack, and that was confirmed by those two emails yesterday," Proud said.
The mood shifted quickly.
"Well, they [did] 11 hours on this week [sic], but let me move onto the other big news this week," Sharpton said.
Dowdell looked horrified, and Walsh said, "They absolutely did not ... They did not lie."
"Clearly, they did not establish that yesterday," Sharpton said. "Let's go to the other news of the week. Joe Biden announcing that he was not going to run."
Unfortunately for the other MSNBC panelists, it was quite clearly established that Clinton told her family and other foreign officials one thing about the Benghazi attack in the days following the attack, and the public another:
Jordan showed an email Clinton sent her own family, in which she said officers were killed in Benghazi by a group like al Qaeda.
"You tell the American people one thing. You tell your family an entirely different story," Jordan said.
On the night of the attack, Jordan said, Clinton had a phone call with the president of Libya where she told him Ansar al-Sharia was claiming responsibility.
The next day, Jordan said, Clinton told the Egyptian prime minister something "significant," where she acknowledged they knew the attack in Libya had nothing to do with any video.
"We know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film," Jordan read out from Clinton’s email. "It was a planned attack. Not a protest. Let me read that one more time. We know, not we think, not it might be, we know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with a film. It was a planned attack. Not a protest. State Department experts knew the truth. You knew the truth, but that’s not what the American people got. Again, the American people want to know why. Why didn’t you tell the American people exactly what you told the Egyptian prime minister?"