Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shot back at a Republican senator during today’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the Benghazi terror attacks, arguing that the Republicans’ focus on whether there was a protest against an anti-Muslim video at the time of the attack is irrelevant.

Much of the politicization surrounding the Benghazi affair centered on Republicans attacking the Obama administration’s initial assessment that the Benghazi attacks may have been sparked by the video protest, a determination that the administration later backed away from.

When Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) asked Clinton why she didn’t make “a simple phone call” to the evacuees to find out, the Secretary of State shot back: “With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans!” she said, “What difference does it make?”:

JOHNSON: Madam Secretary, do you disagree that a simple phone call to those evacuees to determined what happened would have ascertained immediately there was no protest? That was a piece of information that could have been easily, easily obtained. within hours if not days.

CLINTON: Senator, you know, when you’re in these positions, the last thing you want to do is interfere with any other process.

JOHNSON: I realize that. I realize it’s a good excuse.

CLINTON: No it’s a fact. [...]

JOHNSON: Again, we were mislead there was supposedly protests and something spraying out of that, assault spraying out of that. That was easily ascertained that was not the fact and the american people could have known that within days and didn’t know that.

CLINTON: With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans! Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night decided to go kill some Americans?! What difference at this point does it make?! It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again.

Watch the clip:

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) has his doubts about the legitimacy of the State Department Accountability Review Board’s investigation into the Benghazi attacks last September — but that didn’t stop him from lavishing praise on the ARB’s findings that chastise the Obama administration.

The ARB found that an anti-Islamic video was not the main cause behind the attack on the diplomatic mission in the Libyan city, a major focus of Republican election season attacks on President Obama. On CNN on Wednesday, Chaffetz crowingly quoted the report to affirm his view that the administration was hiding something in the response to the tragedy. “Why was the American public and the world mislead for so long about a video that the [ARB] said had nothing to do with the attack itself?” he asked.

But when host Soledad O’Brien pointed out that the same report also absolved all government officials of any wrong-doing, Chaffetz suddenly discovered that he wasn’t so happy with its conclusions:

O’BRIEN: The Accountability Review Board also said this. “The board did not find that any individual U.S. government employee engaged in misconduct or willfully ignored his or her responsibilities, did not find reasonable cause to believe that an individual breached his or her duty so as to be the subject of a recommendation for a disciplinary action.” So they weighed in and said, listen, nothing was done willfully and nobody should really be disciplined.

CHAFFETZ: I thought it was interesting that the Accountability Review Board — an internal review — didn’t even interview Secretary Clinton. Why is it that the person in charge wasn’t even asked a question by this Board? And the other thing that’s deeply concerning about this review is that they took sixty days. They went in there and they found more than two dozen systemic failures. They had sixty recommendations — what in the world is going on at the State Department?

But just seconds later, Chaffetz became a supporter of the report again. “We have four dead people, and in sixty days they could figure out what Secretary Clinton and the administration couldn’t in four years,” he said. Watch the clip:

Chaffetz, one of the top Republicans on the House Government Oversight Committee, has been leading the Benghazi charge in the House for months now. His track record has not been phenomenal given his willingness to come at his pursuit from any angle so long as it results in attacking the Obama administration. At hearings on Benghazi in November, Chaffetz accidentally revealed classified information while attempting to shame administration officials for presenting cleared information. He also once proudly declared that he had voted to cut funding to State Department security functions before attacking the administration on prioritizing resources.

Among the recommendations of a highly anticipated State Department report on preventing future failures akin to the ones leading up to the Sept. 11 attack on a diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, many share a common thread: restoring GOP cuts to State’s budget.

Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today, Deputy Secretaries of State Tom Nides and William Burns laid out the commitment of the Department to implement each of the twenty-four unclassified recommendations put forward by the Accountability Review Board (ARB). One of the most expensive recommendations from the ARB includes restoring full funding for mechanisms put into place after embassy attacks in Kenya and Tanzania in 1999:

Recalling the recommendations of the Nairobi and Dar es Salaam ARBs, the State Department must work with Congress to restore the Capital Security Cost Sharing Program at its full capacity, adjusted for inflation to approximately $2.2 billion in fiscal year 2015, including an up to ten-year program addressing that
need, prioritized for construction of new facilities in high risk, high threat areas. It should also work with Congress to expand utilization of Overseas Contingency Operations funding to respond to emerging security threats and vulnerabilities and operational requirements in high risk, high threat posts.

In order to carry out that and other recommendations, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton intends to request an additional $1.3 billion dollars in funding from Congress, transferred from money allocated for Iraq. This increase would provide for the addition of Marine guards to many of the more dangerous posts around the world, along with increasing the number of State Department diplomatic security personnel and security improvements at overseas U.S. missions. The House and Senate are poised to increase funds available to the Marine Corps to deploy many more Marine Embassy Guards around the world, potentially shifting their mission from one of protecting classified to documents to protecting people.

In Thursday’s hearings, Democratic Sens. Barbara Boxer (CA), Robert Menendez (NJ), and Bob Casey (PA) didn’t shy away from recalling the effect Republican gutting of the State Department budget in the past Congress has had on diplomatic security. Boxer pointed out that the Obama administration requested $2.6 billion for the State Department in 2012, which the House of Representatives slashed. While the Senate was able to restore the a large amount of funding requested, State still wound up $200 million short over the last two years.

Committee Chairman Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) made clear in his opening and closing statements that an increase in the State Department’s budget was a real necessity in the coming years. Kerry, thought to be Obama’s choice to replace Clinton following her pending resignation, will likely utilize many of the same arguments before Congress in the next term.

Several Republicans have attempted to argue in the past that the funding cuts to the State Department’s budget had a negligible effect on the result in Benghazi. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), one of the most outspoken critics of the Obama administration in the wake of Benghazi, once proudly declared that he “absolutely” voted for budget cuts to the State Department. The Republicans in the House for Fiscal Year 2013 have already stated that they were willing to put forward $1.934 billion for the State Department’s Worldwide Security Protection program, leaving a sizable gap between them and the $2.15 billion requested by the Obama administration.

(Photo credit: NY Times)

The much-awaited release of the State Department’s Accountability Review Board report on the attack in Benghazi, Libya has not quieted the chattering of conservatives about an administration cover-up. Instead, the new conspiracy theory surrounding the tragedy is that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is faking recovery from a concussion to avoid testifying to Congress on the report’s contents.

Accusations began with former Bush Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton on Monday outright stating that Clinton is lying about her illness while appearing on Fox News, setting off a string of rumors. In his conversation with host Greta Van Sustren, Bolton said, “You know, every foreign service officer in every foreign ministry in the world knows the phrase I am about to use: When you don’t want to go to a meeting or conference, or an event, you have a ‘diplomatic illness.’ And this is a ‘diplomatic illness’ to beat the band.” Right-wing commentator Charles Krauthammer joined Bolton’s analysis on Tuesday evening.

Which lead to the hosts of Fox and Friends running with the theorizing on Wednesday morning. Dropping any pretense, hosts Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade both outright stated in their exchange that Clinton was avoiding discussion of Benghazi to keep her credibility for a run for the White House in 2016:

DOOCY: If she runs for President in four years, this is not helpful to her, the fact that there were these systemic failure and management failures. Where the people in the field are asking for help and they’re saying ‘Sorry, we don’t have enough money.’ That’s not acceptable.

KILMEADE: You’re saying in four years she should recover from the concussion. That should be a long enough period –

DOOCY: That we didn’t know about until it was time to go to Capital Hill. [CROSSTALK]

KILMEADE: That’s a long enough period of time, after having a concussion, to remember everything.

The State Department announced on last Thursday afternoon that Clinton sustained a concussion during a fall, the result of extreme dehydration in the course of a debilitating stomach virus. Department spokeswoman Victora Nuland yesterday slammed insinuations that Clinton could be hiding from the Benghazi report, saying that it is “really unfortunate that in times like this people make wild speculation based on no information.” Deputy Secretaries Thomas Nides and William Burns will testify in Clinton’s place in open hearings of Congress on Thursday, and Clinton has also confirmed that she will be available to speak before various Congressional committees in January.

Today John Bolton, former U.N. ambassador under George W. Bush, said that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s trip to Australia is “very important” and necessary, undercutting attacks from conservative news outlets such as Fox News and Drudge that Clinton is vacationing Australia rather than testifying in front of a congressional committee about the Benghazi attacks.

Speaking on Fox News today, Bolton said:

Let me first say a word in defense of Secretary Clinton and Secretary Panetta being in Australia. This is for an annual meeting called the AUSMIN that we have and I think it is very important that we demonstrate solidarity with the Australians so the fact that they’re out of town shouldn’t be concerning.

Watch the clip:

Specifically, Fox Nation propagated a myth that Clinton skipped a hearing on Benghazi to drink wine in Australia. The Drudge Report picked up the story as well, going even further with its headline: “Hillary can’t make House hearing on Benghazi; busy visiting friends, wine tasting in Australia.” Drudge and Fox link to an article in the Herald Sun, a newspaper, as Media Matters pointed out, that is owned by conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Indeed, the Australia meeting is crucial. At the meeting today, Clinton and Panetta announced that the military “will station a powerful radar and a space telescope in Australia as part of its strategic shift toward Asia.” Other key topics including Afghanistan will be covered as well, the Voice of America notes, “The two countries will also discuss plans to wind down the war in Afghanistan. Australia, which has 1,550 troops in Afghanistan, is the biggest military contributor to the campaign outside NATO.”