We all know that there is only one thing that can prevent Hillary Clinton from becoming the Democratic presidential nominee. Of course, that one thing isn’t the surge of support for Bernie Sanders among young Democrats. Given the crooked way the Democrats choose their presidential candidate with superdelegates holding the balance of power, Clinton has an edge that will stand up to Sanders’s ability to win key primaries like the one he took this week in Michigan. No, the only thing that stands between Hillary and an acceptance speech in Philadelphia this summer is the FBI investigation into her mishandling of classified material while she was secretary of state. But given that President Obama is not likely to let the Justice Department indict her, Clinton probably has nothing to worry about heading into the general election other than the stain of scandal should disappointed FBI agents ever leak the contents of their probe.
But Clinton has another big problem that could hurt her in November and that has nothing to do with a homebrew server. It’s a woman named Patricia Smith and her unwillingness to let the former First Lady get away with a lie.
Smith is the mother of Sean Smith, one of the four Americans killed in the Benghazi terror attack on September 11, 2012. The mere mention of Benghazi causes Democratic eyes to roll since they associate it with what they consider to be pointless investigations by Republicans intended to hurt Clinton’s reputation. But while they are right that GOP members of Congress failed to do anything more than annoy Clinton during their course of their probes, Patricia Smith may be a lot harder to dismiss as her claims get prominent mention in the months leading up to November.
Democrats may have agreed with Clinton in 2013 when she responded in exasperation to a question about the reasons she gave for the Benghazi attack from Senator Ron Johnson. Clinton’s “what difference at this point does it make” made for a bad sound byte but she escaped that hearing and a later one held by the House more or less unscathed. But as much as the left poured scorn on the House special committee on Benghazi for wasting everyone’s time, there was one particularly interesting piece of information that they uncovered from the trove of Clinton emails that were not deleted that sheds light on Mrs. Smith’s assertions. It revealed that Clinton had written her daughter to say that Benghazi was a terrorist attack on the day after the atrocity. But at the ceremony when the bodies of the fallen were returned to the U.S., Clinton told Smith and the other parents that a YouTube video was the reason for the attack. That was a false argument the administration promoted in the days after the event in order to dispel the notion that there was a revival of Islamist terror since that undermined the Obama re-election campaign’s emphasis on the death of Osama bin Laden. That Clinton would recycle that lie even when speaking to grieving parents was particularly vile. The fact that we know for sure that she already knew it was false makes it even worse.
Smith has been particularly vocal about her bitterness about Clinton lying to her about the cause for her son’s death but rather than apologize for a politically inspired falsehood, Clinton has doubled-down on the lie.
She did so again last night in the CNN presidential debate when she asserted that Mrs. Smith was “absolutely wrong” about what she was told on the day her son’s coffin came home. But ever the clever lawyer, Clinton not only denies that she lied to Smith but also talked about “the fog of war” and of opinions changing about the source of the attack. But the email to her daughter gives the lie to this argument.
Does it matter? Perhaps not in the grand scheme of things especially when you consider that Clinton’s mendacity about the emails and the conflicts of interest created by the donations solicited by her family foundation. But the difference here is that in a general election campaign, Mrs. Smith’s accusations will continue to be aired.
It’s one thing to deny lying about classified emails or to stonewall the Clinton cash scandals by claiming it’s just another plot by the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that is still out to get Bill and Hillary. But it is quite another to basically accuse a gold star mother of an American hero of lying, as Hillary did of Mrs. Smith last night. If she thinks that will sit well with voters who already doubt her honesty, then she has badly miscalculated. As bad as her Bernie Sanders and FBI worries may be, her Benghazi mom problem may prove even more harmful.