Sowell: Clinton’s actions as secretary of state make a difference

Hillary claimed then, as now, that key documents had disappeared. Her more recent claim that many of her e-mails had been deleted was just Hillary 2.0. Only after three years of stalling and stonewalling on her part has the fact finally come out this year that those e-mails could be recovered, and now have been.

By this time, however, Hillary and her supporters used the same tactics that both Clintons used back in the 1990s — namely, saying that this was old news, stuff that had already been investigated too long, that it was time to “move on.”

That was Hillary 1.0. More recently, Hillary 2.0 said, melodramatically, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”

One of the things that the former secretary of state was now trying to cover up was the utter disaster of the Obama administration’s foreign policy that she carried out in Libya.

Having intervened in Libya to help overthrow the government of Moammar Gadhafi, who was no threat to America’s interests in the Middle East, the Obama administration was confronted with the fact that Gadhafi’s ouster simply threw the country into such chaos that Islamic terrorists were now able to operate freely in Libya.

Just how freely was shown in September 2012, when terrorists stormed the compound in Benghazi where the American ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, was staying. They murdered him and three other Americans who tried to defend him.

Lie about attack

Meanwhile, there was a presidential election campaign in 2012, and Barack Obama was presenting himself to the voters as someone who had defeated al-Qaida and suppressed the terrorist threat in the Middle East. Obviously, the truth about this attack could have undermined the image that Obama was trying to project during the election campaign. So a lie was concocted instead.

The lie was that the attack was not by terrorists — who supposedly had been suppressed by Obama — but was a spontaneous protest against an American video insulting Islam, and that protest just got out of control.

Now that Hillary Clinton’s e-mails have finally been recovered and revealed, after three years of stalling and stonewalling, they showed explicitly that she knew from the outset that the attack that killed Ambassador Stevens and others was not a result of some video but was a coordinated terrorist operation.

Nevertheless, Hillary 2.0, along with President Obama and Susan Rice, the national security advisor, told the world in 2012 that the deaths in Benghazi were due to the video, not a terrorist organization that was now operating freely in Libya, thanks to the policy that got rid of the Gadhafi government.

Yet that key fact was treated by the media as old news, and what was exciting now was how well Hillary 2.0 outperformed the congressional committee on television. If the corruption and undermining of the American system of constitutional government eventually costs us our freedom, will the media say, “What difference does it make now?”