B’ghazi bulldog rips Hill

Fatal ‘priorities’

WASHINGTON — The chairman of the panel investigating the deadly 2012 Benghazi attacks said Sunday that new information reveals a “total disconnect” between the security needs of US personnel on the ground and the political priorities of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s State Department staff in Washington.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (RSC) described emails from Ambassador Chris Stevens to the State Department requesting more security almost from the moment he arrived in Libya. The request virtually crossed paths with one Clinton’s staff sent to Stevens, asking the new ambassador to read and respond to an email from a Clinton confidant, according to Gowdy. At another point, Victoria Nuland, an aide to Clinton (inset), asked Stevens for advice on “public messaging” on the increasingly dangerous situation in the region, Gowdy said.

“He didn’t need help with [public relations], and he was asking for more security,” Gowdy said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” Gowdy refused to release the emails on Sunday, but he said they point to “the total disconnect between what was happening in Libya with the escalation in violence — that we were a soft target, that there was an increase in antiWestern sentiment . . . while Washington is asking him to read and react to a Sidney Blumenthal email and help on how to message the violence.”

At one point, according to Gowdy, Stevens joked in an email: “Maybe we should ask another government to pay for our security upgrades because our government isn’t willing to do it.”

Gowdy described the emails as he defends his 17month probe into the Sept. 11, 2012, attack that left Stevens and three other Americans dead, and anticipates Clinton’s longawaited public testimony on Thursday. The event is makeorbreak for the investigation that even some Republicans say was designed to undermine Clinton’s campaign.

“I have told my own Republican colleagues and friends, shut up talking about things that you don’t know anything about,” Gowdy said Sunday on CBS.

Gowdy, a former prosecutor, insisted that his investigation is focused on the events before, during and after the deadly attacks.

On Sunday, he cast Clinton as “just one out of 70” witnesses and suggested her testimony is of equal value with the others, at best.