Expect more hearings on Benghazi after the testimony before a House committee that conflicted with official reports, Rep. Cynthia Lummis tells Newsmax TV.
Lummis, R-Wyo., is a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee holding hearings this week into the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012 that left Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans dead.
"The information that we have is conflicting once again," Lummis tells Newsmax in an exclusive interview. "It appears that the shots were being called from Washington, meaning the security decisions were being made from Washington. And then four-and-a-half months after the attacks in Benghazi, Secretary Clinton testified that those decisions were actually being made in Libya."
Wednesday's testimony came from people who were on the ground in Libya and were in direct communications with Benghazi, Tripoli, the State Department in Washington, D.C., and with the Libyan president’s office, Lummis said.
"They knew it was a coordinated terrorist attack. How that translated a few days later to on-air interviews by the administration saying it was based on a spontaneous demonstration is something we still do not know."
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The State Department had the correct information from Gregory Hicks, the second-in-command at the embassy, Lummis said, yet U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice appeared five days later on all five Sunday morning talk shows and blamed the incident on an anti-Muslim video. She read from State Department talking points that had been changed from saying that the incident was an attack to saying it was the outgrowth of a demonstration against the video.
"Ambassador Rice was either given false information or deliberately used false information," Lummis said.
It is difficult to say yet whether more could have been done militarily to aid those who were under attack, she said, because what Hicks testified to, as someone on the ground, differs from the military's official response.
House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa said the evidence points to a cover-up at the highest levels. Lummis tells Newsmax she agrees.
Hicks was on the ground at Benghazi and spoke from direct knowledge, she said.
"It was a terrorist attack," Lummis said. "So we have to go from the fact and work up the chain to find out where that truth was turned into a lie. Because it was a lie that was conveyed to the American people on the Sunday talk shows just a few days after the hearing."
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