When CIA director David Petraeus stepped down from his post after an extramarital affair went public, former general and right-wing activist Jerry Boykin confidently claimed that Petraeus resigned in order to expose an Obama administration scandal surrounding the Benghazi attack.
Boykin, now vice president of the Family Research Council, suggested in 2012 that Petraeus was “held hostage” by administration officials and resigned because “he reached a point where he was unwilling to continue spouting the party line [on Benghazi] to the American public and continuing to breach his own integrity.”
Glenn Beck, who regularly hosts Boykin on the Blaze network, suggested that Petraeus stepped down from the CIA in order to reveal information about the Benghazi attack that could bring down the Obama administration.
But, stunningly, nothing Boykin or Beck said about Petraeus came true. In fact, Petraeus recently cited former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s “extraordinarily resolute, determined and controlled” handling of the incident as a reason she would “make a tremendous president.”
“She’d make a tremendous president,” Petraeus says in the new book “HRC” by Jonathan Allen and Aimee Parnes.
And for Petraeus, Exhibit A in why she would be a tremendous president is the very thing for which Republicans most aggressively attack Clinton: her performance as Secretary of State when the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked.
“Like a lot of great leaders, her most impressive qualities were most visible during tough times,” Petraeus tells Allen and Parnes. “In the wake of the Benghazi attacks, for example, she was extraordinarily resolute, determined, and controlled.”
Petraeus was director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time of the attacks, which killed four Americans, including two who worked for the CIA and the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens.
As Kyle pointed out, the GOP-led House Armed Services Committee released a report today that thoroughly debunks the conservative conspiracy theories surrounding the Benghazi faux-scandal.
This is more bad news for Boykin, who predicted that the House would uncover a massive scandal and pressed Speaker Boehner into launching additional investigations. With his conspiracy theory unraveling, Boykin is even implicating Boehner in the Benghazi “cover-up” since the House investigations have failed to discover the “scandal” he is trying to find.
But don’t expect conservative pundits like Beck and Boykin to reconsider or retract any of their outrageous and delusional Benghazi claims that don’t hold any merit outside of the right-wing echo chamber.
