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Hillary Thought Article Calling Benghazi Obama’s ‘3 A.M. Call’ Was Fit To Print

Chuck Ross Investigative Reporter
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Emails released by the State Department on Friday show that Hillary Clinton believed that an article which called President Obama’s handling of the attack in Benghazi his “3 a.m. call” — a reference to a controversial anti-Obama ad Clinton ran in 2008 — was fit to print.

On Oct. 3, 2012, Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department at the time, emailed Clinton a Wall Street Journal article entitled “Benghazi was Obama’s 3 a.m. call.”

3am

In the article, the Journal’s Bret Stephens slammed President Obama, arguing that the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi — which left four Americans dead — was a failure of his “policy and worldview.”

“It was five in the afternoon when Mr. Obama took his 3 a.m. call. He still flubbed it,” Stephens wrote.

The early morning reference was to an ad Clinton ran criticizing Obama in Feb. 2008.

“It’s 3 a.m., and your children are safe and asleep,” a narrator said in the ad, which features images of several sleeping children. “But there’s a phone in the White House, and it’s ringing.”

The ad was intended to plant doubt about Obama’s ability to handle international crisis. Obama responded to the ad on the 2008 campaign trail, saying that “they’re the kind that play on people’s fears to try to scare up votes.”

Whether Clinton agreed with Stephens’ article or not, she found it interesting enough that she ordered another State Department staffer to “pls print” it. The 296 Libya- and Benghazi-related emails released Friday show that Clinton often commanded her staff to print off emails of articles and other briefings sent to her email account.

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