U.S. Senate Candidate Rob Maness: Pat Smith ‘Treated Like Dirt’ by Media
U.S. Senate Candidate Rob Maness: Pat Smith ‘Treated Like Dirt’ by Media
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by DAN RIEHL
4 Aug 2016Washington,
Asked by Breitbart News Daily SiriusXM host Stephen K. Bannon why he was running for the U.S. Senate, retired Air Force Colonel Rob Maness of Louisiana spoke of the importance of this year’s election.
“What is at stake is the United States Senate, more than anything else,” said Maness, adding:
I know all the media attention is on the presidential race. But more than anything else, the men and women in the United States Senate are the voices of the states and to the rest of the world. … In approving treaties, approving Supreme Court Justices and the justices part of it, they are the protectors, literally, the last line of defense for the Constitution of the United States as the Founders intended it to be.
As a non-politician, Maness also compared himself to presidential candidate Donald Trump, while defending him in his skirmish with Gold Star parent Khizr Khan. He faulted the media and the Obama administration for mistreating grieving mother Pat Smith, who spoke at the Republican National Convention and was all but ignored by the mainstream media.
Maness asked:For years and years and years, she’s been treated like dirt, and the screeching media, all they want to talk about is what the GOP candidate for president, Donald Trump, who has rightly called out the political attack on him, all they want to talk about is the other side. Where’s the respect for everybody that’s a Gold Star parent?
Rob Maness’ campaign website is here. Listen to the full interview below.
http://www.breitbart.com/radio/2016/...dirt-by-media/
Patricia Smith: Hillary Clinton ‘Treats Me Like Dirt’ Because ‘I’m a Nobody’ — ‘Why D
Patricia Smith: Hillary Clinton ‘Treats Me Like Dirt’ Because ‘I’m a Nobody’ — ‘Why Doesn’t She Just Tell Me the Truth?’
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by JOHN HAYWARD
4 Aug 2016
1,714 comments
Patricia Smith, mother of Benghazi victim Sean Smith, was a guest on Thursday’s Breitbart News Daily with SiriusXM host Stephen K. Bannon.
“I don’t know how to explain Sean,” she said. “He was my only child. We kind of lived together. I took care of him. He had nobody else than me, and we were very, very close. Everyplace he was stationed, I tried to go and visit him. All over the world, I went.”
Sean served in the Air Force before becoming an IT contractor for the State Department. His mother recalled that he tried to enlist in the Navy, but she refused to sign for him.
“I told him, I will sign for you if you’ve checked with all the other services. He says, ‘They don’t want me, Mom, because I didn’t graduate college.’ I said, ‘Well, did you check with them?’ He said, ‘No.’ And I said, ‘Well, until you do, I’m not going to sign for you.’ We left it at that, and very shortly after that, they called him from the Air Force, and that’s how he got into that,” she recalled.
Bannon, a Navy veteran himself, asked Smith why she hesitated to let Sean join the Navy.
“I just wanted him to be sure that he knew what he was doing,” she replied. “And if he didn’t check, that’s not good enough for me. All you have to do is ask.”
She said Sean loved being in the Air Force, where he served for eight years, keeping in touch with her on an almost daily basis, and then he went to work for the State Department after concluding his Air Force service. “I don’t think there was any difference in time. He just went from one to the other. So I imagine he had it all set up ahead of time,” she speculated.
Bannon asked if she knew exactly why Sean had been sent to Benghazi as an IT specialist.
“I talked to him the night before all this happened. He told me — well, in plain English, he says, ‘Mom, I’m going to die,’” Smith said. “And I know this isn’t answering your question, but he was stationed in the Hague, and I didn’t know that he was in Benghazi. I guess that he went TDY, what they call TDY, to Benghazi for something.” (TDY is an abbreviation for “temporary duty.”)
“He was a computer guy. He was a communications guy, without a gun. He was over there in Benghazi, and they sat him down in his place, wherever it was, and he didn’t even have any security,” she said, growing upset as she spoke.
“She pulled the security from him. And he says ‘Mom, I’m gonna die, they pulled it all back.’ I says, ‘You gotta say something about this.’ He says, ‘I did, I begged them, and they wouldn’t.’ He says, ‘We’ve been asking, and they won’t give us security,’” she recalled.
“I wanted Hillary to explain mainly why she did what she did. They haven’t talked to me. They treat me like dirt,” Smith charged. “I want the whole world to know what Hillary would do. She purposely treats me like dirt, and will not answer any questions that I have. And then she gets — I see her on TV, saying ‘It was not my bailiwick.’ People were asking why, why all this was like that, she says ‘It was not my bailiwick.’”
“This is the only person I’ve ever heard of doesn’t have a bailiwick when you’re running the whole darn department!” she exclaimed. “If it was her department, and it’s not her bailiwick — why? Why can’t these things be answered to me? Why did my son have to die, if it’s not her bailiwick? Whose bailiwick was it? Who gave the order to pull all the security? I guess it’s not her. I need these things answered, and I think I have the right to have them answered.”
“What happens is, I get — people tell me, people until very recently told me that they put a hit on me, because they don’t like the way I talk. Well, I’m still here, people. I’m still here, and I still want to know why my son is dead,” she defiantly declared. (As she would later clarify in the interview, the “hit” she referred to were threats of violence meant to intimidate her or express deep contempt for her, rather than serious plots to injure her.)
Smith said she talked to House Benghazi Committee chairman Trey Gowdy early in his committee’s investigation, and after the hearings were over she was given a copy of the transcripts.
“There’s a million pages, and none of ‘em answers anything,” she said. “I went through this, I did not read every single word, but I read most of them. It doesn’t tell me anything. The only thing I found out about this is that Hillary was not required to answer truthfully. I want to know why. Why wasn’t she required to answer truthfully? It was her bailiwick, even though she doesn’t admit it. So that’s what I got out of the hearings.”
When Bannon asked for a list of the specific questions she would ask Hillary Clinton if she could, Smith cried, “I did that! I went on national TV, and I begged her, please, tell me what happened. And she doesn’t answer. Nothing. I begged her to tell me. She doesn’t talk to me. I’m a nobody. I’m a very non-important nobody that she doesn’t have to, because she is Hillary.”
Smith said that at the memorial service when the bodies of the Benghazi fallen were returned, she asked Clinton, “Please tell me what happened.” The answer she got was, “It was the fault of this video.”
“I asked her, ‘What video? I don’t know anything about a video. Nobody told me anything about that.’ And she says, well, she’s gonna check into everything, and if it’s any different than the video, she will get back to me and let me know. And from that moment on, I am not to be talked to by the State Department,” she said. “Every time I called, which was many times, they told me I am not a part of the immediate family, and they don’t have to tell me. This is what I get from the State Department to this day. And I’m still begging her, just tell me what it is. If it’s so darn secret, I won’t tell anybody anything. Just tell me what happened, so I understand.”
“But no, she won’t do that, because she’s Hillary,” she said. “And the only thing I know about this is what the security guards told me. And that’s what the ones who pulled my son out from a burning building told me. But Hillary won’t, because it was still, as far as she’s concerned, it was still part of the video.”
“She talked to her daughter,” Smith pointed out, referencing Clinton’s email to her daughter Chelsea on the night of the Benghazi attack. “She talked to all kinds of other people about it. But she won’t talk to me. And I won’t shut up until I know why my son is dead. My only son, my only child.”
Bannon noted that when Chris Wallace of Fox News asked Clinton about Pat Smith, the day after her speech at the Republican National Convention, Clinton said Smith and the grieving father of Tyrone Woods “may not recall everything that was or wasn’t said” during their encounter at the memorial service. Bannon asked Smith if Clinton was calling her a liar.
“You betcha she is,” replied an angry Patricia Smith. “You betcha. And she is the one that remembers everything, I’m not, right? Everything that I said is incorrect, because she remembers it the way she wants to remember it. No. I know what she told me. I know what she told me, and she stressed it. Then I went around the room talking to the other people that were there, Obama and Panetta and all the rest, and I asked them the same thing. And you know, they told me the exact same thing: it was the fault of the video.”
“Now, all those people in that room — were they lying to me?” she asked. “They must have been, because they all knew, they knew what happened at that time, at the ceremony. And since then, I’ve gotten nothing more from my beloved government but lies, and then they get on TV and call me a liar.”
“I know what I heard, and may God strike me dead, I am telling the truth!” she declared. “Hillary, did you hear that? Can you say that with a straight face?”
Bannon asked if she had received any recognition comparable to the Gold Star status awarded to the parents of military personnel killed in the line of duty. Smith said a medal was awarded to her son posthumously, but she doesn’t know what it was, as the medal was not placed in her custody. Also, Sean’s name was recorded on a plaque in the Hague.
“I’m assuming that they’ve been in contact with Sean’s wife, who has been involved in all of this, I’m sure. I don’t know. They don’t speak to me,” she said. “Am I not a Gold Star mother?”
“I believe from the bottom of my heart that she knew it was going to happen, because he told me he told her. I don’t know who he spoke to, the one that was designated to take those — he was a communicator. He communicated all these things to the State Department. He knew what he was doing, and he knew he was going to die,” she said.
Smith clarified that her son’s sense of impending danger was based on his observations of the situation in Benghazi, including suspicious behavior by what she called “the February 17 people, whoever they are.” This is a reference to the Libyan militia that was supposed to be providing security for American installations in Benghazi.
According to Sean, the February 17 militia was “taking pictures of everything, including the diesel containers, that they had set on fire.”
She also noted that Sean, an avid player of online computer games, put out a message on the game network that said, “Assuming I don’t die, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“There was no protection,” Smith said. “And the Ambassador knew it too. He kept asking and begging for help. And then when the contractors were asking for help, after Sean was dead, that they were still on top of the rooftops over there, trying to be not killed — they were told that they shouldn’t go and help. Stand down. There were four different stand-down orders, and our government, someone in our government says, oh no, we never said that. But four different times, three times for a stand-down and one time for a don’t-go.”
“What’s the matter with our government?” she asked. “Why are they doing this? Why are they lying? Hillary, tell me the truth and I’ll go away! I’ve been saying this since Day One. I want to know why my son is dead. You must have had a reason. You must have had a reason for not having the security there. What was that reason? You’d have to be crazy to pull what has been pulled. You must be crazy to do that. Who would, in their right mind, do something like that? Pull all the security and say, ‘Go, you’re on your own.’”
“I accuse you, Hillary. Come back to me, tell me why my son is dead, instead of having people put a hit out on me,” Smith said. “If I gotta go, I guess I gotta go, but learn to tell the truth sometime in your life.”
“I know what she did, even though she’s denying doing it. I know what she did, because I heard from so many different places that are allowed to talk to me. But Hillary’s State Department never has gotten back to me, as she promised. As she promised me, two inches from my face. But I guess she’s allowed to lie like that, and get away with it, because she is Hillary. She is Hillary, and my son is dead. Why?” the anguished mother asked.
Smith said that one thing she hasn’t talked about much, until now, is that “Hillary, her State Department and the people in it, made me look — told my daughter-in-law that I should shut up, and to tell her to tell me to shut up, and since then, I haven’t seen or heard from my grandkids.”
“I would like to be able to have contact with my grandkids,” she said. “I would like to see what they look like. She sent me a couple of pictures, but that’s it. I would like to have contact with them. So if she could just take the kibosh off of me, I know she told them all to tell me to shut up. Well, I can’t shut up. Now what?”
Smith said she did not currently have serious concerns for her physical safety, but thought various threats of violence had been floated through the media to intimidate her.
“Why? Why would they do that to me? Why does somebody even think that I should be hit, or I should be beaten to death, as they put it?” This last was a reference to GQ writer Nathaniel Friedman, who did indeed express a desire to beat Smith to death after her speech at the Republican convention.
Pat Smith expressed confidence that Sean would support her quest for the truth.
“There was a certain phrase I always told Sean, that applies on this too. It is: ‘You don’t choose it, it chooses you.’ You have to be ready for things and be out there. That’s how the Air Force got him, because he got chosen.”
Pat said she, too, has been chosen by her moment, and has to see it through to the end. She confessed that she isn’t sure what her next step will be: “I have no idea. It’s got to choose me. I guess people called and asked me to speak — I’ve had over a hundred speaking engagements, giving information out. I will do it every chance I get, every chance. Everything I can do, I will do. I don’t know, I don’t have any big plans on this. I speak from my heart. I don’t have a schedule, or a list of what I’m supposed to be saying.”
“All I know is, Sean can speak through me,” she said. “I miss my son. I miss my grandkids. And I don’t think Hillary should have the right to do what she has done. She lied. She’s on TV, I see her bobbing her head up and down with a big smirk on her face, saying ‘It wasn’t me that lied, it was her.’ No. I beg your pardon. And every time I see that, I will say it again: She is a liar. She lied to my face, and it wasn’t necessary. Why doesn’t she just tell me the truth, and I’ll go away? I just want to know. I guess I don’t deserve it, like I feel I’m dirt.”
Asked if the American media has given her a platform to search for the truth, Smith replied, “Fox has. Fox has, a lot. They’ve been there for me. They let me say what I needed to say. But the other day, I had an interview on CNN. They were baiting me. They wanted me to say things I didn’t want to say, about the Khan family. I didn’t appreciate that, and I don’t know how many of these interviews I’ve given out, that they’ve turned it around on me.”
http://www.breitbart.com/radio/2016/...e-im-a-nobody/
