Reines: Benghazi and 2016 aren’t linked

Philippe Reines, longtime adviser to Hillary Clinton, on Friday said Clinton’s camp is not going to help those who are trying to tie the deadly attack in Benghazi, Libya, to Clinton’s potential bid for the presidency in 2016.

Reines said looking back there will always be things that could have been done differently to help prevent the 2012 attack that killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, under Clinton’s tenure as secretary of State. 

But he asserted there was no actionable intelligence warning about the specific attack.

{mosads}“In terms of the politics of it, it is very even sitting here, very difficult to shift to talking about people losing their lives and the politics of 2016,” he said on CNN.

“For as much as people want to make the two the same and to use one in that context, we don’t see it that way. I know that sounds canned, but we just don’t, and we are not going to help those who want to.”

Reines was addressing the GOP’s reaction to a Senate Intelligence report released this week that concluded the attack was preventable, but the State Department failed to increase security at the compound despite intelligence reports that the situations there was deteriorating.

Reines said the report echoes previous findings, and pointed out Clinton accepted all 29 recommendations from an internal State Department review, which Reines described as the most critical report yet.

He said the United States has national security interests in dangerous parts of the world, and members of the diplomatic core take on a certain amount of risk.

Read more from The Hill.