Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) on Thursday stepped back from his claim that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton became emotional at Wednesday’s Benghazi hearing in an effort to dodge his questions, saying he shouldn’t have speculated on her reaction.
“I was responding to a question,” Johnson said on CNN’s “Starting Point” on Thursday. “I probably speculated, and I shouldn’t have.”
Clinton showed flashes of anger as she delivered her long-awaited testimony on the terrorist attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, at hearings in front of the House and Senate Foreign Relations committees on Wednesday.
Johnson pressed Clinton about why survivors of the Libya attack weren't interviewed before the administration’s initial public statements, provoking a fiery response from the secretary of State.
“With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans,” Clinton told him angrily. “Whether it's because of a protest or whether a guy out for a walk decided to go kill some Americans, what difference, at this point, does it make?”
In an interview on Wednesday, Johnson insinuated that Clinton was faking the emotional response in an effort to avoid a tough line of questioning,
"I'm not sure she had rehearsed for that type of question," Johnson told Buzzfeed. "I think she just decided before she was going to describe emotionally the four dead Americans, the heroes, and use that as her trump card to get out of the questions. It was a good way of getting out of really having to respond to me."
“I was trying to be respectful and I was a little surprised by her reaction,” Johnson said Thursday. “Listen, I was asking a pretty simple question — we could have known pretty quickly whether there was a protest or there wasn’t a protest just by getting on the phone to those evacuees.”
But the GOP lawmaker kept up his tough criticisms of the administration and said there were still unanswered questions about how the White House handled Benghazi.
"This administration has been hiding behind an FBI investigation and a 60-day accountability report,” said Johnson. "They were playing election politics, no doubt about it."
