Original published at Media Matters
Days after he wrote a column endorsing the assassination of President Obama, Fox hosted Michael Scheuer to accuse Hillary Clinton of effectively murdering the Americans who died during the 2012 attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya.
Scheuer, a former CIA officer with a long history of extreme rhetoric, has appeared on Fox News and Fox Business dozens of times over the years.
Scheuer endorsed the assassinations of both Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron in his December 23 column, as The Daily Beast's David Frum noted. Concluding a piece criticizing their handling of "the Islamists' war on America," Scheuer wrote (emphasis added):
"As they head further down the road of losing wars and wrecking Anglo-American liberties, Messrs Obama and Cameron and their supporters in all parties would do well to read the words of the great 17th century English republican Algernon Sidney, a man who was revered on both sides of the Atlantic, who greatly influenced America's founders, and who was executed by the British Crown for what it described as sedition. 'There must therefore be a right,' Sidney wrote,
"'...of proceeding judicially or extra-judicially against all persons who transgress the laws; or else those laws, and the societies that should subsist by them, cannot stand; and the ends for which governments are constituted, together with the governments themselves, must be overthrown. ... If he [a political leader] be justly accounted an enemy of all, who injures all; he above all must be the publick enemy of a nation, who by usurping power over them, does the greatest and most publick injury that a people can suffer. For which reason, by an established law among the most virtuous nations, every man might kill a tyrant; and no names are recorded in history with more honor, than of those who did it.'"
The former CIA official appeared on Fox Business' Lou Dobbs Tonight only 10 days after that column's publication. During his January 2 interview, Scheuer accused The New York Times of publishing a series on the Benghazi attacks in order to protect Hillary Clinton, who he claimed "has blood on her arms up to her elbows for not being willing to protect the people who are representing us in Libya" and thus "killed those Americans and [the Times editors] have to kill that story or it is going to become mainstream for 2016." Dobbs responded, "Strong words from Michael Scheuer."
In previous Fox interviews on the Benghazi attacks, Scheuer has said that "Democrats are very good at watching Americans die"; accused Clinton of having "blood on her hands"; and suggested that Obama forced CIA director David Petraues to resign because he wouldn't take responsibility for the attack. In 2009, he claimed that "The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States because it's going to take a grassroots, bottom up pressure because these politicians prize their office, prize the praise of the media and the Europeans."
Scheuer is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's Center for Peace and Security Studies. He testified before the House Homeland Security Committee during an October 9, 2013, hearing entitled "From al-Shabaab to al-Nusra: How Westerners Joining Terror Groups Overseas Affect the Homeland," and was identified by Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) as one of the committee's "distinguished witnesses."
From the January 2 edition of Fox Business' Lou Dobbs Tonight:
