Watch Fox’s Chris Wallace call out Darrell Issa for ‘highest level of falsehood’ on Benghazi

Continuing his periodic reputation of breaking from the Fox mold now and then, Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace directly confronted GOP Rep. Darrell Issa, accusing him of having the “highest level of falsehood” in regards to his obsession with the terrorist attacks in Benghazi.

In February, The Washington Post looked into Issa’s claim that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had told Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to “stand down” instead of calling reinforcements to the scene of the attack.

“Issa is crossing a line when he suggests there was no response — or a deliberate effort to hinder it,” fact checker Glenn Kessler said in the piece.

During the Sunday interview, Wallace pointed out Issa’s alleged problems with the facts, telling him that “for the second time, they gave you ‘Four Pinocchios,’ which is their highest level of falsehood.”

Issa claimed that he was simply “quoting something that was in somebody else’s report” when he made the accusations against Clinton.

“Witnesses have told us that they asked for help,” Issa went on to say. “The president himself implied that he told Leon Panetta, then-secretary of defense, to use what efforts they could. And what we know for a fact is, not one rescue of DOD was launched to get there in that 8.5 hours.”

“But to be honest, you do not have any evidence that secretary Clinton told Leon Panetta to stand down,” Wallace pressed.

Issa backpedaled, saying that he wasn’t using the term “stand down” in the traditional military sense, but was just characterizing the administration’s “failure to react.”

“The fact that only State Department assets, and only assets inside the country were ever used,” Issa said. “That members of the armed forces, gun-carrying trained people were not allowed to get on the aircraft to go and attempt the rescue. Those kinds of things, through State Department resources, represent a stand down.”

Watch the exchange in the video below (h/t: The Raw Story):

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