Jennifer Jacobs

The Des Moines Register

DES MOINES, Iowa — Donald Trump has rented space at an Urbandale movie theater and will give Iowans free tickets to a showing of the Benghazi movie that critics of Hillary Clinton have been eagerly awaiting.

“Mr. Trump would like all Americans to know the truth about what happened at Benghazi,” the GOP presidential candidate’s Iowa co-chair Tana Goertz said Thursday night.

Trump will pay for the showing of 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi at 6 p.m. Friday at the Carmike Cobblestone 9 Theatre, Goertz said.

“The theater is paid for. The tickets are paid for. You just have to RSVP,” she said.

The movie depicts the terrorist raid on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya on Sept. 11, 2012. It reportedly makes no mention of Clinton, then the U.S. secretary of State, but has again raised the topic of the Democratic presidential candidate’s role in the tragedy, three months after Republicans grilled her on her response to the attacks during an 11-hour congressional hearing in October.

Trump, a billionaire New York real estate entrepreneur, flies to Iowa for a 10 a.m. campaign rally on Friday at Living History Farms in Urbandale. He’s currently in second place in the GOP presidential race here, trailing Texas Sen. Ted Cruz by 3 points, the latest Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics Iowa Poll shows.

Trump has said he’s willing to spend a billion dollars to win the GOP nomination. “I make $400 million a year so what difference does it make?” he told reporters in Iowa in August.

Tickets for the movie, which opened Thursday, cost about $8 each, the theater’s website shows.

The word "Benghazi" has re-emerged in the GOP race. In the GOP debate in South Carolina on Thursday night, presidential rival Jeb Bush was first to bring it up, saying Clinton would “continue down the path of Benghazi” and would be “a national security mess.”

For the Record: Sign up for our politics newsletter