It’s beginning to look like Jake Tapper may single-handedly save CNN:
CNN has obtained an email sent by a top aide of President Barack Obama, in which the aide discusses the Obama administration reaction to the attack on the U.S. posts in Benghazi, Libya. The actual email differs from how sources characterized it to two different media organizations.
The actual email from then-Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes appears to show that whomever leaked it did so in a way that made it appear that the White House primarily concerned with the State Department’s desire to remove references and warnings about specific terrorist groups so as to not bring criticism to the department.
Rhodes, White House communications director Jennifer Palmieri, and White House press secretary Jay Carney, could not be reached for comment.
In the email sent on Friday, September 14, 2012, at 9:34 p.m., obtained by CNN from a U.S. government source, Rhodes wrote:
“All –
“Sorry to be late to this discussion. We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation.
“There is a ton of wrong information getting out into the public domain from Congress and people who are not particularly informed. Insofar as we have firmed up assessments that don’t compromise intel or the investigation, we need to have the capability to correct the record, as there are significant policy and messaging ramifications that would flow from a hardened mis-impression.
“We can take this up tomorrow morning at deputies.”
[…]
ABC News reported that Rhodes wrote: “We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don’t want to undermine the FBI investigation. We thus will work through the talking points tomorrow morning at the Deputies Committee meeting.” The Weekly Standard reported that Rhodes “responded to the group, explaining that Nuland had raised valid concerns and advising that the issues would be resolved at a meeting of the National Security Council’s Deputies Committee the following morning.”
Whoever provided those quotes and paraphrases did so inaccurately, seemingly inventing the notion that Rhodes wanted the concerns of the State Department specifically addressed. Nuland, particularly, had expressed a desire to remove mentions of specific terrorist groups and CIA warnings about the increasingly dangerous assignment. Rhodes put no emphasis at all in his email on the State Department’s concerns.
I’m sure Stephen Hayes will have something to say on this, but for right now, I’m just glad some journalists remain — Hayes and Tapper among them — who remain committed to taking us where the evidence goes. And that’s what many of us want, despite claims that we are engaging in some partisan witch hunt,
This email seems to relieve some pressure on the White House over supposed directives to coordinate with the State Department on a sanitizing of the talking points. Or rather, it isn’t damning in the way some earlier reports presented it. Which in and of itself doesn’t mean anything other than that Ben Rhodes wasn’t explicit in his email, and that earlier characterizations of the email suggesting he had been were inaccurate and therefore unduly prejudicial.
What it doesn’t do, however, is explain where the President was during the attacks and their immediate aftermath, why the story about a YouTube video was floated, who proposed floating that story, who gave the stand-down order aborting an attempted rescue, and why — despite evidence now suggesting that both the State Department and the White House knew precisely who was responsible for the attacks and murders — the President and then Secretary of State Clinton, along with Susan Rice, were still advancing the YouTube video story in public.
In fact, it makes it all the more curious that they were; after all, if Ben Rhodes was interested on Friday in making sure misinformation was tamped down, who was responsible for the talking points used by Ms Rice on the Sunday morning shows?
We need to know how this played out. And if that takes subpoenas, the Republican leadership had better step up and do their jobs before they lose all credibility, as well.
Wow. Even Chuck Todd is smacking the shit out of Carney right now. Could NBC actually be pulling its pants up?
What is the newest (latest) White House line of defense on the subject of the “no there there”? (And hence of course, the line the whole Democrat apparatus takes?)
As I understand it, the White House maintains it was merely umpiring an “inter-agency process” of dispute. It’s sausage-making: don’t look, ’cause ugly.
What does Tapper’s neat distinction clarify?
That the White House was umpiring an “inter-agency process” of dispute.
So, saving CNN? Or something else altogether?
It’s all political motives, sdferr. Nothing is anything but partisanship.
Meanwhile, The Weekly Standard is still groping around in the dark seeking to find the genesis of the “video” as explanation. They should talk to Moses.
Does anyone in this administration know anything about anything?
Megyn Kelly, now unfettered, just killed it with a Sgt. Schultz clip. And then we get Holder: “I don’t know, I don’t know. I don’t know. But I’m sure everything is perfectly legit.”
Could NBC actually be pulling its pants up?
Maybe I’ve been studying Leftist Thinking for way too many years, but I don’t trust any of the MSM bastards.
the Republican leadership had better step up and do their jobs before they lose all credibility, as well.
They still have credibility?!
They’re all lying liars what lie. They have their moments of clarity, usually when it involves saving their own hides. If they had any integrity they wouldn’t be in either politics or journalism.
I grow cynical in my old age.
On the video genesis. IIRC the video was mentioned in passing by an Egyptian Imam some days before 9-11-12. Then the US embassy in Cairo on 9-11-12 released a statement, which has disappeared from even the Wayback machine, condemning the “film” and then were attacked by protesters.
Hours later came the attack at Benghazi which later was blamed on the film first by a Libyan militia which has ties to Al Qaeda. There were also reports that the group which attacked the consulate was earlier trying to get the local youths to chant protests of the film as a cover for the attack.
I have links to all this somewhere but it will take some time to dig them out.
“which later was blamed”
Have you a general sense of how much later geoffb (without bothering to dig through any archives)? I.e., later as in effect “late enough” that the virtue of applying the video to the attack ex post facto had come to light already as a “useful” tactic or maneuver, owing to the early capitulation by the Embassy in Cairo, say, or possible mouthings issuing from Washington?
The Hill: White House: GOP fabricated leaked Benghazi email
My memory is that the Libyan militia leader blamed the video before it was mentioned by the administration. I also recall that there was an phone intercept of a couple of terrorist leaders who, before 9-11-12, discussed using the video as a pretext for an, or the, attack.
Carney can make this charge. But does he have any evidence to this effect? For instance, in a hypothetical, for all anyone knows, the White House leaked already falsified e-mails to people in the Capitol, who in turn leaked these things to Weekly Standard and ABC, mistaking these [hypothesized] entities in good faith for the genuine article.
Yet we can reasonably doubt this question will be asked by the press of Carney’s assertions. No more than Dianne Feinstein will be asked to provided proofs of her assertions about the Republicans vs. Sec. Clinton.
This might be the first step in getting back any credibility. In my world, they don’t have any.
Oops, sorry Physics Geek. I should have read all the comments first.
This 9-12-12 piece in the NYT claims to have interviews and quotes from leaders of the attack and Libyan officials all talking of the Benghazi attack being preceded by, growing out of, a protest of the Youtube video.
That we now know there was no such protest, and that some details of the attack in the story are not true, makes it appear that Libyan officials and militia leader[s] were looking to plant this storyline about the protest of the video. Unless of course the whole interview/quotes are simply made up out of whole-cloth by the administration and pushed as Libyan sourced.
So is there a sense that Obazm and his followers simply read the NYT’s 9/12/12 piece and took it for gospel, choosing then and there to run with it?
Unless they were the ones who planted the NYT story to begin with. With this bunch “what is truth” gets very fuzzy.
I notice that though “Yussef Magariaf, president of the newly elected Libyan National Congress, offered ‘an apology to the United States and the Arab people, if not the whole world, for what happened.’ He pledged new measures to ensure the security of foreign diplomats and companies. ‘We together with the United States government are on the same side, standing in a united front in the face of these murderous outlaws.’ ” makes this token appearance in the article, his contrary view of the irrelevance of the Nakoula video does not.
Way-out-of-left-field theory: The smart money has decided that Barry O is going down one way or the other and they’ve decided cut him loose with maximum time for it to blow over before the next election.
It’s the standard Illinois political career trajectory: get in office, grab all the goodies you can, then do a couple of years in minimum security after you leave (or are removed) from office. It plays out at every level from Chicago alderman to governor.
The old joke was that Illinois was the only state that elects its governor to two four-year terms: one in Springield and one in Joliet.
A couple of other things from the NYT piece. We have been told that it takes a couple of days for the US military to do anything like launch a plane and have it get to Libya. However, in this NYT piece published less than 24 hours after the attack began and likely less than 12 hours after we find:
Then there is this:
Caricatures, like here, here, here.
Hayes’ account shows up: Release All the Benghazi Emails
*** There is one way the White House can ensure everyone is working from the original emails. It can release them publicly. That way, everyone can see exactly what was being said in real-time and in context. It would provide a better understanding of the issues at hand, something the White House claims to want.
At his very challenging briefing Friday, spokesman Jay Carney defended the White House’s efforts to provide information about Benghazi to the public in the hours after the attack. “And our effort has been to be – to provide as much information as we have when it’s available and when we feel confident it’s accurate.”
Carney’s boss made the same claims last fall. “Everything we get, every piece of information we get as we got it, we laid it out for the American people,” he told Jon Stewart on October 18.
He emphasized this point again in an interview with Philadelphia talk radio host Michael Smerconish on October 26. “This is something that the American people can take to the bank. My administration plays this stuff straight. We don’t play politics when it comes to American national security. So what we have consistently done throughout my presidency and what we did in this circumstance is as information came in we gave it to the American people. And as we got new information, we gave that to the American people. And that includes, by the way, members of Congress.”
It’s not too late. The White House can still provide these emails, so that the American people, and that includes members of Congress, have a better understanding of the decision making process that produced the scrubbed talking points on September 15, 2012. ***
link
Obama isn’t going anywhere. He will finish out his term.
I have to agree. He won’t go anywhere except to the golf course and fund-raisers for the rest of his term. Policy-wise, I believe he is finished.
I’ll be happy to see the ACA killed in the crib and immigration reform kicked to the curb.
immigration is all cheesedicked up by roobs and schumer and meghan’s coward daddy doing all their business in the dark all secret-like
there should’ve been a real discussion where people had to make a case for the policies they wanted one policy at a time
“comprehensive” is the same as saying hey we wanna make you eat a shit sandwich now open wide here comes the choo choo
and “fuck you” is what you say to roobs and schumer and meghan’s coward daddy in reply
It’s the same as “compromise”. No thanks.
Well, Marco certainly was a shooting star, wasn’t he? Fizzled out, he has.
Another piece from back then I’d forgotten I’d saved.
Fizzled out
Smells more like sold out to me.
Well, yeah. I was being nice.
“Well, that answers virtually none of our questions, but, seeing as how you’re a Democrat, we’ll let you go.”