Heya Luther :2wave: .....this is what Slate has up.
I was told there was going to be a cover-up. After reading the 100 pages of emails related to the Benghazi media talking points, I’m hard-pressed to find evidence for the most damning accusations against the president and his staff. If they were involved, they were once again leading from behind.
The cover-up story relies on the premise that Obama administration officials pushed the idea of spontaneity in order to obscure the fact that they had missed warnings of planned terrorist attack. It's plausible that someone was pushing that story for parochial reasons in these email exchanges. Perhaps the CIA put that idea in its first assessment and kept it there in every subsequent version to cover for its failure to stay on top of the al-Qaida affiliates in Benghazi, even though there was a CIA outpost there. It's also obvious that the State Department wanted to shift blame away from its failure to protect its people in Benghazi. But there's no evidence in the emails that the idea of spontaneity was initiated by anyone associated with Obama, the White House, or the president's wider political fortunes. Did Obama benefit from the spontaneity narrative? Yes. But to embrace intelligence from your CIA that is favorable to you—when you have no reason to doubt your intelligence service—is not the same as making up a false story. It’s not even a sin.
Next we come to the claim that the president and his team removed the references to al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations as well as references to prior warnings about terrorist activity. If this were the case, you would expect to see some effort by the White House voices in the email traffic toward this goal. It’s not there. The opposite is the case. In the initial round of emails, one CIA official reports that the White House signed off right away on the full initial CIA assessment. "The White House cleared quickly, but State has major concerns," reads an email that a CIA official sent to CIA director David Petraeus. So rather than being the authors of the bowdlerizing effort, the White House was just fine with the fully caffeinated version that mentions Ansar al-Sharia, al-Qaida, and that the CIA had produced numerous warnings about extremists in Benghazi. White House aides reviewed the talking points, made no substantive changes, and moved them along.
When the language does eventually change in the talking points, it is clear that it is at the behest of State Department officials, not anyone in the White House. When Obama’s aides do come on stage, it’s pretty far in the background. One State Department official writes, "Talked to [NSC spokesman] Tommy [Vietor], we can make edits.” This is hardly the vision of a campaign-obsessed Obama operation pushing a storyline. There have been some sloppy Nixon analogies thrown around this week, so let's remind ourselves for a moment of what a real cover-up sounds like. "I don't give a **** what happens,” President Nixon was recorded saying. “I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover up or anything else if it'll save it—save the plan. That's the whole point. … We're going to protect our people, if we can."
Just because there's no real evidence of the grand White House conspiracy doesn't absolve the president of responsibility for the underlying failures and the shoddy efforts to explain the whole affair. From his first remarks in the Rose Garden, to the exchanges in the debates with Mitt Romney, to the present day, the president has been shading and back-dating what he said shortly after the attack to make it seem like he was aware it was a planned attack when at the time he was encouraging the view that it was a spontaneous one. That's spin and it's lame, but it's a present-day failing unconnected with White House actions last fall. So the president and his aides are guilty—guilty of doing a bad and misleading job of explaining why there was no cover-up. But that’s not the smoking gun Republicans set out to find.....snip~