#BENGHAZI: Whistlerblowers, emails and a coverup

LL1885 @ Wizbang:

In an advance issue of The Weekly Standard titled The Benghazi Talking Points, Stephen Hayes lays out new evidence that members of the Obama administration actively lied about who was responsible for the death of four Americans.  The Weekly Standard has obtained emails detailing how high level officials made changes to the CIA talking points, effectively erasing Al Qaeda from the picture.

“The discussions involved senior officials from the State Department, the National Security Council, the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the White House.”

This is a very detailed and long article with a lot of unwritten questions in it.  Questions I will pose here, so I urge you to read it all before proceeding with the remained of this post.

Questions:

In the first page of the article, Hayes says that there were emails turned over that had ‘stipulations’. The section, with emphasis added:

“The White House provided the emails to members of the House and Senate intelligence committees for a limited time and with the stipulation that the documents were available for review only and would not be turned over to the committees. The White House and committee leadership agreed to that arrangement as part of a deal that would keep Republican senators from blocking the confirmation of John Brennan, the president’s choice to run the CIA. If the House report provides an accurate and complete depiction of the emails, it is clear that senior administration officials engaged in a wholesale rewriting of intelligence assessments about Benghazi in order to mislead the public.”

Why an emphasis on Brennan? This administration has stonewalled, lied and spun Benghazi for over seven months. Suddenly now they turn these emails over, making Brennan part of the deal? Of all the things the White House could ask for, they ask for Brennan to be confirmed for CIA?  Why? Was it to ensure that someone would be in place to protect this administration’s narrative on Benghazi and the President’s alleged non-role in decision making that night?

Bear in mind that the active head of the CIA at the time of the attacks was Petraeus.  The scandal surrounding Petraeus’ affair was kept on the back burner until after the election, but put into public view last year on November 7th when Petraeus resigned. It it plausible the timing was coincidence, however more likely the administration wished to keep him from testifying, as well as keep Benghazi out of the limelight until after the election – although he did testify at a later date. By then the media had everyone focused on the scandal and not Petraeus’ role at the CIA and Benghazi.

In fact, it was Mike Morrell who would end up testifying for Petraeus in closed-door sessions first – the same one that The Weekly Standard article cites as being the one who changed the talking points:

There is little information about what happened at that meeting of the Deputies Committee. But according to two officials with knowledge of the process, Mike Morrell, deputy director of the CIA, made broad changes to the draft afterwards. Morrell cut all or parts of four paragraphs of the six-paragraph talking points—148 of its 248 words (see Version 2 above). Gone were the reference to “Islamic extremists,” the reminders of agency warnings about al Qaeda in Libya, the reference to “jihadists” in Cairo, the mention of possible surveillance of the facility in Benghazi, and the report of five previous attacks on foreign interests.

Later in November, the Obama administration would shrug off the controversy surrounding Susan Rice and the YouTube video she pushed. Related reading: #Benghazi: Obama’s Lack of Concern On Rice’s Lies (Updated)

Where did the insertion of the  Youtube video come from? Victoria Nuland is identified by The Weekly Standard as a key player in the changing of the talking points:

The talking points were first distributed to officials in the interagency vetting process at 6:52 p.m. on Friday. Less than an hour later, at 7:39 p.m., an individual identified in the House report only as a “senior State Department official” responded to raise “serious concerns” about the draft. That official, whom The Weekly Standard has confirmed was State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland, worried that members of Congress would use the talking points to criticize the State Department for “not paying attention to Agency warnings.”

In an attempt to address those concerns, CIA officials cut all references to Ansar al Sharia and made minor tweaks. But in a follow-up email at 9:24 p.m., Nuland wrote that the problem remained and that her superiors—she did not say which ones—were unhappy. The changes, she wrote, did not “resolve all my issues or those of my building leadership,” and State Department leadership was contacting National Security Council officials directly. Moments later, according to the House report, “White House officials responded by stating that the State Department’s concerns would have to be taken into account.” One official—Ben Rhodes, The Weekly Standard is told, a top adviser to President Obama on national security and foreign policy—further advised the group that the issues would be resolved in a meeting of top administration officials the following morning at the White House.

So Nuland was the point person for the State department coordinating the changes desired by her superiors. No where in Nuland’s changes in the emails does the infamous YouTube video come into play. So where did the Nakoula video get added in and who did it? The Weekly Standard’s Hayes highlights the discrepancy:

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