FoxNews: New details about the Obama administration's initial story-line on the Benghazi attack are raising additional questions about top-level efforts to downplay terrorism, with one report showing a State Department official pushed to delete a section that could have been used to "beat up" her department.
The fresh reports have surfaced two days after three whistle-blowers testified on Capitol Hill about the Benghazi attack. One of them sharply challenged the administration's decision to describe the attack out of the gate as a protest gone wrong.
ABC News reported Friday that, despite administration claims that the flawed description reflected the best intelligence at the time, the talking points that led to the statement were revised 12 times.
ABCNews: When it became clear last fall that the CIA’s now discredited Benghazi talking points were flawed, the White House said repeatedly the documents were put together almost entirely by the intelligence community, but White House documents reviewed by Congress suggest a different story.
ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.
White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department. The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.
That would appear to directly contradict what White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said about the talking points in November.
Speaker Boehner, it's time to ACT and form a special investigative Select Committee. Testimony all the way up to Hillary and Obama himself should be heard, under oath! Perjury, dereliction, nor impeachment should be taken off the table. No more excuses.
It's time to hold these leaders accountable.
Related links: Benghazi Story Escapes Conservative Media
BuzzFeed's Ben Smith explains motives behind White House Libya coverup
WOAH: CNN now saying talking points were edited down to something ‘totally untrue’
UPDATE: So...is the White House now getting their media in lockstep with the cover-up too? Unreal...
Boy, that doesn't seem like the actions of a guilty party, does it?Politico: The White House held an off-the-record briefing with reporters on Friday afternoon to discuss recent revelations about the Benghazi investigation, sources familiar with the meeting tell POLITICO.
The meeting began around 12:45 p.m. and postponed the daily, on-the-record White House press briefing to 1:45 p.m. White House press secretary Jay Carney did not respond to a request for confirmation of the meeting.
The off-the-record session was announced to reporters in the wake of an ABC News report showing that White House and State Dept. officials were involved in revising the now-discredited CIA talking points about the attack on Benghazi.
H/t: Marcy L.
