The White House on Wednesday was under fire from reporters and Republicans as it tried to dismiss allegations by critics that a newly released email proves the Obama administration's response to the 2012 attack on a U.S. compound in Benghazi was politically calculated.
Republicans say the email, part of 41 White House documents sought and made public by the conservative Judicial Watch, is a “smoking gun” that shows the administration tried to spin the tragedy, in which four Americans were killed, to minimize damage to President Obama's re-election campaign and that officials have been stonewalling to protect Hillary Clinton, then the secretary of State.
The email from presidential adviser Ben Rhodes appears to show the Obama administration drafted talking points to blame a terrorist attack in Benghazi on a spontaneous protest, critics say.
ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl drilled White House press secretary Jay Carney with questions regarding the email that helped “prep” then-U.N. envoy Susan Rice for Sunday talk shows. The email was released as part of a Freedom of Information Act request by the watchdog group.
“Why were you holding back this information?” he demanded.
The reporter and press secretary sparred for eight minutes.
Carney said that the email wasn't about the assault in Benghazi specifically but instead referred to a different set of talking points that addressed unrest across the region.
“The email and the talking points were not about Benghazi; they were about the general situation in the Muslim world,” Carney said.
Judicial Watch's President Tom Fitton later responded.
“We didn't ask for documents about protests everywhere in the world. We asked for Benghazi talking points. We got this document from the administration, from the State Department in response to a specific request about Benghazi documents.”
He continued: “This email has serious implications and the White House is flailing. There are serious implications to misleading Congress, lying to Congress.”
The documents obtained by Judicial Watch in a lawsuit filed against the State Department were not among dozens of emails that the White House released last year in an effort to clear itself of allegations that officials had tried to escape blame for the incident.
“It is outrageous that it took a federal judge to force the White House to comply with the law,” said Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus. “If the White House felt this talking points memo was classified, what else don't we know about Benghazi?”
Priebus said the White House has been trying to protect Clinton, who is a likely contender for the 2016 presidential race.
“The emails show that Benghazi, in the eyes of the White House, was a political problem for re-election and they approached it from that point of view,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who calls it a smoking gun. “The document now released … clearly shows that Ben Rhodes was trying to be a political operative rather than a national security spokesman.”
But Bernadette Meehan, National Security Council spokeswoman, said in a statement: “In the email, Rhodes makes clear that our primary goals included making sure our people in the field were protected and bringing those responsible for the attacks to justice. The content reflects what the administration was saying at the time and what we understood to be the facts at the time.”
The attack on the diplomatic post in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and Sean Smith, a State Department information officer.
The following Sunday, Rice said on five talk shows that the attack was a “spontaneous reaction” to a protest in Cairo prompted by anger about an anti-Muslim video posted on YouTube, a claim that turned out to be false.
“The best information and the best assessment we have today is that in fact this was not a pre-planned, premeditated attack; that what happened initially was that it was a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired in Cairo as a consequence of the video,” Rice said on Fox News on Sept. 16, 2012.
Carney said Rice was working off of two sets of talking points.
One, produced by the CIA for lawmakers and White House officials, blamed the attacked on an impromptu demonstration.
In testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in April, Michael Morell, who in 2012 was the deputy CIA director, said that although the agency believed al-Qaida-linked individuals were involved from the beginning, the agency's initial assessment was that the attack in Benghazi was a spontaneous event inspired by protesters breaching the U.S. Embassy in Cairo. But there was no mention of the video.
Republicans have seized on Rice's explanation, which mentions the video while the CIA talking points did not. The protests in Cairo were widely attributed to anger over the video.
Morell testified that it wasn't until Sept. 18, two days after Rice's TV appearances, that the CIA got the Libyan government's assessment of video footage from the Libyan consulate's security cameras, which showed the front of the building just before the attack with no sign of protesters.
“It became clear that we needed to revisit our analysis,” Morell told lawmakers.
The second set of talking points, Rhodes email, lists goals for Rice's public appearance, including “to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy,” and “to reinforce the president and administration's strength and steadiness in dealing with difficult challenges.”
Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, a member of a House committee investigating the attack, should “come clean” and release all of its emails related to the Benghazi attack.
Chaffetz told USA Today that although the White House provided emails to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform based on a request, many sections were blocked out.
“There were other emails that went to Susan Rice. We got them with heavy redactions,” Chaffetz said.
McClatchy Newspapers, the Washington Post and Politico contributed to this report.
