It was an interesting moment on The News Hour when Michael Gerson assured Mark Shields and Jim Lehrer that the Benghazi cover up is not Watergate. I am rather certain that that is true, but the fact that Gerson had to say is an indication of the seriousness of the scandal.
The way that the scandal came back to the front pages is also interesting. In what is becoming rather a pattern these days, the conservative press follows a story that isn't getting the coverage it deserves. It was Stephen Hayes at the Weekly Standard who had the scoop. That made it impossible for the rest of the press to ignore. Today Jonathan Karl at ABC broke the same story and with it the damn broke. Now nearly everyone acknowledges the scandal.
In the days after the Benghazi attack, Administration officials (most infamously, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice) told us that it was the result of one the spontaneous protests that erupted in the Middle East over the infamous film about the Prophet. When it became clear that this was false, that the consulate was subject to a coordinated terrorist attack, the Administration claimed that it had only been relying on talking points supplied by the CIA.
What Hayes and Karl demonstrate is that the talking points supplied by the intelligence service were carefully scrubbed of certain bits of information. From Jonathan Karl:
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.
Let's recap. An American consulate was attacked and four Americans, including the US Ambassador to Libya, were murdered. On the eve of a presidential election, the Administration presented a deliberately falsified account of what happened to the press and the public. Then it lied about the fact that it had lied about the facts.
Is this Watergate? Of course not. This is not going to bring down the Obama Presidency nor should it. We don't impeach presidents for such things as lying and manifest incompetence and, even if we did, the press won't tell the story that way and the Democrats will circle will circle the wagons.
It matters a lot nonetheless. We need to know when something like this has taken place. It has done a great deal of damage to the President's credibility. His Press Secretary, Jay Carney, found out today that the White House Press Corp is hopping mad. They think that they were deliberately misled by Carney because, in fact, they were. It is unlikely that he will regain their trust. Of course the President's role in all this is unclear but that doesn't matter. Either he knew what was going on or he wasn't paying attention. Either way, he is responsible.
This is a pattern that seems to be locked in. An embarrassment results in a cover up, virtually assuring that the one will erupt at a later point, compounded by the latter. The Administration's friends were doing the President no favors by pulling out all the stops in his defense. They just can't help themselves. It has been said that virtue is its own reward. The same is true of vice.
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