White House: GOP fabricated leaked Benghazi email
The White House on Tuesday accused congressional Republicans of fabricating emails leaked to two different media organizations that suggested interest in scrubbing the Benghazi, Libya, talking points.
{mosads}”Republicans who were leaking these emails that have been shared with Congress didn’t just do that. They decided to fabricate portions of an email, and make up portions of an email in order to fit a political narrative,” Carney said. “I’m not surprised by it because we’ve seen it again and again.”
Both ABC News and The Weekly Standard reported last week that then-Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes wrote an email primarily concerned with the State Department’s suggested edits of the Benghazi talking points.
The email appeared to give credence to those who had suggested a greater White House involvement in scrubbing mentions of specific terrorist groups and prior CIA terror warnings from the final talking points distributed to administration officials and congressional leaders.
But a full version of the email, obtained by CNN, suggests that Rhodes never specifically says he wants the concerns of State Department official Victoria Nuland to be addressed at a meeting to work through the talking points. Rather, he wrote that he hoped the concerns of all those involved in the process are considered.
Carney said Tuesday that apparent contradiction was evidence of Republican willingness to “cherry pick information, or in this case, make it up in order to fit a political narrative.”
Dan Pfeiffer, a senior White House adviser, also suggested that Republicans had falsified the leaked email.
“Somewhere on Capitol Hill, a GOP source is having a series of awkward conversations with reporters about the fabricated Benghazi email,” Pfeiffer said on Twitter.
On Monday, President Obama said congressional Republicans were engaged in a “sideshow,” attempting to exploit the Benghazi attack for political gain.
“There’s no there, there,” Obama said. “The fact that this keeps on getting churned up, frankly, has a whole lot to do with political motivations.”
But House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said Sunday the White House has “effectively lied” to the American people in the aftermath of the attack, and pledged further investigation.
“The real truth is the people who were there in Tripoli and Benghazi knew it was a terror attack from the get-go,” Issa told “Meet the Press.” “When the wheels come off, when in fact people make a decision to give us something that’s false and then that’s shown to be false, of course we have an obligation to look at it.”
Copyright 2023 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.