BREAKING: Benghazi "Talking Points" Went Through TWELVE Revisions

Via National Review's Morning Jolt email newsletter.

"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.

"Those talking points originated from the intelligence community. They reflect the IC's best assessments of what they thought had happened," Carney told reporters at the White House press briefing on November 28, 2012. "The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word 'consulate' to 'diplomatic facility' because 'consulate' was inaccurate."

Here's the kicker: "In an email to officials at the White House and the intelligence agencies, State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland took issue with including that information because it "could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either? Concerned . . ."

Yes, I'd be "concerned" if I were a politically ambitious Secratery of State about the truth getting out about how my department absolutely fell down on the job of providing adequate security to the Benghazi facility and that directly led to the death of four Americans.

These incompetent sons of bitches got people killed and all they cared about was saving their sorry ass reputations.

Added: Democrats are working to get reporters to smear Benghazi whistleblowers. Amazingly, some are reporting on that and not doing Obama's dirty work.

posted by DrewM. at 09:24 AM

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