14 | October | 2012

This morning on Fox News Sunday, David “The Red” Axelrod assured Chris Wallace that “there isn’t anybody on this planet who feels a greater sense of responsibility for our diplomats”… than this President, but when Chris Wallace asked how soon after the Benghazi attack the President actually met with his national security team, Axelrod had no clear answer for him.

Via NRO:

Wallace followed up on Axelrod’s non-answer by asking whether the President managed to squeeze in a meeting with the National Security Council before jetting off to Las Vegas for a campaign rally. Given Axelrod’s inability to produce a straightforward answer to the questions, it’s pretty clear the answer is “no.”

Wallace also hammered Axelrod over Biden’s debate allegation that they (“we”) didn’t know about any requests for more security. Wallace said, “just the day before, several State Dept officials testified under oath that there were repeated requests for more security that were rejected. What is the Vice President talking about?”

Axelrod answered that he meant what the White House knew. Of course, because whenever something awful happens in this administration, the White House was way out of the loop, but when something (arguably) good happens, Obama was deeply involved, basically running the show.

Wallace: “We’re now getting into a definition of what the word, ‘we’ means…when the Vice President says ‘we’, he’s not talking about the Obama administration because the question wasn’t about what you knew…it’s that there were requests for more security – Biden is not talking about the Obama administration, he’s not talking about the State Dept – he’s just talking about himself and the President?”

Why does Axelrod feel the need to keep repeating that nobody cares more than Obama?: “There is nobody – nobody on this planet who is more concerned, and more interested in getting to the bottom of this than the President of the United States. He’s feels personal responsibility for every representative he sends around the world. He knew Chris Stevens, he admired Chris Stevens…”

Because Obama wouldn’t interrupt his campaign schedule to meet with his security team? Because the FBI didn’t even make it to the site of the attack to investigate until three weeks after the attack? Because his administration has been engaging in a disinformation campaign since the whole thing happened, inspiring suspicious minds to entertain all sorts of interesting theories as to what really happened?

Clinton is rumored to be lawyering up.

Powerline: What Happened In Benghazi:

The State Department has released a transcript of a briefing that two high-ranking department officials gave to a number of reportersvia conference call on October 9 (Tuesday). I am not certain about this, but I believe the transcript was only made public today. You should read it in its entirety; it is the most detailed description I have seen of the events in Benghazi on September 11.

While this is by no means clear, it appears that the State Department may have released the transcript as part of the escalating conflict between Barack Obama and Joe Biden and the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. In their desperation to avoid responsibility for the Benghazi debacle, Obama and Biden have pointed fingers in two directions: at the intelligence community for reporting incorrectly that the incident was a protest over a YouTube video clip, and at the State Department for not providing adequate security for the Ambassador.

Read the excerpts from the narrative at Powerline, and you tell me how anyone in his/her right mind could have confused that for a spontaneous protest gone wrong. And what was the President doing jetting off to Las Vegas while the news of it was breaking?

Reporters in on the call had some questions…

This exchange is priceless:

OPERATOR: The next question is from the line of Brad Klapper with AP. Please, go ahead.

QUESTION: Hi, yes. You described several incidents you had with groups of men, armed men. What in all of these events that you’ve described led officials to believe for the first several days that this was prompted by protests against the video?

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL TWO: That is a question that you would have to ask others. That was not our conclusion. I’m not saying that we had a conclusion, but we outlined what happened. The Ambassador walked guests out around 8:30 or so, there was no one on the street at approximately 9:40, then there was the noise and then we saw on the cameras the – a large number of armed men assaulting the compound.

So Hillary Clinton and the State Department unequivocally reject the account that Barack Obama and Joe Biden have given. It is hard to imagine what “intelligence” reports Obama could have received that blamed the YouTube video. He is lying, evidently.

Obviously. It seems to me like a hair-brained scheme dreamed up by those “intelligence experts” Jarrett or Axelrod in order to protect the “al Qaeda is on its heels” – “our enemies have been brought to justice” narrative, the Obama campaign is still promoting in ads.

So the obvious question to ask here, is – if they would lie about something as important as a terrorist attack on an American consulate – what wouldn’t they lie about? A better question I guess is, what haven’t they lied about?

MORE:

Via Stephen Hayes, The Weekly Standard:

For nine days, the Obama administration made a case that virtually everyone understood was untrue: that the killing of our ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya, was a random, spontaneous act of individuals upset about an online video—an unpredictable attack on a well-protected compound that had nothing do to with the eleventh anniversary of 9/11.

These claims were wrong. Every one of them. But the White House pushed them hard.

Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, appeared on five Sunday talk shows on September 16. A “hateful video” triggered a “spontaneous protest . . . outside of our consulate in Benghazi” that “spun from there into something much, much more violent,” she said on Face the Nation. “We do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned.”

Yes indeed, it was specifically– the White House — who was pushing this phoney narrative as Brit Hume made Chris Wallace admit during the panel discussion on Fox News Sunday:

Here’s the part of the panel discussion where they discussed the not so shocking lack of Benghazigate coverage in the papers, especially the NYTs.

SEE ALSO:

The NYT’s Ombudsman, MARGARET SULLIVAN took her paper to task for their disgraceful lack of coverage of the House hearing, last week: Why Wasn’t Libya Hearing on Page A1 of The Times?

Stories about Wednesday’s Congressional hearing on Libyawere prominently displayed on the front pages of major newspapers throughout the United States on Thursday morning.The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, for example, both led with the story, meaning that editors placed it in the primary news position on their front pages.But The New York Times was not among them. The six stories on The Times’s front page included one on affirmative action at universities, one on Lance Armstrong’s drug allegations, two related to the presidential election, one on taped phone calls at JPMorgan Chase, and one on a Tennessee woman who died of meningitis. The major artwork on Page A1 was from Syria, and the only mention of the hearing on Libya came in a one-paragraph summary at the bottom, leading readers to a well-displayed story on Page A3.I talked with Jill Abramson, the executive editor, about the decision, which she said she may have set in motion while running the morning news meeting on Wednesday.“I said that I wanted us to weigh the news value against the reality that Congressional hearings are not all about fact-finding,” she said. In other words, they are often deeply politicized.

UPDATE:

Don’t mess with the Clintons…

RS McCain: Libya Cover-Up: Hillary Clinton Throws Obama Under His Own Benghazi Bus:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters that her agency was not the source of misinformation concerning the attacks, charging instead that the White House was the source of the false mantra that the murders were spurred by an anti-Muslim film made in the United States.
Clinton told reporters that when Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, made her rounds on every Sunday morning news show to claim the film motivated the attacks, the information had been fed to her by the White House and not the intelligence community in the State Department or the CIA.
Not only does Clinton’s statement contradict early White House accounts but directly contradicts statements made by Vice President Biden during the debate.