Apparently, as Hot Air reported May 9th, an off-record press meeting was held prior to briefing on Benghazigate. Or as the WH would clarify it was a “deep background” meeting.
If there’s one thing you want to do when accusations are flying about an attempted cover up and a disinterested, collusive media, it’s holding an off-the-record briefing.
Time for the team to huddle.
The White House held an off-the-record briefing with reporters on Friday afternoon to discuss recent revelations about the Benghazi investigation, sources familiar with the meeting tell POLITICO.
The meeting began around 12:45 p.m. and postponed the daily, on-the-record White House press briefing to 1:45 p.m. White House press secretary Jay Carney did not respond to a request for confirmation of the meeting.
The off-the-record session was announced to reporters in the wake of an ABC News report showing that White House and State Dept. officials were involved in revising the now-discredited CIA talking points about the attack on Benghazi.
Then at the other official briefing, Jay Carney would say:
“If you look at the issue here, the efforts to politicize it were always about, you know, were we trying to play down the fact that there was an act of terror and an attack on the embassy. And the problem has always been with that assertion it is completely hollow because the President himself in the Rose Garden said this was an act of terror and he talked about it within the context of September 11th, 2001.”
Speaking of politicizing the scandal.(pardon that redundancy) My only guess is this statement was to get press and media to point back to the “did he say it was terrorism or not in the rose garden” — which is only a controversy to Dems.(keep that lie alive) Wink-wink, nod-nod. In other words, good diversion on the part of WH strategy team.
So when it is finally perfectly clear that Nuland and State demanded a rewrite of the talking points, because truth could be used against them, then time to go back to step one and refight the prior battles to divert attention away from reality.
It really is torturing the truth.
Jay Carney pointed his hypocritical finger at Republicans for politicizing Benghazi, while the administration played politics with Benghazi from the beginning. Remember all along the way in the story, Hillary kept injecting the video narrative as the cause d’joure, when specifically talking about the deaths in Benghazi. At one speech, Hillary introduced a top diplomat from Libya who spoke only of terrorism as the motivation for the Benghazi attack and repeatedly called it “terrorism”. Then Hillary spoke and kept injecting the video into her speech.
You have to step back for a minute and ask why is it they would have such a hard time calling Benghazi terrorism? And why does a Libyan diplomat say it as a simple matter of fact?
This week it gets better, once again, on the Sunday news shows. Anyone suffering major deja vu yet?
Newsbusters exposes Candy Crowley sequel
Do you remember Candy Crowley back in October, while acting as a presidential debate moderator, defending Barack Obama’s claim that he had called the attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, an act of terror the day after the attack?
Crowley apparently doesn’t, for on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday, she actually challenged Obama advisor Dan Pfeiffer about this asking, “Why didn’t the president just say, yeah, it was a terrorist attack?” (video follows with transcript and commentary):
CROWLEY: Let me ask and turn you to Benghazi. When Susan Rice went on this show and all the other shows on Sunday, was the president aware of the talking points that we have seen sort of emerge over the last six months?
PFEIFFER: Of the many things the president gets involved in, talking points for Sundays shows is not one of them. But what he was aware of was the consensus of the intelligence community at the time.
CROWLEY: So, he was aware — was he aware at the back and forth between the state department and White House?
PFEIFFER: No, no, no.
CROWLEY: None of that.
PFEIFFER: No, never — no president would be involved in something like that.
CROWLEY: And so he did say in an interview in CBS which we later learned after the election, but a week and a half after Susan Rice was on, he did say he wasn’t sure if it was a terrorist attack in a CBS interview.
PFEIFFER: No one was sure at that point. That’s the point. That’s why, as you look at the e-mails, the intelligence community –
CROWLEY: Well, no, the president –
(CROSSTALK)
CROWLEY: Libya, they were sure of it and the CIA seemed pretty sure of it.
PFEIFFER: Let’s distinguish between two things. Was it an act of terror? Absolutely. And the president called it the day after in the Rose Garden. Was al Qaeda or al Qaeda affiliated extremists or an active terrorist group involve in a premeditated attack? No one knew that at the time and that’s exactly why the talking points were written by the intelligence community, by the CIA as –
CROWLEY: So, why wouldn’t the president just say, yeah, it was a terrorist attack?
PFEIFFER: He already called it acts of terror. What we didn’t know yet was whether it was a premeditated attack by a terrorist group or something that had come as a result of protest or the video that had sparked outrage across the Middle East that week.
So here’s a twofer , wait its a…. How often do you see the media and the administration caught with the same foot in their mouth? That is not what Candy said as debate moderator in the campaign. They scored on that falsehood.
If you thought the Obamastration tried to obfuscate the facts before, try this on for size:
PFEIFFER: Let’s distinguish between two things. Was it an act of terror? Absolutely. And the president called it the day after in the Rose Garden. Was al Qaeda or al Qaeda affiliated extremists or an active terrorist group involved in a premeditated attack? No one knew that at the time and that’s exactly why the talking points were written by the intelligence community, by the CIA, as they were.
Let’s distinguish, shall we?
So they could not say it was terrorism and did not… even though they say they did, but clearly could not… because no one knew, which they did know but could not say.
Follow that… did he muddy the water enough to suit Obama? What torture. I’m beginning to understand the need for briefings on “deep background” now.
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