White House Releases Benghazi Emails

WASHINGTON—The White House succumbed to mounting pressure Wednesday and decided to publicly release the chain of administration emails surrounding the controversial Benghazi talking points.

The move came a week after public interest in last year's terror attack unexpectedly rebounded with testimony by three State Department employees that reopened lingering questions about the assault. The documents were being released late Wednesday afternoon.

While many of the emails have already leaked out, the release of the complete set of communications paints a fuller picture of an administration struggling with how much to disclose about an attack that eight months later remains a focus of partisan division.

The decision to release them represented a major shift that officials hope will tamp down the controversy. Administration lawyers for months had rebuffed calls to hand over the emails on the grounds the exchanges were part of internal administration deliberations.

But administration officials have complained that congressional Republicans in recent days have been leaking selective excerpts from the emails to buttress their argument that the talking points were manipulated for political purposes.

Even with the release of the emails, however, Republicans have made clear they have outstanding unanswered questions, including how the independent Accountability Review Board conducted its investigation of the attacks last year.

The talking points, drafted at the request of key lawmakers, were meant to provide a first public account of the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks on U.S. posts in Benghazi, Libya, that claimed the lives of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

The talking points were drafted by the Central Intelligence Agency and then heavily edited during a more than daylong email debate among more than two dozen intelligence and administration officials.

The final product made no reference to al Qaeda, despite secret intelligence at the time pointing to the involvement of al Qaeda-linked militants. The talking points also contained an assertion that the administration later acknowledged was false—that the attack in Benghazi sprung out of a protest.

United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice used the same talking points as the basis of the administration's explanation of what happened in the assault in a series of television interviews on Sept. 16, 2012, five days after the attacks.

The talking points have emerged as the flashpoint in a partisan controversy over the Benghazi attack, with Republicans saying they show the administration misled the public about the role of al Qaeda and Democrats charging the GOP with trying to damage the standing of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a 2016 Democratic presidential prospect.

One of the White House officials involved in the talking-points debate, former National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor, issued a statement Wednesday defending the way the administration handled the matter.

"Some people have understandably asked how we were so wrong about there being a protest," Mr. Vietor said in the statement. "I don't know. When I was in government, I asked some intelligence officials how it happened. They told me that there were many different strands of information indicating there was a protest, both open source and intelligence based."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424...d=djemalertNEWS

Now we want Obama's daily briefing reports

Emails here: emails have, of course, been redacted to protect confidential information: http://www.scribd.com/doc/141731781/Whit...Benghazi-Emails

I'm assuming these would be the ones which have not already been shredded.......

Why should we believe that these are the complete set and that none of them have been altered? Do they think that we trust them?

well the ones that would end Obama's reign have been mistakenly left out by a low level staff member without his knowledge