The press hasn’t learned yet, apparently. On Monday
July 6th, Democrats busted Republicans for leaking yet another fake
Benghazi email story to the press. They titled their press release,
“Politico Ran Bogus Leak in Front-Page Story.”
Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Ranking Member of
the House Select Committee on Benghazi, sent a letter to Chairman Trey
Gowdy warning, “it now appears that someone who was given access to the
Select Committee’s documents leaked doctored information to the press in
order to make unsubstantiated allegations against Secretary Clinton.”
Oh, gee. This is so new, how could anyone in the
press have known to be on the look out for total fabrications based on
emails they were not allowed to see but had to take the word of a
Republican on? I mean, it only happened in a huge scandal revealed on May
14, 2013 when CNN’s Jake Tapper discovered that the Benghazi emails
reported by ABC’s Jonathan Karl had been edited to make Obama look bad. Karl had written that these emails had been reviewed by ABC. But it turns out that wasn’t true.
The emails were basically looked at by a Republican who handed their
notes to Karl, who reported them as if he had read them himself.
Jonathan Karl and ABC tried that same trick a year later, but got busted.
This leads us to today, where just as predicted on
these pages, Republicans have nothing on Secretary Hillary Clinton and
they can’t beat her in a fight for the White House based on policy or
platforms, so they are going to keep making stuff up. This is why Democrats had to bust Republicans on June 17 of this year after they refused to release the full Blumenthal transcripts.
Here’s the letter sent by Rep. Cummings to Rep. Gowdy:
Dear Mr. Chairman:
Documents released recently by the Benghazi
Select Committee demonstrate that a Member of the Committee, a staffer
on the Committee, or someone who has been given access to the
Committee’s documents inaccurately described to the press email
exchanges obtained by the Committee in a way that appeared to further a
political attack against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
On June 18, 2015, Politico ran a front-page story entitled “Benghazi Panel Probes Sidney Blumenthal’s Work for David Brock.” The
anonymous source for this story appears to have been attempting to
support a line of political attack that many Republicans have been
making recently against Secretary Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal, Media
Matters, and the White House. Unfortunately, the Politico reporter
apparently relied only on “a source who has reviewed the email exchange”
when she reported the following:
While still secretary of state,
Clinton emailed back and forth with Blumenthal about efforts by one of
the groups, Media Matters, to neutralize criticism of her handling of
the deadly assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, sources
tell POLITICO.
“Got all this done. … Complete
refutation on Libya smear,” Blumenthal wrote to Clinton in an Oct. 10,
2012, email into which he had pasted links to four Media Matters posts
criticizing Fox News and Republicans for politicizing the Benghazi
attacks and challenging claims of lax security around the U.S.
diplomatic compound in Benghazi, according to a source who has reviewed
the email exchange. Blumenthal signed off the email to Clinton by
suggesting that one of her top aides, Philippe Reines, “can circulate
these links,” according to the source. Clinton responded: “Thanks, I’m
pushing to WH,” according to the source.
The emails were not included in documents originally turned over by the State Department.
Now that
the emails quoted in this story have been released, it is clear that
this source provided the following inaccurate information:
- First, the source claimed that Secretary Clinton wrote “Thanks, I’m pushing to WH” in response to an email from Mr. Blumenthal on October 10. In fact, she did not make that statement in response to this email. Secretary Clinton was responding to a completely different email more than a week earlier, on October 1.
- Second, the source claimed that Secretary Clinton was responding to a suggestion from Mr. Blumenthal that Philippe Reines circulate links to four Media Matters articles that refuted the way the “right-wing media” was covering Republican statements about the Benghazi attacks. In fact, Secretary Clinton was responding to an email from Mr. Blumenthal forwarding an article from Salon.com reporting that Republicans were planning to claim inaccurately during the presidential debates that the White House had advance knowledge about the Benghazi attacks and failed to act on it. The article included no reference to Mr. Reines at all.
- Third, the source claimed that Secretary Clinton’s email saying “Thanks, I’m pushing to WH” was not turned over by the State Department. In fact, that email was turned over to the Select Committee by the State Department on February 13, 2015, marked with Bates number STATE-SCB0045548-SCB0045550. The Select Committee has had that email for four months.
It
appears that this source fed Politico an inaccurate characterization of
these emails and that Politico accepted this mischaracterization without
obtaining the emails themselves. The source apparently took an email
that was produced to the Select Committee in February, isolated
Secretary Clinton’s statement about the White House, removed it from the
original email exchange about the presidential debates, and then added it to a different email exchange
involving Media Matters. The source then apparently misrepresented
that the State Department had withheld this new hybrid document from the
Select Committee.
Unfortunately,
this is only the latest in a reckless pattern of selective Republican
leaks and mischaracterizations of evidence relating to the Benghazi
attacks.
In 2013,
another source provided an inaccurate characterization of an email from
National Security Council official Ben Rhodes, including words that
simply were not there, in order to misrepresent the White House’s role
in editing the intelligence community’s talking points. As CNN later reported,
this mischaracterization “made it appear that the White House was
primarily concerned with the State Department’s desire to remove
references and warnings about specific terrorist groups so as to not
bring criticism to the department.”
Similarly, former Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa mischaracterized
a State Department cable in 2013 by claiming that Secretary Clinton
“outright denied security in her signature in a cable, April 2012.” It
was later revealed, however, that the cable had only a pro-forma stamp
of her signature, like millions of cables that go out from the State
Department every year. The Washington Post Fact Checker gave this claim “four pinocchios,“ concluding that “Issa presented this as a ‘gotcha’ moment, but it relies on an absurd understanding of the word ‘signature’.”
These
abuses are reminiscent of those seventeen years ago, when the Speaker of
the House, Rep. Newt Gingrich, demanded that the Chairman of the
Committee on Government Reform, Rep. Dan Burton, issue an apology
to the House of Representatives and fire his chief investigator for
releasing inaccurate, selectively edited audio recordings during an
investigation of Webster Hubbell. These tapes had been manipulated and
provided to the press and the American people in order to cast an
inaccurate and negative light on then-First Lady Hillary Clinton.
In the Select Committee’s one-year progress report
n May, you proclaimed: “serious investigations do not leak information
or make selective releases of information without full and proper
context.” Yet, it now appears that someone who was given access to the
Select Committee’s documents leaked doctored information to the press in
order to make unsubstantiated allegations against Secretary Clinton.
Since you have repeatedly refused my requests for the Select Committee
to adopt rules—including protocols governing the release of documents
obtained as part of the investigation—it is unclear how you propose to
prevent this type of abuse from happening again in the future.
Sincerely,
Elijah E. Cummings
Ranking Member
Ranking Member
Tip: If a Republican aide comes to you as a source
and promises to tell you what is in emails, especially if these emails
are allegedly about Benghazi, don’t take their word for it.
Even if we didn’t have a trail of objective sources
refuting the Republican fabrications once the facts were obtained (but
the lie had already done its job by permeating the barely informed
voters among us), we have logic. While it’s impossible for anyone to
refute lies when they don’t have facts to prove the accusation is a lie,
the problem starts when the press believes the lie without proof. Why
are the standards any different, especially when there is a long history
of Republicans outright lying on this issue. The standards should be
tougher when making an accusation than when proving it’s not true,
otherwise the press is just inviting being used as a political football
by whichever side is willing to lie the most. This process encourages
lies.
Family members have asked Republicans to stop their
politicization of the Benghazi tragedy, but Republicans don’t care. They
have asked and been answered so many times that if they were really
looking for information, they completed that task long ago. They can’t
let go because this is all they have against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
That means they are going to keep trawling for reporters who are willing to take their word on Benghazi emails.
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