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White House Releases Benghazi Emails
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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.
More at link --> [link to online.wsj.com]
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