In a contentious press briefing on Friday, White House press secretary Jay Carney came out swinging – and fibbing – about the Benghazi talking points. Early on Friday morning, ABC News reported that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s spokeswoman Victoria Nuland had amended the talking points to remove CIA warnings about terror activity in Benghazi because they “could be used by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that …” When asked about that email, Carney flatly denied that any edits were politically motivated.
“The talking points were focused on what we knew,” Carney insisted, blatantly ignoring the words of the reported email. “There was a process where there was an effort underway, an interagency process to develop information that could be given [to the public] … about what we knew.”
Carney then went on the attack, repeating over and over again that Republicans going back to Mitt Romney had somehow politicized the Benghazi attacks. He insisted that the administration had always called what happened in Benghazi a “terrorist attack” – even though on September 19, 2012, a full week after the attack, Carney himself said “based on the information that we had then and have now we do not yet have indication that it was pre-planned or pre-meditated.” In essence, Carney did a version of Hillary Clinton’s infamous “what differences does it make” routine before the press.
Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).
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