Since September, Republicans have claimed the Obama administration covered up the truth about the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya by altering the talking points Susan Rice used on the Sunday morning talk shows. To bolster the story, Republicans misquoted or significantly embellished the emails officials used to draft Rice’s remarks, the CBS Evening News reported Thursday.

CBS News’ Major Garrett confirmed that it was a GOP source who leaked the altered emails.

The miscast quotes affect at least two emails that include a State Department spokesperson and a White House deputy adviser — the two parties GOP lawmakers insist were trying to engage a cover-up on behalf of the Obama administration to protect the president’s chances of re-election.

A leaked email adds new language to State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland’s email, including a specific reference to al-Qaeda:

“The penultimate point is a paragraph talking about all the previous warnings provided by the Agency (CIA) about al-Qaeda’s presence and activities of al-Qaeda.“

The actual email read:

“The penultimate point could be abused by members to beat the State Department for not paying attention to Agency warnings.“

A leaked email written by deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes suggests that he asked for the final draft to remove references to warnings about specific attacks, a demand made by the State Department:

“We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don’t want to undermine the FBI investigation.”

But the actual email did not mention the State Department:

“We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation.”

Since the congressional hearings last week, the White House on Wednesday released a hundred pages of emails from after the consulate attack. The full version undermines already-thin accusations that this is a White House scandal.

A Democratic senator on Thursday introduced a new bill to boost security at U.S. embassies in the aftermath of an attack on a diplomatic outpost in Libya last year.

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) serves as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a role he inherited as the “scandal” over the Obama administration’s response to the attack in Benghazi, Libya was reaching one of its many peaks in January. Today on the Senate floor, Menendez castigated his colleagues who believed that the Senate had not done enough to investigate Benghazi, reminding them that there have been 11 hearings in Congress on the matter since September. “We have fully vetted this issue,” Menendez said.

The focus “should not be to score political points at the expense of the families of the four victims,” he went on to say. “It should be on doing all we can to protect our personnel serving overseas and provide the necessary oversight and legislative authority to carry out the administrative review board’s recommendations.” With that in mind, Menendez introduced the Embassy Security and Personnel Protection Act of 2013, a bill he hoped would be “able to count on the support of all of our colleagues to enact this crucial, time-sensitive legislation without delay, without obstruction, without political grandstanding.”

The bill would provide further funding to the Capital Security Cost-Sharing Program, first instituted in 1998 to boost security to “high-risk, high-threat” diplomatic posts and has since been chronically underfunded. Under the new legislation, the program would be able to build far more than the two to three facilities a year for the two dozen posts that fall into the high-risk, high-threat category. It would also provide funding for implementing a shift in the mission of Marine Corps security guards posted at U.S. embassies to protect staffers as well as classified assets. The bill would also require the State Department to provide verification to Congress of it fully putting into place its Accountability Review Board (ARB) on Benghazi’s recommendations for improvement.

Diplomatic security has been given a short-shrift in the aftermath of Benghazi. During her appearance before the Senate in January, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attempted to persuade Congress to shift $1.3 billion in funding bookmarked for warfighting in Iraq towards providing for greater diplomatic security. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) shepherded legislation through the Senate fulfilling Clinton’s request, but the bill died in the House. Since then, most of the conversation surrounding Benghazi has focused almost exclusively on the Obama administration’ss supposed cover-up, no matter how many documents are released debunking the claim.
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On Wednesday, just days after Congress held hearings claiming that the Obama administration misled the public in the aftermath of the Sep. 11, 2012 attack on an American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, the White House released 100 pages of emails that seem to undermine GOP claims that the White House orchestrated a “cover-up.”

The e-mails between the White House, CIA, State Department, Justice Department, and the FBI were part of an effort to draft unclassified talking points for lawmakers to use during media appearances and formed the basis of U.N. Ambassador’s Susan Rice’s prep for the Sunday morning talk shows. The CIA wrote the first draft of the talking points, before sending it out to the rest of the government. Click the pictures to view larger versions of the emails that debunk the basis many of the Republican’s claims of a conspiracy.

GOP Claim: The Obama administration struck references about Al Qaeda for political reasons.

In the very first of the declassified emails in the set, the CIA is revealed to have willingly struck references to Al Qaeda’s involvement in the attack, a deletion that conservatives have previously slammed as political in nature. A CIA official, responding to an inquiry about whether or not the Agency was sure that Al Qaeda took part in the attack, noted that the initial draft “could be interpreted that way,” suggesting that the document be revised to say that terrorist group took part in the protests instead. The CIA was also under “express instructions” to avoid naming perpetrators so to not to undermine the FBI’s investigation, according to an email from Sept. 14.

GOP Claim: Obama lied about there being a protest in Benghazi to hide that it was a terrorist attack.

The addition of references to “demonstrations,” another email shows, was completed before the document was sent out to the rest of the government, as was that the attack was “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.” The fact that no protest actually occurred in Benghazi prior to the attack was used as another data point that the Obama administration was hiding something about its response to the attack. Rather than being political, however, it appears the CIA made the changes to make the talking points more accurate based on what information was currently available, a situation that is often the case when dealing with intelligence.

GOP Claim: The White House directed the intelligence agency to lie about whether Islamic terrorists were involved.

John Brennan, then the White House Advisor on Homeland Security and Counterterrorism and now the CIA Director, reviewed the talking points as well, but didn’t perform the scrubbing many conservatives have suggested the White House enacted. Instead, Brennan left in place a reference to “Islamic extremists” in his suggested edit, undercutting the notion that the administration wanted to hide the nature of the attack. In fact, the White House, according to an email to then-CIA Director “cleared [the document] quickly.” Over the course of the next day, after State and Justice were looped in, the turf war that has been previously reported played out.

GOP Claim: Susan Rice had access to the classified information and lied about it on television.

On Sept. 15, the talking points were finally sent to Congress after multiple edits and provided to Rice to prepare for her Sunday show appearances the next morning. We now know that Saturday evening the intelligence community received new information related to whether or not a demonstration took place, not in time to change the points. Instead, Rice gave the much shortened talking points as provided, setting off the firestorm that eventually ensued.

Read all of the emails here.

Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) has one of the quietest, yet potentially most important, forces in the debate to intervene in the Syrian civil war given Congress’ power to declare war. Today, Reid provided the clearest picture yet of his position. In short: While Reid is wary of getting more involved in Syria, if the President wants to go to war, Reid said he won’t need Senate authorization to do it.

At a roundtable interview for reporters on Wednesday, ThinkProgress asked Reid whether or not President Obama could impose a no-fly zone — that is, use military force against Syrian air assets to prevent them from bombing rebel forces and civilians — without explicit Congressional permission, meaning either a declaration of war or explicit authorization for the use of military force. The Senator strongly cautioned against getting more deeply involved in Syria, but implied it was ultimately the President’s call:

We have about 80,000 people dead, Assad’s a war criminal – and if there is this peace conference, and I hope it works, part of the deal has to be that he’s gone. I don’t think at this stage [pause] less than ten percent of the deaths caused by the non-regime forces are caused by helicopters and missiles. That’s still a lot of people, but I’m not going to run the President’s foreign policy, we know that there are a lot of countries, a significant number of countries providing weapons there, and we’re doing a lot of food, medical supplies, and things of those [sic] nature. We have to be very careful about how we proceed down the next step.

A Senate Democratic aide clarified to ThinkProgress that Reid would defer to the President on both the advisability of a no-fly zone and what legal authorization would be required for the President to lawfully implement one:

The decision on whether a no-fly zone would be advisable, and under what authorities it might be established, is best placed in the hands of the commander-in-chief. Without question, should President Obama decide on such a course, it would be imprudent for him to proceed without first consulting Congress.

The phrase “under what authorities it might be established” is a reference to legal authority for the use of force; suggesting a decision on this issue “is best placed in the hands of the commander-in-chief” amounts to saying that the President is free to make a decision on whether he has the legal authority to establish a no-fly zone, though it would be “imprudent” to make such a decision without discussing it with Congress first.

This stance is consistent with the Senator’s position during the Libya intervention, the last major U.S. military engagement initiated without Congressional approval. While the War Powers Resolution requires the President to end unauthorized military options 60 or 90 days after they begin, U.S. troops remained involved in operations against Libyan forces beyond that window.

The Obama administration argued that these operations mainly involved logistical and technical support for other NATO and local forces, meaning that they were not “hostilities” in the technical legal sense used in the War Powers Act despite the fact that some U.S. forces were still engaged in direct combat. Reid backed this position, arguing that “The War Powers Act has no application to what’s going on in Libya.”

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has confirmed that the administration is weighing the direct provision of weapons to Syrian rebels. As the situation in Syria deteriorates, regional powers and U.S. lawmakers are attempting to pressure the administration into taking a more direct military role in the conflict.

CNN has obtained the full email from a White House official on the Benghazi talking points, which undermines claims that the administration acted deliberately to change the intelligence community’s assessment.

Much of the controversy surrounding the Obama administration’s response to the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on a diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya has focused on a set of unclassified talking points provided to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice. Rice delivered those points five days after the attack, appearing on all five major Sunday news shows. Rice subsequently came under attack for not mentioning Al Qaeda and referencing an anti-Islamic video as the impetus for the attacks, becoming the symbol of the White House’s supposed goal of misleading the American public about what happened.

In recent days, the talking points have come back to the forefront of conservative outrage, as several outlets have released the full edits made to the document, along with the original version the CIA drafted. Alongside those edits were emails that these outlets claimed showed the White House engaging in a flurry of activity that would help President Obama gain reelection. One such email from Deputy National Security Director Ben Rhodes allegedly showed the White House insisting that State Department requests that references to terrorism and Al Qaeda be “scrubbed” from the draft be discussed more fully.

CNN’s Jake Tapper, however, obtained the full text of the email Rhodes sent to the email thread of officials across the government providing their input on the document. Viewed in full, the document shows a distinct lack of intent to maliciously change the narrative compared to paraphrased versions:

All –

Sorry to be late to this discussion. We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation.

There is a ton of wrong information getting out into the public domain from Congress and people who are not particularly informed. Insofar as we have firmed up assessments that don’t compromise intel or the investigation, we need to have the capability to correct the record, as there are significant policy and messaging ramifications that would flow from a hardened mis-impression.

We can take this up tomorrow morning at deputies.

Previously, the Weekly Standard and ABC News had reported that Rhodes intervened on behalf of the State Department, urging that the talking points be changed to scrub al-Qaeda references at Nuland’s request. The Standard paraphrased the email as Rhodes “respond[ing] to the group, explaining that [State Department spokeswoman Victoria] Nuland had raised valid concerns and advising that the issues would be resolved at a meeting of the National Security Council’s Deputies Committee the following morning.” Likewise, ABC paraphrased the email’s content as saying “[w]e must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don’t want to undermine the FBI investigation. We thus will work through the talking points tomorrow morning at the Deputies Committee meeting.”

The elevation of the talking points to infamy has seemingly instead helped to undercut the Republican case that a cover-up occurred. In actuality, the only thing to be revealed during this latest round of investigation seems to be a turf war between the CIA and State Department to avoid further blame for the attack, one that played out in the editing process of the talking points. In the end, contrary to Republican claims, the intelligence community did have the last say in what went into the talking points, including that the attacks “were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo,” and immediately preceded by a demonstration.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney weighed in on Benghazi last night, saying the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya was “one of the worst incidences” he could recall.

President Obama on Monday defended the actions he and the rest of the Executive Branch took in the days and weeks after the assault that took the lives of four Americans, directly questioning those who claim that he orchestrated a cover-up.

But on Fox News last night, Cheney attacked Obama’s response, claiming (without evidence) that the Obama administration “lied” about Benghazi:

CHENEY: I watched the Benghazi thing with great interest, Sean [Hannity]. I think it’s one of the worst incidences, frankly, that I can recall in my career. It put the whole capability claiming the terrorist problem solved once we got Bin Laden, that Al Qaeda was over with. If they told the truth about Benghazi, that it was a terrorist attack by an al-Qaeda-affiliated group, it would destroy the confidence that was the basis of his campaign for re-election.

They lied. They claimed it was because of a demonstration video, that they wouldn’t have to admit it was really all about their incompetence. They ignored repeated warnings from the CIA about the threat. They ignored messages from their own people on the ground that they need more security. They reduced what was already there.

Cheney’s choice of words is interesting, given the numerous security lapses and misleading narratives that took place during his multiple periods in power in Washington. One would think that the former vice president would regard the 9/11 attacks as the “worst incident” that he could recall. Or perhaps the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, in which he and other members of the administration repeatedly misled the American people about Iraq’s WMDs and the war’s difficulty and costs. Or the Abu Gharib prison scandal, in which Iraqis were tortured under the watchful eyes of American soldiers and prompted more and greater attacks on U.S. forces. Or perhaps the thirteen attacks on U.S. diplomatic compounds that occurred during the Bush administration’s two terms, in which nearly a dozen Americans died.

“Well, they tried to cover it up by constructing a false story, claiming there was confusion about what happened in the Benghazi compound,” Cheney went on to tell Hannity, joining the chorus of those who believe a conspiracy took place to hide the truth about the attack. “The cover up included several officials up to and including President Obama and the cover up is still ongoing.”

Former Ambassador Thomas Pickering, co-chair of the State Department’s Accountability Review Board report on Benghazi, referred to claims that a cover-up occurred as “Pulitzer Prize fiction.” Likewise, the CIA’s original draft of the infamous talking points, which Republicans, including Cheney, point to as evidence of a conspiracy, mentioned that the attacks “were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo,” with the next draft showing the intelligence community’s belief that a demonstration had occurred prior to the attacks.

It’s also worth noting that during his time as a Congressman from Wyoming, Cheney was the ranking member of the panel investigating the Iran-Contra scandal, during which an actual cover-up occurred. At the time, Cheney viewed the Congressional investigation as being an overreach into executive prerogative. Apparently the Iran-Contra scandal doesn’t fall under “one of the worst incidences” that he can recall.

President Obama in a press conference on Monday shot back at Republicans trying to create a scandal out of his administration’s handling of the Benghazi terror attacks last September.

The Benghazi issue resurfaced in recent weeks after Fox News and House Republicans tried and failed to turn up new evidence of some kind of administration “cover-up” of its response to the attacks. And an ABC News report on Friday fanned the flames, purportedly uncovering damning evidence of the White House and State Department’s role in editing talking points on the attacks.

None of these efforts have resulted in any new information and when Obama was asked about it today, he appeared agitated, saying the issue has already been investigated and Benghazi has turned in to a “political circus.” The President also noted what a terrible job his administration is doing if it was trying to cover anything up on Benghazi:

OBAMA: If this was some effort on our part to try to downplay what had happened or tamp it down — that would be a pretty odd thing that three days later, we end up putting out all the information that in fact has now served as the basis for everybody recognizing that this was a terrorist attack and that it may have included elements that were planned by extremists inside of Libya.

Who executes some sort of cover-up or effort to tamp things down, for three days? So the whole thing defies logic and the fact that this keeps on getting churned out, frankly has a lot to do with political motivations. We’ve had folks who have challenged Hillary Clinton’s integrity, Susan Rice’s integrity, Mike Mullen and Tom Pickering’s integrity. It’s a given that mine gets challenged by these same folks. they’ve used it for fundraising and frankly, you know, if anybody out there wants to actually focus on how we make sure something like this does not happen again? I am happy to get their advice and information and council.

Watch the entire response in the clip below:

Pickering, a former U.S. ambassador and co-chair of the independent review board on Benghazi, also criticized those claiming the administration is engaged in a cover-up. “I think the notion of a quote, cover up, has all the elements of Pulitzer Prize fiction attached to it,” he said last week.

The Benghazi “scandal” is back in the headlines, meaning everyone is angling for a scoop, the soundbite that will gain their network countless replays. Nowhere was that more evident than on the Sunday news shows this weekend, where many of the shows’ hosts and reporters opted to give credence to the fringe notion that President Obama should be impeached over his administration’s handling of the Benghazi terror attacks.

Last week, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) — himself an ardent proponent of several conspiracy theories — said that the investigation on what happened in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on a diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya will lead to articles of impeachment being filed against Obama. Inhofe claimed that Benghazi would prove to be the “most egregious” cover-up in history — worse than the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and Iran-Contra.

There is to date zero evidence that President Obama committed any crimes regarding Benghazi. But rather than relegating Inhofe’s statement to the fringe where it belongs, the majority of Sunday shows’ anchors chose to ask their guests to comment on it:

CNN’s RELIABLE SOURCES

HOWARD KURTZ: Well, at the same time, Margaret Carlson, have some conservative outlets hiked this into crusade with talk of impeachment?

CNN’s STATE OF THE UNION

CANDY CROWLEY: That’s pretty big. Do you see something in Benghazi either in the handling before, during, or after with the talking points that were scrubbed that the i-word, the impeachment word should come up?

ABC’S THIS WEEK

MARTHA RADDITZ: Let’s look at what happened because of the e-mails. Tom Pickering said the idea of a cover-up is absurd. Stephen King, Republican from Iowa, said it was bigger than Watergate. And this is what James Inhofe said

Despite the anchors’ best efforts, the guests themselves pushed back, refusing to go along with attempts to goad them into joining Inhofe’s belief in a future impeachment. “You know, they’ve been looking for Watergate for so long that, you know, they went too far on Benghazi,” said Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson to Kurtz. Even ardent believer in a Benghazi cover-up Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) demurred when faced with Inhofe’s comments. “With all due respect, I think this is a serious issue. I will even give the president the benefit of the doubt on some of these things,” McCain told Raddatz.

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