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Friday, May 17, 2013

Did Benghazi just become a Republican scandal?

That email release from the White House is proving to be a real problem for Republicans. Earlier reports showed that versions of emails leaked by the GOP had been selectively edited, smearing the State Department and the administration with incomplete information that left an inaccurate impression of the email conversations.

Now it turns out that it’s much worse than lies of omission. The Republican version contain outright lies.

CBS News: …On Friday, Republicans leaked what they said was a quote from Rhodes: “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 it turns out that in the actual email, Rhodes did not mention the State Department.

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

Republicans also provided what they said was a quote from an email written by State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland.

The Republican version quotes Nuland discussing, “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 from Nuland says: “The penultimate point could be abused by members to beat the State Department for not paying attention to Agency warnings.”
As I pointed out earlier, Benghazi is rapidly spinning out of Republican control. The ever escalating hype has finally inflated their Benghazi conspiracy theory to the point that the facts can’t possibly support it, so the facts must be abandoned that now the whole thing is propped up almost entirely by fiction.

The question is what are they going to do now? You don’t make shit like this up if you have anything concrete. By leaking these phony emails (and there is no doubt the GOP leaked them) , they practically admit that the whole thing is frosting — there’s no cake here. If anyone has an “editing the talking points” scandal brewing here, it’s the elephant party.

And Darrell Issa’s going to stretch this thing out until 2014? That ought to go well. The whole thing’s in a tailspin now. Keeping it up in the air that long would be a good trick in itself. Keeping from crashing directly into Republican Party HQ and leveling the place would be an even better one.

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