“Republicans have claimed that the State Department under Hillary Clinton was trying to protect itself from criticism. The White House released the real e-mails late yesterday and here’s what we found when we compared them to the quotes that had been provided by Republicans. One e-mail was written by Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes. 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, in the actual e-mail Rhodes did not mention the State Department. It read “We need to resolve this in a way that respects all the relevant equities, particularly the investigation.” Republicans also provided what they said was a quote from an e-mail written by State Department Spokesman Victoria Nuland. The Republican version notes 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 e-mail from Nuland says: the “…penultimate point could be abused by Members to beat the State Department for not paying attention to Agency warnings…” The C.I.A. agreed with the concerns raised by the State Department and revised the talking points to make them less specific than the C.I.A.’s original version, eliminating references to al-Qaeda and affiliates and earlier security warnings. There is no evidence, Scott, the White House orchestrated these changes.” Major Garrett reporting on last night’s CBS Evening News
It’s a big block of text, but I urge you to read it all. Garrett basically confessed that it was the Republicans who provided/leaked selectively edited quotes to ABC News from the administration Benghazi emails as a means of falsely indicting everyone involved.
Fancy that, the Republicans using selectively edited material and manipulating the press with it. We’ve seen this over and over, and here is it again. The Republicans tried to scam the nation into believing something that’s patently untrue. Again.
ABC News and especially Jonathan Karl need to come clean about this.
UPDATE: In video form: