Among the many revelations that will emerge from the voluminous majority report of the Benghazi Select Committee when it is released Tuesday is this one: Barack Obama skipped his daily intelligence briefing one day after the Benghazi attacks on September 11, 2012. The president’s briefer handed a written copy of the presidential daily briefing to a White House usher and then briefed Jack Lew, who was then serving as White House chief of staff. But Obama, who sometimes avails himself of the oral briefing that is offered along the written intelligence product, did not ask for such a briefing the day after the attacks on U.S. facilities in Libya.
That disclosure came during the Benghazi committee’s transcribed interview with the executive coordinator of Obama’s presidential daily briefing (or PDB, for short), a veteran intelligence officer who rose through the ranks in Army intelligence and then the Defense Intelligence Agency before serving as the president’s top briefer. It is buried deep in the committee’s report, in Appendix H—a 14-page examination of how that briefer came to include an assessment in the PDB that the Benghazi attacks were likely a planned attack and not a protest gone awry. It’s not unusual for Obama to skip his oral briefing, but his decision to pass on the PDB on September 12, 2012, will no doubt generate additional questions.
The disclosure also sheds some additional light on the president’s engagement during and after the attacks—an area that has remained something of a black hole throughout previous Benghazi investigations. The White House has provided little detail on Obama’s activities throughout the Benghazi attacks and their aftermath, refusing to answer to questions from journalists about the president’s whereabouts and actively working to keep information from investigators with the Select Committee. During the interview with the president’s briefer, a lawyer from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, who sat in on the session, twice ended exchanges between committee staff and the briefer.
The first time, Obama’s briefer was describing in general terms how Obama asks questions during his oral briefings:
The second time, a committee staffer asked about what information was briefed to the White House chief of staff from the original situation report prepared by the CIA:
The appendix explores a fascinating intra-intelligence community dispute over language that appeared in that PDB, which the Select Committee calls “the very first written piece produced by CIA analysts regarding the Benghazi attacks.”
The dispute centered on this line: “…the presence of armed assailants from the outset suggests this was an intentional assault and not the escalation of a peaceful protest.” That assessment would prove accurate—the Benghazi attack was an intentional, planned assault and was not the escalation of a peaceful protest, because no such protest took place. But that conclusion did not come from the work product prepared by CIA analysts in the early morning hours of September 12, 2012. Rather, it was a line added by the executive coordinator herself.
The executive coordinator testified to the committee that she made the call in part based on her “gut feeling” that the attacks were too sophisticated to have been spontaneous. The executive coordinator told investigators that she spoke to others on the PDB team and they agree with her assessment. She said she would never include such an assessment based solely on intuition and she testified that others on her team spoke with individuals on the ground and that this information helped shape her views. The CIA analyst who prepared the report that the executive coordinator rewrote to include in the PDB, however, “was pretty convinced that this was a spontaneous attack, that it was, you know, as a result of this confluence of events – the 9/11 anniversary, the video being released, the protest in Cairo,” the executive coordinator testified.
CIA officials interviewed by the committee testified that the inclusion of this “bottom line” was highly inappropriate and highly unusual. The executive coordinator, however, told the committee that while the intensity of the dispute with the CIA analysts was unusual, such judgment calls were not uncommon as she and her team prepared PDBs for executive branch officials.
