Newly-released emails between top aides to Hillary Clinton and President Obama reveal the extent of coordination between the State Department and the White House in the hours after a 2012 terror attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.
The records, obtained by Judicial Watch through the Freedom of Information Act earlier this month, indicate then-White House deputy strategic communications adviser Ben Rhodes signed off on statements from State Department officials regarding the emerging situation in Libya.
“We are holding for Rhodes clearance,” Victoria Nuland, then a State Department spokesperson, wrote of drafted press statements the evening of September 11, 2012.
Bernadette Meehan, spokesperson for the National Security Council, circulated press statements to State Department and White House staff the morning after the attack and detailed the plan to “ensure we are all in sync on messaging for the rest of the day.”
The new emails show Denis McDonough, President Obama’s chief of staff, was involved in deliberations about how administration officials would frame the attack in the press late into the evening of September 11, 2012.
Jay Carney, then the White House press secretary, was looped into email discussions of the attacks by the evening of September 12.
“FYI- we are considering releasing this tonight,” Rhodes wrote to Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, Philippe Reines, spokesman for Clinton, and Meehan just before midnight on September 11, soliciting their opinion.
While the content of whatever Rhodes proposed for release was redacted, it was labeled a “readout of President’s call to Secretary Clinton.”
The email confirms a late-night call between Obama and Clinton did take place the night of the attack.
The new records were so heavily redacted that, because the documents contained email chains that produced duplicates, information was withheld in some emails that was disclosed in identical versions of others.
For example, an email sent just before 7 p.m. on September 11 reveals Gregory Hicks, deputy chief of mission in Libya, told State Department officials that the U.S. embassy in Tripoli was sitting empty the evening of the attack.
That revelation was redacted from a copy of the email included later in the records.
An email sent around 3 a.m. the morning of September 13 shows government officials had attempted to solicit statements from religious and community groups that fit with the overall narrative of denouncing the video that the administration said sparked the attack.
According to a list circulated among top administration officials days later, State and White House officials successfully pressed key organizations to issue statements that boosted their narrative, then promoted those statements in the media.
For example, the list touted a statement from Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., under the heading “congressional outreach” and cited an immediate need to “disseminate” the statement “overseas.”
“[T]he last thing Chris Stevens would want would be for us to withdraw or pull out of Libya,” Ellison said on the House floor two days after the attack. “Americans should know that this is not representative of certainly the will of the Libyan people.”
The new documents shed additional light on the White House’s role in shaping the Benghazi spin in the days after the attack.
An email obtained by Judicial Watch last year showed Rhodes had outlined “goals” for the Sunday show appearances of Ambassador Susan Rice days after the attack.
The messaging goals included the need “to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.”
Rhodes’ email was cited by congressional leadership as a catalyst for the formation of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which is presently probing the State Department failures that led to the attack.
“These documents show the Obama White House was behind the big lie, first promoted by Hillary Clinton, that an Internet video caused the Benghazi terrorist attack,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, of the new emails. “Top White House aide Ben Rhodes, Hillary Clinton, and many key Obama officials pushed others to tie the Internet video to the attacks.”
