Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama's Washington

by Sharyl Attkisson

  I’m not even sure we knew he was going to Benghazi, State Department officials had told reporters.

  On a difficult assignment in Libya, Stevens wasn’t the kind to whine or complain when his security requests were denied. Given the choice to go to Benghazi with the protection he had or not go at all, he would always have chosen the former. To sit behind the relative safety of the walls of the posh embassy in Tripoli would be no kind of job for a guy like him. It wouldn’t be a job worth having.

  Stevens served only three short months as the U.S. ambassador to Libya before being murdered by terrorist thugs.

  On February 26, 2013, President Obama meets with a small group of senators at the White House and makes a brief reference to Stevens’s presence in Benghazi on September 11. “We screwed up,” Mr. Obama reportedly tells the lawmakers. “Chris shouldn’t have been there.”

  | THE LIGHT SWITCHES OFF

  There’s a saying some of us have: The news broadcasts are in love with a story, until the day they aren’t.

  This refers to the mysterious popularity cycle many stories seem to follow. Developments on the same story may air night after night with the lead producers wanting more, More, MORE. So you keep digging. You work your sources. You get plugged in. Day and night. Then one day you come to work and they don’t want to hear it anymore. Like a light switch. Like you entered an alternate universe where they would never be interested in such a story. They look at you as if to say, Why are you still talking about this? From that point on, it can be a mighty battle to convince the broadcasts to air a development, even when it’s more significant than developments they aired just a few days before. In the other universe. Back when they were giddy over the story.

  I can’t fully explain it; I can only tell you this is how it is. As the correspondent, you never really know why the interest falls off. Maybe a bigger story emerges. Maybe viewer feedback indicates the audience has tired of the subject. Maybe the White House and Democrats’ phone calls, emails, and blogs are taking a toll. You don’t ask and the bosses don’t explain. This is just part of the job.

  But if you’re me, you keep pitching developments because the good ol’ University of Florida–trained journalist in you doesn’t allow herself to be steered away from a legitimate story that’s still unfolding. Your job is to keep following the leads no matter where they go. It’s what I’m trained to do.

  For that reason, I suppose, two of my former CBS Evening News executive producers have independently referred to me as a “pit bull.” Jim Murphy was first to use the metaphor and I wasn’t quite sure initially whether he meant it as a compliment or insult. When one of Murphy’s successors, Rick Kaplan, also called me a pit bull, I settled on the idea that it was a compliment. (Why not?) Once a pit bull chews into something, it doesn’t let go. I think one of the shortfalls of journalists is our short attention span. Our tendency to cover a story, get stonewalled, and quickly move on to an easier target. We also lack follow-through. We raise questions and don’t stick with the story long enough to find the answers. Chewing in and not letting go—as long as there’s more meat—is what I love to do most.

  Yet when you keep pitching a story they’ve grown tired of, it makes them uncomfortable. Colleagues say, Why don’t you just move on? You’re wasting your time. You know they don’t want that story anymore. You get the feeling that some of the managing producers are thinking, Why can’t you just make it easy on us and shut up? They don’t say that. But you can tell by the way they act. They don’t want to know what you’ve learned. They argue against the story without knowing the facts. Or they may say they love the story but there’s just no time for it in the broadcast. There’s that big weather story we have to cover. And more fires out west. You get the picture. They’re dug in and not going to change their mind.

  A personal favorite is the attempt to squelch by labeling all new developments “incremental.” As in, the story you’re offering is just an incremental development. Or it’s too incremental. I first heard the term used in this context just a few years ago. Once a managing producer uttered it, it really caught on and it seemed everyone began to parrot it. Like the first time an executive said a story was “a bridge too far.” Pretty soon, all the senior producers around him were saying every story development they didn’t want was “a bridge too far.” Everybody’s got their own. NBC talks about stories not having “enough uplift,” as in they’re not positive enough. I was originally so stumped by the application of the term incremental that I looked it up in the dictionary. Incremental simply means an increase or decrease in a series on a fixed scale. What’s wrong with reporting a story development that’s incremental? If I can advance a story by reporting a development that’s 50 percent better each time, in fixed increments, isn’t that a good thing? But what these producers are really trying to imply—however inartfully—is that the development is too small or meaningless to merit a place in the broadcast. I found the word used in this context by broadcast producers dating as far back as January 15, 1994, in a story about how long it took the networks to begin covering the Clinton Whitewater scandal. In the article, an NBC Nightly News executive producer was quoted as using two of my favorite catchphrases often invoked to stop a story: “piling on” and “incremental.” In covering Whitewater, the producer stated that, “The caution for us is to make sure we are not piling on . . . not just another incremental nag.” Today we routinely hear “incremental” and “piling on” invoked as excuses for stories they really don’t want, even as we observe that developments on stories that they like are aired in the tiniest of increments. The phrase would rear its head again as I covered HealthCare.gov.

  When this happens, I continue publishing online, where the thirst for great stories is insatiable and space is, thankfully, unlimited. There are always niche followers who will seek out the material online that they can’t find anywhere else.

  The height of popularity for the Benghazi story inside CBS is when I get Colonel Wood on camera in October 2012. But even then, not everybody is happy. I happen to be in New York City, where I’ve just picked up an investigative Emmy for Fast and Furious. It’s the first New York visit that my producer on the Benghazi story, Kim, has made with me. She quite correctly detects that she’s getting the cold shoulder from New York colleagues she’s never met before. I’m getting it, too. I tell her I call it the Big Freeze and not to worry. There’s no point in trying to figure it out; their response isn’t logic based. It’s visceral. Having worked at CBS for nearly twenty years, I tell Kim that there are groups of people who are so ideologically entrenched, they literally see you as the enemy if you do stories that contradict their personal beliefs. They may not even consciously understand why it is that they hate you—and I do mean hate—but they do. “It has nothing to do with you,” I explain to Kim. “They don’t like you because you work with me.” She thinks it’s crazy. I’m used to it.

  Through mid-October, I and my CBS News colleagues in Washington, D.C., including Jan Crawford, Margaret Brennan, and David Martin, break a number of important stories. So do our foreign correspondents. But as things look worse for the Obama administration and the election draws near in late October, the light switch turns off. Most of my Benghazi stories from that point on would be reported not on television, but on the Web.

  | DYING FOR THE TRUTH

  In the early days after the Benghazi attacks, high-ranking Obama administration officials seem to be on the very same page. But it’s a page pulled from a work of fiction.

  First, here’s the nonfiction version.

  Americans on the ground in Libya believed from the outset that it was an act of terror. And Libyan officials immediately concluded that it was terrorism. A State Department Operations Center alert issued mid-attack stated that the al-Qaeda–linked “Ansar al-Sharia Claims Responsibility for Benghazi Attack.” The first interagency talking points read “ . . . Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qae
da participated in the attack.”

  But before any of that information became public, the Obama administration painted a very different picture.

  White House spokesman Carney doesn’t refer to the attacks as “terrorism” in briefing reporters on September 12. President Obama also avoids the t-word when speaking in the Rose Garden the same day. He calls what happened “an outrageous and shocking attack,” “senseless violence,” and “brutal acts” but never possibly the work of terrorists. He refers to the assailants as “killers” and “attackers.” Only when he segues to evoking the World Trade Center attacks does the president use the phrase “acts of terror.”

  As luck would have it, 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft is at the White House on this day for a previously scheduled interview and asks the president about his wording on Benghazi.

  STEVE KROFT Mr. President, this morning you went out of your way to avoid the use of the word terrorism in connection with the Libya attack.

  PRESIDENT OBAMA Right.

  STEVE KROFT Do you believe that this was a terrorist attack?

  PRESIDENT OBAMA Well, it’s too early to know exactly how this came about, what group was involved, but obviously it was an attack on Americans.

  That brief part of the interview isn’t big news at the time and doesn’t even make the air on CBS News. But weeks later, there’s a reason to take another look at it when President Obama is debating the Republican candidate for president, Mitt Romney. In that debate on October 16, Mr. Obama claims that in the Rose Garden on September 12, he definitively called Benghazi an act of terror.

  Remember, that’s not what he said in the interview with Kroft. Too early to know.

  Then there’s Secretary of State Clinton. Like Carney and President Obama, she avoids calling Benghazi a “terrorist act” in her September 11 public statement, her September 12 public statement and her September 14 speech at the ceremonial return of the bodies of the four American victims. Instead, she refers to it as an “attack.” “Assault.” “Rage and violence . . . over an awful Internet video.” She refers to the terrorist attackers as “thugs,” “killers,” and a “mob.” The only nod she gives to the notion that it might be something different is when she quotes a foreign official who called the event “an act of ugly terror.”

  But administration officials being on the same page means a lot more than just tiptoeing around use of the word terrorism. They also steer public attention toward the idea that an anti-Muslim YouTube video turned ordinary protesters into violent attackers. “Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet,” Clinton says the night of the attack. “The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others.”

  Family members of two victims say that Clinton and other administration officials personally consoled them at the return of the bodies by saying, We’ll find whoever made that awful video. Why focus the families’ attention on the producer of a perfectly legal video instead of the actual killers? Why not instead say, We’ll find whoever killed your loved one?

  Meantime, the Sunday political talk shows were just a few days away and on September 13, the White House asks Clinton to take the hot seat and make the TV appearances. She has zero interest. One source tells me: “She’d rather chew tin foil.” So it’s decided the job of appearing on television will be assigned to the U.S. ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice.

  On Sunday, September 16, Rice makes the rounds on TV and seems to be on the same page as Carney, the president, and Clinton. On Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer, even when she follows an appearance by a Libyan official who declares that the Benghazi attacks were “preplanned” and many of those arrested are linked to al-Qaeda and its affiliates, Rice sticks firmly to her own talking points, which differ. She says the attacks were “spontaneously” inspired by protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.

  It’s still unclear as to how an untrue story about protesters and a YouTube video grows to such prominence in the Obama administration’s initial narrative. But we do now know the genesis of Rice’s infamous talking points. Shortly after CIA director Petraeus gave a classified briefing on September 14 to the House Intelligence Committee, the lead Democrat on the panel, Maryland’s Dutch Ruppersberger, asked, “What can I say on TV”? Later, an administration source says to me, “How cynical is that? All he cares about is what he can say on the campaign trail.” In his defense, Ruppersberger said he simply wanted clarity on what material was classified and what could be shared with inquisitive constituents. In any event, Ruppersberger’s question got the ball rolling.

  There’s interagency disagreement over how much should be disclosed. Should the public really be told about suspicions of terrorism? Is it wise to let Americans hear that the CIA had issued warnings in advance? As the various agencies duke it out, Mr. Obama’s deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes intervenes and emails that there will be a deputies’ meeting the next morning, on September 15, to work out the issues. One official involved later tells me, “That’s polite code for ‘let’s not debate this on email for eighteen hours.’” After the Saturday morning meeting, the talking points emerge drastically reduced and finessed. (As mentioned earlier, Ben Rhodes is the brother of CBS News president David Rhodes.)

  Four days after Rice’s Sunday talk show appearances, on September 20, a team of Obama administration officials agrees to brief the House and Senate in closed sessions with the freshest information. There, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper removes any doubt as to the origin of the assaults and tells members of Congress that Benghazi “had all the earmarks of a premeditated attack.” No longer is it peddled as “spontaneous.” Upon hearing this news, Senator John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, storms out of the room while Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina utters an expletive to a colleague sitting next to him. They feel they’d been misled until this point. An Obama administration official who was present later calls this moment a turning point. “Something just snapped. [Senators] started yelling and screaming, ‘Why did Susan [Rice] lie?’ . . . Susan was done.”

  Meanwhile, another controversy is waiting to boil over within the Obama administration: a sex scandal involving the CIA’s Petraeus. The timing is—intriguing. Only after the Benghazi attacks, as Petraeus’s loyalty to the administration falls into question, does everything turn sour for the spy chief.

  In the immediate aftermath of the Benghazi attacks, Petraeus first draws ire from some administration colleagues for not reading from the Carney-Obama-Clinton-Rice book of fiction. While they’re pushing the spontaneous protest narrative, he’s disclosing full information on the suspected al-Qaeda links to House Intelligence Committee members at a classified briefing, according to those present. Then the talking points his agency approves for public dissemination on September 14 say that the CIA provided warnings on September 10 that the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, could come under attack and that Benghazi was in a precarious state. Clinton’s state department sees the inclusion of that damning information in the CIA’s original proposed talking points as a “knee-jerk cover-your-ass moment” on Petraeus’s part. One official later tells me, “We thought, Why are you guys [Petraeus’s CIA] throwing us under the bus? . . . They made it seem like the State Department was given a warning they ignored. [But] no specific warning was given.”

  Emails indicate that on September 15, 2012, a CIA representative sent Petraeus the final version of the talking points that had been revised “through the Deputies Committee” after “State voiced strong concerns with the original text.” The CIA’s references to terrorism and early warnings had been removed.

  Petraeus expresses disapproval of the final version, writing that he assumes that they not be used. But his deputy, Morell, and the White House give them the green light.

  Is all of this the beginning of the end of Petraeus’s career as CIA director?<
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  Let’s look at a timeline constructed primarily using government accounts:

  In November 2011, Petraeus, who’s married, allegedly begins an affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell.

  The following summer, of 2012, the FBI discovers the affair and FBI director Robert Mueller is notified on a date the government won’t disclose. Also, at some point, the FBI interviews Petraeus and Broadwell and concludes national security hasn’t been breached. But the FBI continues investigating whether Petraeus had any involvement in sending harassing emails to a third party.

  In late summer, on a date the government won’t reveal, Attorney General Eric Holder is notified of Petraeus’s troubles. Supposedly, the White House is kept in the dark. Apparently, Holder doesn’t think President Obama needs to know that one of his top cabinet-level officials is under FBI investigation (not to mention part of a potential sex scandal). No one starts developing a strategy in the event the Petraeus scandal blows up before the election. And, we’re to believe, not a soul worries that President Obama could get hit with a surprise question about Petraeus on the campaign trail.

  Odd.

  Then comes September 11.

  Some Obama administration officials become frustrated if not downright angry with Petraeus and his post-attack behavior. His deputy, Morell, is given authority over the talking point edits and sides with the State Department against Petraeus’s desires. In late October, as Petraeus’s interagency relationships become increasingly strained over Benghazi, some FBI agents suddenly reach out to Republicans in Congress to disclose Petraeus’s dirty laundry. They eventually land at the office of Republican majority leader Eric Cantor. About that same time, the week of October 29, the FBI interviews Petraeus and Broadwell a second time.