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

by Sharyl Attkisson

  Now, normally in Washington, D.C., this would be about the time the scandal goes viral. Republican leaders, alerted to a sensitive issue that they could argue has national security implications, could be expected to at least leak to the press. Especially with less than two weeks to go until the presidential election.

  But strangely enough, that doesn’t happen. On October 31, in a move that seems to defy everything that defines Washington, the chief of staff for Congressman Cantor keeps publicly mum about the administration’s burgeoning scandal and instead confidentially contacts the FBI’s chief of staff about the Petraeus rumors. Even with the news having reached the president’s most ardent political opponents and with the election just a week away, the entire White House is still, somehow, for some reason, uninformed.

  Fast-forward a week to November 6, the day of the election. Someone at the Justice Department, we’re told, has finally decided to tell Director of National Intelligence Clapper about Petraeus. (How good of a chief intelligence officer are you if you don’t know the head of the CIA has been under investigation by your FBI for months? And Republicans on the Hill know before you do?) Clapper calls Petraeus the same day and urges him to resign. It’s a stark reversal of the FBI’s pre-Benghazi determination that there was no harm in Petraeus staying on the job.

  On Wednesday, November 7, according to the government’s accounts, somebody finally notifies the White House about all of the above. And when is the president himself finally looped in? Not until Thursday, November 8, say officials. The president accepts Petraeus’s resignation on Friday, November 9.

  If President Obama was indeed kept out of the loop regarding one of his most important political appointees, it adds to the perceptions created during Fast and Furious when the president and his staff say they had no idea that a federal agency conducted a cross-border weapons operation that helped arm killer cartels in a foreign country. It adds to an image evoked after the Benghazi attacks when the president directed his staff to do everything they could, but didn’t speak to Libyan officials or personally keep in close touch with the secretary of defense. It builds upon the theme when the president said he didn’t know his own spy agency was monitoring friendly world leaders, and when his people insisted Obamacare was ready—only to have the website crash on opening day.

  Then again, the timing of Petraeus’s departure could be purely coincidental. Maybe it had nothing to do with his supposed disloyalty to the administration after Benghazi. But one thing is certain: his inelegant and abrupt exit from the CIA ended the interagency resentments that he sparked in the aftermath of Benghazi. As for Petraeus’s insight into all of this? He’s not talking.

  Though the administration and its supporters would repeat the mantra time and time again that the accusations were solely generated by politically motivated, conspiratorially minded, witch-hunting Republicans, the truth is that most of the damaging information came from Obama admnistration insiders. From government documents. From sources who were outraged by their own government’s behavior and what they viewed as a cover-up. From loyal Obama administration officials who testified truthfully under oath. From the State Department’s own employees. From military officials and rank-and-file.

  Some of them were self-described Obama and Clinton supporters. One relayed to me how he had enthusiastically contributed to Obama’s first presidential campaign.

  But all that was before Benghazi.

  | MORE ON THE TALKING POINTS CONFUSION

  Shortly after the talking points were constructed, there seemed to be endless secrecy and confusion surrounding them. But eighteen months later, called to a congressional hearing on the topic, former CIA deputy director Morell seems to have grown amazingly clear on the whole thing. Though he hadn’t offered up the information early on, he now tells Congress that he was the primary editing force behind the talking points. And that there were no political motivations behind removal of references to terrorism and prior warnings given to the State Department. That’s just the stuff of conspiracy theorists and right-wing crazies.

  As I watch the testimony, my head spins with all the inconsistencies. I open the mental filing cabinet storing what’s been said over the many months and can’t help but notice that much of it doesn’t match up with what Morell is saying today. Today, he’s so bent on convincing Congress and the public that he, alone, made the substantive changes in the talking points, and that no politics were involved, that he’s in the awkward position of defending his mistaken reliance on bad intelligence as if he would do it all again the same way. Better for the false narrative to have been the result of poor intelligence analysis than politics.

  The reason Morell is brought before the House Intelligence Committee is to answer for evidence unearthed in subpoenaed documents allegedly indicating he misled members of Congress by withholding what he knew about the genesis of the talking points.

  First, he has to explain an email he received on September 15, 2012, from his own station chief on the ground in Libya stating that the attacks were “not an escalation of a protest” over a YouTube video. Morell says he and his Washington analysts disregarded the information as unreliable and didn’t pass it along to other agencies.

  “I did not hide nor did I downplay the station chief’s comments as some have suggested, in fact I did the opposite,” Morell said.

  Next, we finally learn the answer to the simple but much-dodged question: Who removed references to al-Qaeda from the talking points? Morell now says it was the CIA. Not him, personally, but “[t]he group of officers from our office of Congressional affairs and our office of public affairs.” (Previously, when I had reported the involvement of federal public affairs officials in editing the talking points, based on documents and my sources, government officials had vehemently denied the fact.)

  Morell tells Congress it was his decision to remove the word Islamic from the phrase Islamic extremists and says he did it for two reasons: so as not to further inflame passions in the Islamic world and because “what other kind of extremists are there in Libya?”

  Morell also explained that he opposed his boss, Petraeus, and removed language disclosing that the CIA had provided “warnings” in advance of the attacks.

  “I thought it was an effort on the CIA’s part to make it look like we had warned and shift any blame to the State Department,” Morell testifies. “I made a decision at that moment I got the talking points I was going to take the . . . language out.” I wonder why Morell was calling the shots, subordinate to his boss. I wonder why he seemed to be watching out for the best interests of Clinton’s State Department over his own agency, the CIA.

  As the hearing closes, I review the evolution of the talking points narrative.

  On Friday, November 16, 2012, Petraeus had told members of Congress that it wasn’t the CIA that revised the talking points. And another CIA official told reporters that the edits were made at a “senior level in the interagency process” so as not to tip off al-Qaeda as to what the United States knew, and to protect sources and methods. Soon thereafter, another reason was given. A source from the Office of the Director for National Intelligence (ODNI) said that office made the edits as part of the interagency process because the links to al-Qaeda were deemed too “tenuous” to make public. Then, later in November 2012, Morell provided yet another account in a meeting with Republican senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Kelly Ayotte: he said it was the FBI that removed the references “to prevent compromising an ongoing criminal investigation.”

  But it was just a matter of hours before there was yet another revision. A CIA official contacted Graham and stated that Morell “misspoke” in the earlier meeting and that it was, in fact, the CIA, not the FBI, that deleted the al-Qaeda references.

  Morell is so clear today on his recollection that changed the talking points. Why was he so unclear right after it all happened?

  | HISTORY REPEATING?


  The Accountability Review Board’s investigative report on Benghazi begins with a quote attributed to Spanish philosopher George Santayana in 1905.

  Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

  The inclusion of the quote is ironic because, in some ways, history has repeated itself with Benghazi. Back in 1998, there was another tragic story of embassy security requested and denied. Lack of money was blamed. An Accountability Review Board was convened. It made recommendations to prevent something similar from happening again.

  But it did happen again.

  In 1998, Clinton was in the White House as first lady. And who was at State Department headquarters? None other than Susan Rice, Patrick Kennedy, and their boss, Ambassador Thomas Pickering, future head of the Benghazi Accountability Review Board, where he will be tasked with impartially investigating his longtime friends and former colleagues.

  In 1998, the terrorist targets were U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Two hundred twenty-four people, including twelve Americans, were killed by car bombers and more than five thousand were injured. The U.S. ambassador to Kenya, Prudence Bushnell, was among those hurt. Bushnell had warned eight months before that security at her embassy was inadequate. Twice she requested a new building.

  “Unfortunately, we lacked the money to respond,” Kennedy explained to reporters at State Department headquarters in the immediate aftermath in 1998. “[O]ther embassy projects had a higher priority than Embassy Nairobi for our limited funds. We just did not have the funds to meet all our needs.”

  As with Libya, the State Department also had declined the U.S. military’s offer of assistance in Kenya. Kennedy told reporters that months before the East Africa bombings, “the U.S. military Central Command expressed to the Department its concern over the vulnerability of the Nairobi chancellory,” and was also worried that “the embassy was close to the street at a busy intersection.” The military offered to do a survey of the embassy but “the [State] Department . . . declined the offer of the military to send one of their teams, because we had already scheduled a security assessment team to visit the post in March of this year,” said Kennedy.

  The spring before the bombings, Bushnell tried to sound alarm bells at State Department headquarters as Stevens later did in Libya. She fired off an emergency cable to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. It said that resource constraints “were endangering embassy personnel” and “expressed concern about crime, administrative matters and safety.” State Department headquarters replied that “a new building was ranked low in relative priority, compared to the needs of other embassies.”

  | TWO QUOTES

  On January 23, 2013, Secretary of State Clinton appears before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and takes fire from Republicans on the Benghazi issue. Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, is probing Clinton’s initial blame of the YouTube video. Clinton gets testy and makes a statement that may haunt her for some time.

  “With all due respect,” responds Clinton, raising her voice and appearing angry, “the fact that we had four dead Americans, was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided that they’d go kill some Americans? . . . What difference at this point does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator.”

  What difference at this point does it make?

  To me, as a journalist, it certainly makes a difference. For one reason, it makes a difference if it turns out that anyone in the administration intentionally deceived the American public. And there are clues that point in that general direction. It also makes a difference if Benghazi was a well-planned attack long in the making amid warnings from Americans on the ground: it makes the poor security decisions even more egregious. Furthermore, as I listen to Clinton at the hearing, I can’t help but think that she’s continuing to pose scenarios in her controversial, passionate response that never happened. And she knows it. The Benghazi attacks were neither “because of a protest” nor were they the result of “guys out for a walk last night who decided to kill some Americans.” Why is she still evoking those spontaneous images when there have now been official acknowledgments that it was a preplanned terrorist attack that required a great deal of coordination and practice? From knowing when and where the ambassador would be, to the incredibly skilled mortar hits that landed on the CIA annex—too precise to be lucky or spontaneous.

  Kennedy likewise seems out of touch with the public when he testifies to Congress on September 18, 2013, a year and one week after the attacks. When pressed by Representative Ted Poe, a Republican from Texas, Kennedy acknowledges Benghazi was the work of terrorists. But, as if reading from the same page as Clinton, he indicates it doesn’t really matter.

  “I know that this was a terrorist attack and it doesn’t matter to me whether it was Ansar al-Sharia or al-Qaeda or whoever,” Kennedy testifies before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. “These were terrorists and whatever organization they belong to, they are enemies of the United States and they must be brought to justice.

  Republican Adam Kinzinger of Illinois replies, “I think it does matter . . . because ultimately, it gives us a blueprint on who we need to kill or capture, which I think is very important and I hope that’s done.”

  | MRS. CLINTON’S BENGHAZI CHAPTER

  Earlier, I described the propaganda strategies employed by the powers that be to shape public opinion. Astroturf tactics. Controversializing stories and those who report them. Use of trademark catchphrases.

  No power or political party holds a monopoly on these techniques. But Clinton’s use of them in the case of Benghazi is instructive.

  In a June 18, 2014, interview with Greta Van Susteren of FOX News, Clinton said that her own assessment of the Benghazi attacks “careened from the video had something to do with it, the video had nothing to do with it . . . I was trying to make sense of it.” She also spoke of being confused in the “fog of war,” a phrase that Obama officials first evoked in the weeks after the attacks—and often repeated—to help explain why it didn’t mount an outside military rescue of the trapped Americans that night.

  The thing is, there’s little sense of “careening” assessments or the “fog of war” in the documentary evidence recorded at the time.

  It was the night of September 11, 2012, and at 5:55 p.m. Eastern time, while the attacks were still under way, a State Department email included a report that “the extremist group Ansar Al Sharia ha[d] taken credit” and U.S. officials had asked Libyan officials to pursue the faction. A few minutes later, an alert from Clinton’s State Department Operations Center stated that the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli also reported that the Islamic military group Ansar al-Sharia had claimed responsibility and called for an attack on the embassy in Tripoli.

  But four hours later, in her first public statement on the attacks at 10:07 p.m., Clinton spoke of none of that. She did, for the first time, introduce the connection to the video.

  “Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet,” Clinton’s statement reported. “The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation.”

  If Clinton wasn’t part of an effort to steer the narrative, then why didn’t she report that terrorists might be involved, as many behind the scenes had already concluded? Or at least say what the administration has so vigorously claimed since: that there was wild uncertainty? Or that assessments were—foggy? And if they were so foggy, then why was she careful not to evoke terrorism—yet quick to finger the video?

  We later discovered that President Obama telephoned Clinton during the attacks around the time that she issued the statement. White House spokesman Carney had, in the past, decl
ined to answer whether that call came before or after. The obvious question is: Did the president and Clinton consult over her statement blaming the video?

  Twenty-one months later, in an interview with FOX News anchor Bret Baier, Clinton was fuzzy on details and, apparently, hadn’t bothered to refresh herself on them even though she had just authored a new book that included a whole chapter about Benghazi—which is why she was now giving interviews.

  Baier found Clinton vague when he asked about the timing of her statement and the president’s call.

  “The statement went out, you know, I don’t know the exact time, it, my recollection is it went out before [the call with the president],” Clinton said. And she wouldn’t give a yes or no when asked whether they discussed the video: a fact she surely should know considering the controversy over that very issue.

  “I don’t know that I talked about it with him at that conversation,” Clinton said.

  Documents revealed in spring of 2014 cast further doubt on Clinton’s description of fogginess. In a State Department email the morning after the attack, her then-assistant secretary of state Beth Jones told Libya’s ambassador that “the group that conducted the attacks—Ansar Al Sharia—is affiliated with Islamic extremists.” Period.

  In a September 20, 2012, appearance on Univision, with Congress and the media chipping away at the video narrative, President Obama seemed to take a stab at blending ideas: retaining the video story but merging it with one that matched more closely with the terrorism reality.

  “What we do know is that the natural protests that arose because of the outrage over the video were used as an excuse by extremists to see if they can also directly harm U.S. interests,” Mr. Obama said.

  The same day, there was a new spin from Carney who told the press that there was no reason to say there was a terrorist attack because everyone knew that, silly!