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

by Sharyl Attkisson

  The series of Obama administration revisions chronicled in the emails is astonishing. The White House had spent months hiding the information in them, insisting it didn’t know who was responsible for developing the talking points and refusing to release the drafts to members of Congress who requested them. Under any neutral assessment, Karl’s break is the big story of the day.

  I write up a comprehensive note summarizing the various drafts of the Obama administration talking points emails and I forward it to my Washington managers and our Capitol Hill staff. Then I brief them in a conference call. I make it crystal clear both in my note and on the telephone that neither I nor my source have the emails in hand since the administration had not allowed them to be physically turned over to Congress. For that reason, I reiterate, my source’s notes are paraphrases, but can be trusted as accurate representations.

  My Washington managers forward my email note to the substitute White House correspondent on duty and the Evening News fishbowl in New York. They send back a message for me to not bother to come into work. They’ll have the White House correspondent use my notes to do the story.

  Yeah, we’re in that phase, I think.

  Isham tells me to go ahead and post a write-up on CBSNews.com to match Karl’s reporting. The very first line of my article contains the same disclosure I’d made to my managers:

  NOTE *Emails were provided by the Administration to certain Congressional Committees for limited review. The Committees were not permitted to copy the emails, so they made handwritten notes. Therefore, parts of the quoted emails may be paraphrased.

  The cleansing of the talking points is such a damning development in the Benghazi saga, the Obama propaganda forces focus their full attention to trying to discredit it. Their crisis response is primarily directed at controversializing Karl, who broke the story.

  STEP ONE The White House releases the talking point emails—the ones it had withheld all this time—and shows wording that differs slightly from the quotes Karl had provided.

  STEP TWO The White House falsely claims the discrepancies are significant, and then uses them to discredit Karl and controversialize the whole damaging story.

  STEP THREE Assistance comes from the administration’s surrogate bloggers on the Web who claim the unnamed source of the email leaks lied by saying he had the emails in hand—though the source had done no such thing. They accuse the source of “doctoring” quotes. Again, utterly false. But pretty soon, legitimate news organizations take the baton and perpetuate the idea that the whole talking-point-email-fuss is a Republican-created-scandal.

  It’s a familiar syndrome: the same news outlets that ignore a genuine controversy when it emerges are all too eager to jump in and pick up the story if it means discrediting it . . . or if it means reporting on the administration’s defense.

  In fact, the differences between Karl’s presented quotes and the actual emails were without distinction. Both demonstrated that the Obama administration had seriously misled Congress and the public. But all of that is lost in the furor whipped up by left-wing bloggers with help from the mainstream press.

  I feel sorry for Karl. He doesn’t have a chance against the White House spin machine, its surrogates on the Web, and a complicit news media on Obama’s side.

  A few days later, I inadvertently get wrapped up in the controversy.

  It starts with a text message from a colleague.

  “Did you see what they did to your story?” the colleague asks.

  “What are you talking about?” I reply.

  “I’ll call you.”

  On the phone, the colleague explains that the Evening News had required our White House correspondent to do a one-sided story discrediting Karl’s reporting on the talking point emails and, by proxy, discrediting my own reporting on the same subject, as well as my source.

  I was told that there were heated internal arguments over this particular Evening News story. That nobody in the Washington bureau thought it should air. Not the correspondent, not the producer, not the senior producer, not the bureau chief. But New York was hell-bent. I was told that Pelley and his producers rewrote the entire script to their liking, “top to bottom.”

  So CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley introduces the resulting report, referring to the content of the White House emails “leaked to reporters last week.” (That would include me.)

  “It turns out some of the quotes in those emails were wrong,” Pelley says. For reasons unknown, he ignores the fact that I had reported the “quotes” provided to me as paraphrases—they weren’t “wrong” at all.

  The correspondent’s report then continues the fallacy by comparing supposed “quotes that had been provided by Republicans” (which are actually paraphrases supplied by a source) to the emails the White House later released, as if some sort of subterfuge has been unearthed.

  But the differences are without distinction: a review of the emails proves that the original paraphrased quotes from a source the week before were entirely accurate in spirit, context, and meaning.

  Tonight’s CBS story is, in my view, inaccurate, misleading, and unfair. It may as well have been written by the White House. On top of that, it mentions the White House’s Ben Rhodes as author of some of the talking points drafts in question, but fails to disclose that he’s the brother of CBS News president David Rhodes.

  I’m genuinely stunned that this story about my reporting and my source aired on my network with nobody picking up the telephone and speaking to me to get the facts. It’s contrary to the most basic practices in journalism. Whoever wrote the story appeared to make no effort to seek the facts beyond the White House spin. I could have immediately told them that what they were about to report was wrong.

  Although my source isn’t named in the disparaging CBS Evening News story, I worry about potential liability. Not only have the facts been misrepresented, but the report, in essence, labeled my source a liar. I feel pretty certain that nobody had run this script by the CBS legal department. They never would have allowed it to air.

  The White House and outlets such as Mother Jones seize upon this new CBS Evening News report as an admission that my report, and Karl’s, had been wrong. That the GOP had “doctored” quotes, though my source had doctored nothing.

  Several CBS colleagues encourage me not to let this inaccuracy go unanswered.

  “[CBS is] selling you down the river,” says one. “They’ll gladly sacrifice your reputation to save their own. If you don’t stand up for yourself, nobody will.”

  I email key CBS News executives, noting that my original article contained the explicit disclosure that the email quotes were paraphrased from handwritten notes, just as my source had explained. I point out that the content of the paraphrases and the emails match up perfectly. I reiterate that everyone who received my story note, including the New York fishbowl, knew this and so shouldn’t have pursued a story that falsely implied quotes were doctored or a source had lied.

  Next, I go to view the original article I’d written for the Web. As I click on the page, I quickly scroll up and down—something is missing. Somebody has edited out the key explanation I’d included at the top of the article about the paraphrased quotes. It’s gone.

  Who edited out the caveat—and why?

  Within a matter of hours, I solve the mystery. An editor for CBSNews.com had made an innocent error. He had removed the disclosure paragraph because he simply didn’t feel it was necessary.

  The big question is: How to fix the whole mess? We need to add back the disclosure paragraph as I originally wrote it and include an explanation as to how it got inadvertently edited out. That way people would know that our source hadn’t lied, and that my reporting had been accurate.

  But that simple fix is met with resistance from management.

  “If we amend the story, it will just draw attention to the [incorrect] Evening News
story [the other correspondent had aired],” one New York manager tells me.

  I decide to consult some trusted advisors within CBS Corporation. They agree I need to push the point both for the sake of accuracy and my reputation. They come up with this suggestion: if my managers won’t agree to restore my Web story to the way I’d written it, then I should ask that it be removed from the website entirely.

  I contact the relevant New York executive and ask that he facilitate getting my Web article reinstated to its initial version. He puts me off saying he’s too busy to focus on it. But for me, the whole thing has already been drawn out too long and the propagandists are making serious hay out of the affair. I tell the executive that if he doesn’t have time to address my concerns, I plan to consult our CBS lawyers.

  “No, Sharyl,” comes his quick reply. I’ve gotten his attention.

  In the end, CBS management agreed to make the fix to my Web article.

  Understandably, the whole Washington inner circle that watches these things seemed confused by the shenanigans surrounding the talking points emails, the spin, and the CBS News stories. So much so that a Washington Post fact-checker ultimately dissected the matter. He, too, was befuddled by the most recent Evening News story that seemed to contradict my reporting. But he was able to get a grasp on the facts. He noted that the paraphrases of the White House emails reported by me and Karl were identical in meaning to the actual quotes, though the White House spin claimed otherwise. He correctly reported that I had clearly disclosed that the material used in my Web article was paraphrased. He even pointed out that Ben Rhodes is David Rhodes’s brother. As a result, he gave the White House three out of four “Pinocchios,” meaning he found “significant fact errors and/or contradictions” in its claim that “GOP operatives deliberately tried to ‘smear the president’ with false, doctored emails.”

  “Indeed, Republicans would have been foolish to seriously doctor emails that the White House at any moment could have released (and eventually did),” noted the Post.

  All of these unnecessary internal battles, largely prompted by propagandists, consume time and energy, and they take their toll. They steal efforts away from real newsgathering. They divert attention from important stories. And they result in convincing management more than ever that it’s easier just to avoid these types of stories entirely. As intended.

  Of course, to this day, the propagandists who manufactured the false tale about the “doctored” emails continue to promulgate the narrative. Yet another effort to controversialize the factual reporting on Benghazi. That’s just what they do.

  | THE DREAMLINER NIGHTMARE

  It was early 2013 when the network assigned me to cover transportation issues. The beat had been passed around among a number of correspondents in recent years, kind of like Hot Potato, and the Evening News fishbowl was looking for a Washington correspondent to pick it up. Maybe they were happy to divert my attention from the watchdog stories I had been focused on. I told Bureau Chief Isham I didn’t really want the assignment, but I’d take it and give it my all.

  There was plenty to keep me busy. The current broadcasts loved anything that could go wrong on an airplane. A chute deploys midflight? That’s a national story! A passenger stands up and shouts something crazy? That’s a national story! A suspicious character passes through security at LAX? That’s a national story! A jet slides off the runway? That’s a national story!

  They also loved industry and government press releases on aggressive driving efforts, cell phones on planes, lasers pointed at planes, drunk driving studies, distracted driving statistics, and crash safety tests. Safe stories fed to us by the powers that be. Stories that everyone covers.

  My idea was to dig a little deeper on these stories and produce something more original. And one of the meaty transportation stories that merited further investigation was the Boeing Dreamliner.

  The giant Boeing 787 Dreamliner was the first commercial jet to rely so heavily on lithium-ion battery technology, which saved money by making the plane lighter and burn less fuel. The downside is that lithium-ion batteries occasionally happen to burst into flames. There was a fire in January 2013 on a Japan Airlines Dreamliner parked at Boston Logan International Airport. Another battery incident less than two weeks later in Japan on All Nippon Airways. Soon Dreamliners were grounded worldwide.

  Kim and I were all over the story and the broadcasts seemed pleased. At first. Like a lot of stories, they loved it before they hated it.

  As we continued our daily news coverage, CBSNews.com asked me to look into the case of a Dreamliner whistleblower who had told his story to a few news organizations but had largely gone unnoticed.

  His name is Michael Leon and, in 2006, he was a senior engineering technician at Securaplane, in Tucson, Arizona, working on the Dreamliner’s prototype battery chargers. The chargers sit next to the batteries on the planes and operate as a system. Leon’s hands were the last hands on the prototype chargers before they went out the door. He claimed that Securaplane, under extraordinary pressure to meet Boeing contract deadlines, took shortcuts and compromised human safety.

  As part of his work years before, Leon discovered that the internal monitor in a prototype Dreamliner battery wasn’t working properly. But Securaplane officials assured him it was safe. Two weeks later, he was in the company lab when the same battery exploded. It wasn’t even hooked up to the charger.

  “It was like an F-16 afterburner,” Leon said. One cell after another exploded and spewed out toxic black smoke as thick as oil. It burned down Securaplane’s three-story building. Leon suffered permanent injuries, including heart problems from the chemical smoke, but continued to work. Boeing claimed the battery caught fire due to an “improper test setup,” but investigators were never able to determine the cause.

  Now, seven years later, experts wondered whether whatever made the battery catch fire then might be a clue to the Dreamliner’s current problems. But Boeing and Securaplane say it’s unrelated.

  Leon had also raised objections to what he felt were “dangerous” chargers. Once, during development, when he refused to sign off on the chargers for safety reasons, he learned that a colleague shipped them out anyway. (Boeing and Securaplane say the battery charger from the early testing is different than the final product so it shouldn’t be a safety concern.)

  Feeling as though his safety complaints were disregarded, and believing that management was targeting him, Leon filed a complaint with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 2007. Securaplane fired him. He sued for wrongful termination, but lost. The labor judge said that Leon wasn’t fired for whistleblowing, but for his hostility and repeated misconduct. Leon argued that the hostility and supposed misconduct were a result of his managers marginalizing him when he raised safety concerns.

  Interestingly, the labor judge did agree that “someone with Leon’s level of expertise could reasonably believe Securaplane might be in violation of FAA regulations” and “Leon’s concerns were objectively reasonable. They were the type of air safety concerns Congress intended to protect whistleblowers for raising.”

  The FAA—often rumored to favor industry—investigated Leon’s complaint in 2007 and 2008 but took no action. The agency said that Leon complained about prototypes that are not installed in the Dreamliners that eventually went into service, so there was no concern.

  As part of our research, Kim and I consulted numerous experts who said that the FAA’s response in 2008 missed the point. Errors in prototypes can be perpetuated in the final product. Additionally, the company’s practices were also at serious issue and so, theoretically, could affect any of its final products, not just certain prototypes.

  So, we studied Leon’s court testimony and documentation from 2006. We consulted with battery and air safety experts in the field to check out his claims. One of them went so far as to tell us he thought Leon’s material qualified as a “smoking gun
” in the current Dreamliner investigation.

  Former National Transportation Safety Board chairman Jim Hall was on record as having said the 2006 battery fire which Leon claimed was caused by a faulty battery and/or poor company practices “is a significant event that the NTSB will want to look closely at.” Former NTSB member John Goglia told us on camera that Leon’s complaints took on new significance in light of the Dreamliner’s grounding and “go right to the core of the battery and the battery charging system and they’re really right on what we’re looking for today.”

  Indeed, the NTSB investigation had narrowed to three areas, and Leon had touched upon each of them in his original complaints years before: the battery charger, battery construction and design, and defects introduced during manufacturing. The NTSB had recently interviewed Leon and so did a Democratic congressional staffer preparing for possible hearings. Leon’s story and the facts revealed were interesting and important context in this developing story.

  Best of all from a story standpoint, we had a compelling on-camera interview from Leon himself. A burly Vietnam vet who’s part Native American, he came off as quirky, knowledgeable, sincere, and credible.

  By late February 2013, we had nailed everything down. Kim, another Evening New producer, and I put the finishing touches on what we felt was an extremely strong script. It was approved by our senior producer and the CBS lawyers.

  But what broadcast to offer the story to?

  Evening News wouldn’t want an original story like this. After all, the story took on Boeing and the FAA. But if we gave it to another broadcast and it got lots of attention and pickup, as it undoubtedly would, Evening News would be upset. Everybody would be asking why they didn’t have the story. It had happened before. They didn’t necessarily want a particular story, but they also didn’t want to be called out for not running it if another broadcast did.