The press hasn’t learned yet, apparently. On Monday July 6th, Democrats busted Republicans for leaking yet another fake Benghazi email story to the press. They titled their press release, “Politico Ran Bogus Leak in Front-Page Story.”
Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Ranking Member of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, sent a letter to Chairman Trey Gowdy warning, “it now appears that someone who was given access to the Select Committee’s documents leaked doctored information to the press in order to make unsubstantiated allegations against Secretary Clinton.”
Oh, gee. This is so new, how could anyone in the press have known to be on the look out for total fabrications based on emails they were not allowed to see but had to take the word of a Republican on? I mean, it only happened in a huge scandal revealed on May 14, 2013 when CNN’s Jake Tapper discovered that the Benghazi emails reported by ABC’s Jonathan Karl had been edited to make Obama look bad. Karl had written that these emails had been reviewed by ABC. But it turns out that wasn’t true. The emails were basically looked at by a Republican who handed their notes to Karl, who reported them as if he had read them himself.
Jonathan Karl and ABC tried that same trick a year later, but got busted.
This leads us to today, where just as predicted on these pages, Republicans have nothing on Secretary Hillary Clinton and they can’t beat her in a fight for the White House based on policy or platforms, so they are going to keep making stuff up. This is why Democrats had to bust Republicans on June 17 of this year after they refused to release the full Blumenthal transcripts.
Here’s the letter sent by Rep. Cummings to Rep. Gowdy:
Dear Mr. Chairman:
Documents released recently by the Benghazi Select Committee demonstrate that a Member of the Committee, a staffer on the Committee, or someone who has been given access to the Committee’s documents inaccurately described to the press email exchanges obtained by the Committee in a way that appeared to further a political attack against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
On June 18, 2015, Politico ran a front-page story entitled “Benghazi Panel Probes Sidney Blumenthal’s Work for David Brock.” The anonymous source for this story appears to have been attempting to support a line of political attack that many Republicans have been making recently against Secretary Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal, Media Matters, and the White House. Unfortunately, the Politico reporter apparently relied only on “a source who has reviewed the email exchange” when she reported the following:
While still secretary of state, Clinton emailed back and forth with Blumenthal about efforts by one of the groups, Media Matters, to neutralize criticism of her handling of the deadly assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, sources tell POLITICO.
“Got all this done. … Complete refutation on Libya smear,” Blumenthal wrote to Clinton in an Oct. 10, 2012, email into which he had pasted links to four Media Matters posts criticizing Fox News and Republicans for politicizing the Benghazi attacks and challenging claims of lax security around the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, according to a source who has reviewed the email exchange. Blumenthal signed off the email to Clinton by suggesting that one of her top aides, Philippe Reines, “can circulate these links,” according to the source. Clinton responded: “Thanks, I’m pushing to WH,” according to the source.
The emails were not included in documents originally turned over by the State Department.
Now that the emails quoted in this story have been released, it is clear that this source provided the following inaccurate information:
It appears that this source fed Politico an inaccurate characterization of these emails and that Politico accepted this mischaracterization without obtaining the emails themselves. The source apparently took an email that was produced to the Select Committee in February, isolated Secretary Clinton’s statement about the White House, removed it from the original email exchange about the presidential debates, and then added it to a different email exchange involving Media Matters. The source then apparently misrepresented that the State Department had withheld this new hybrid document from the Select Committee.
Unfortunately, this is only the latest in a reckless pattern of selective Republican leaks and mischaracterizations of evidence relating to the Benghazi attacks.
In 2013, another source provided an inaccurate characterization of an email from National Security Council official Ben Rhodes, including words that simply were not there, in order to misrepresent the White House’s role in editing the intelligence community’s talking points. As CNN later reported, this mischaracterization “made it appear that the White House was primarily concerned with the State Department’s desire to remove references and warnings about specific terrorist groups so as to not bring criticism to the department.”
Similarly, former Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa mischaracterized a State Department cable in 2013 by claiming that Secretary Clinton “outright denied security in her signature in a cable, April 2012.” It was later revealed, however, that the cable had only a pro-forma stamp of her signature, like millions of cables that go out from the State Department every year. The Washington Post Fact Checker gave this claim “four pinocchios,“ concluding that “Issa presented this as a ‘gotcha’ moment, but it relies on an absurd understanding of the word ‘signature’.”
These abuses are reminiscent of those seventeen years ago, when the Speaker of the House, Rep. Newt Gingrich, demanded that the Chairman of the Committee on Government Reform, Rep. Dan Burton, issue an apology to the House of Representatives and fire his chief investigator for releasing inaccurate, selectively edited audio recordings during an investigation of Webster Hubbell. These tapes had been manipulated and provided to the press and the American people in order to cast an inaccurate and negative light on then-First Lady Hillary Clinton.
In the Select Committee’s one-year progress report n May, you proclaimed: “serious investigations do not leak information or make selective releases of information without full and proper context.” Yet, it now appears that someone who was given access to the Select Committee’s documents leaked doctored information to the press in order to make unsubstantiated allegations against Secretary Clinton. Since you have repeatedly refused my requests for the Select Committee to adopt rules—including protocols governing the release of documents obtained as part of the investigation—it is unclear how you propose to prevent this type of abuse from happening again in the future.
Sincerely,
Elijah E. Cummings
Ranking Member
Tip: If a Republican aide comes to you as a source and promises to tell you what is in emails, especially if these emails are allegedly about Benghazi, don’t take their word for it.
Even if we didn’t have a trail of objective sources refuting the Republican fabrications once the facts were obtained (but the lie had already done its job by permeating the barely informed voters among us), we have logic. While it’s impossible for anyone to refute lies when they don’t have facts to prove the accusation is a lie, the problem starts when the press believes the lie without proof. Why are the standards any different, especially when there is a long history of Republicans outright lying on this issue. The standards should be tougher when making an accusation than when proving it’s not true, otherwise the press is just inviting being used as a political football by whichever side is willing to lie the most. This process encourages lies.
Family members have asked Republicans to stop their politicization of the Benghazi tragedy, but Republicans don’t care. They have asked and been answered so many times that if they were really looking for information, they completed that task long ago. They can’t let go because this is all they have against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
That means they are going to keep trawling for reporters who are willing to take their word on Benghazi emails.
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