Morell accused of lying about responsibility for changes to Benghazi talking points

Stephen Hayes:

“When U.S. intelligence officials testified behind closed doors two weeks ago, they were asked point blank whether they had altered the talking points on which U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice based her comments about the Benghazi attacks that have turned into a political firestorm,” read a Reuters story on November 28. “Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, acting CIA Director Michael Morell and National Counterterrorism Center Director Matthew Olsen each said no, according to two congressional sources who spoke on condition of anonymity.”

For two weeks, the official public position of the intelligence community was that no one knew who had made the changes. In private meetings with lawmakers, on Capitol Hill and at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, Morell denied that he had played any significant role in writing or revising the talking points.

Without any answers, members of the congressional oversight committees pressed the White House to turn over emails and other documents pertaining to the talking points. For months, the administration refused, citing the deliberative process inside the executive branch. But when the president decided to nominate John Brennan to run the CIA, Republicans in the Senate finally had some leverage. Several threatened to block Brennan’s nomination unless the administration cooperated more fully on Benghazi. Eventually, the White House made available on a “read-only” basis nearly 100 pages of emails between top intelligence and Obama administration officials.

Those emails, which the White House released to reporters in May 2013, made clear that Morell had been a key player in rewriting the talking points. In fact, a September 15 email to Susan Rice described a secure video teleconference in which Morell told others on the call that he had rewritten the talking points and would be happy to revise them further in consultation with top advisers to President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton. The email reports: “Morell noted that these points were not good and he had taken a heavy editing hand to them. He noted that he would be happy to work with Jake Sullivan [State Department] and [Ben] Rhodes [White House] to develop appropriate talking points.”
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Five days later, when the White House released the emails, the administration enlisted Morell to participate in two background press briefings. While the emails themselves showed robust and sometimes contentious exchanges between top officials, Morell told reporters that he had been responsible for most of the substantive changes.

That’s quite a reversal. In November 2012, Morell had dodged questions of responsibility during congressional hearings and misled lawmakers in private meetings. Then in May, the White House spokesman told the world that Mike Morell had been in charge of the process that produced the talking points, and Morell privately told reporters the same thing.
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What he has never explained satisfactorily is why he was pushing the bogus suggestion that the attack of a spontaneous response to a video they had never seen.  We now know this was not true, but we have yet to hear a credible explanation for why Morell was pushing that story.  This leads to speculation that it was done to help Obama's political campaign where he was claiming that al Qaeda was on the run.