New emails prove the White House pushed the 'internet video' lie to protect the administration

On September 16th 2012, then UN ambassador Susan Rice appeared on the Sunday morning news shows. There, she dutifully spread the Obama administration's lie that an anti-Islamic YouTube video sparked a "spontaneous protest" which resulted in the Benghazi debacle. We would later learn that there was no spontaneous protest, that the administration knew the incident was a terrorist attack while it was still ongoing, and that the video in question was a "non-issue in regards to Benghazi." Still the State Department spent (at least) two weeks trying to pimp the YouTube angle.

Now, thanks to newly released emails, we know that the YouTube malarkey was being pushed directly by President Obama's top White House advisers. From the Washington Free Beacon:

Previously unreleased internal Obama administration emails show that a coordinated effort was made in the days following the Benghazi terror attacks to portray the incident as “rooted in [an] Internet video, and not [in] a broader failure or policy.”

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Emails sent by senior White House adviser Ben Rhodes to other top administration officials reveal an effort to insulate President Barack Obama from the attacks that killed four Americans. Rhodes sent this email to top White House officials such as David Plouffe and Jay Carney just a day before National Security Adviser Susan Rice made her infamous Sunday news show appearances to discuss the attack. The “goal,” according to these emails, was “to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure or policy.”

Here's a screenshot:

Note that subject line: "PREP CALL with Susan." The emails were conspicuously absent from those released in May of 2013, at which time the White House running around telling everyone that it had released it's complete archive of emails related to the incident. Clearly, they were hoping this material would never see the light of day. In the end, it took a FOIA lawsuit, filed in federal court by Judicial Watch, to force the administration to turn over the goods.

Also contained in the 41 pages of documents obtained by Judicial Watch is a Sep. 12, 2012 email from Payton Knopf, the former deputy spokesman at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. In this communication, Knopf informs Rice that senior officials had already dubbed the Benghazi attack as “complex” and planned in advance. Despite this information, Rice still insisted that attacks were “spontaneous.” The newly released cache of emails also appear to confirm that the CIA altered its original talking points on the attacks in the following days.

Why would they do this? Well, that's pretty obvious. With less than two months to go before the 2012 presidential election, they were trying to make their candidate look good. The communications seek to push the concept of Obama's leadership abilities, recommending that those involved remind everyone of his "strength and steadiness." As Ben Rhodes wrote:

“I think that people have come to trust that President Obama provides leadership that is steady and statesmanlike. There are always going to be challenges that emerge around the world, and time and again, he has shown that we can meet them.”

So, who - exactly - is Ben Rhodes?

That's right. Ben Rhodes is the brother of CBS News President David Rhodes. You may recall David Rhodes' name, because it came up quite a bit when CBS investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson resigned. At the time, Attkisson claimed Rhodes was not responsible for squashing her stories on the President, the White House, and Benghazi, instead indicating that there was an array of mid-level news managers who were "personally defensive" of the President. That may be, but the potential conflict of interest is still remarkable. If their boss's brother was going to be implicated in a story, it's pretty easy to imagine a manager killing a story to provide cover. In these emails we now have hard evidence that the administration lied to the American people in a White House-directed effort to prop up the President ahead of the 2012 election. It's simply undeniable at this point. Maybe that's why even lefties like the National Journal's Ron Fournier have stopped trying to toe the official company line... According to Fournier, Ben Rhodes' emails represent a smoking gun.