White House Declining To Answer Questions About When Obama Learned Of Benghazi Emails

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Written By:
Rob Port

Oct 25, 2012
9:34am

Cover up:

(CNSNews.com) – The White House is declining to say when President Barack Obama first learned of three e-mails that the State Department sent to the White House on Sept. 11, 2012, directly notifying the Executive Office of the President that the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi was under attack, that U.S. Amb. Chris Stevens was at the Benghazi mission at the time of the attack, and that the group Ansar al-Sharia had taken credit for the attack.

The White House also declined to say when the president first met with the National Security Council after the Benghazi attack.

“I have been asked by one of our spokespeople to relay ‘that we decline to comment,’” said White House National Security Staff aide Debbie Bird in a written response to CNSNews.com.

CNSNews.com had asked Bird: 1) “When did the President first meet with the National Security Council after the Benghazi attack on 9/11/12?” 2) “When did White House staff first discuss the substance of the e-mails that went to the White House with the President or with the National Security Advisor?”

Meanwhile, the Obama administration is downplaying the importance of the emails suggesting the embassy attack was an actual, coordinated attack. “There were emails about all sorts of information that was becoming available in the aftermath of the attack,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters yesterday. “The email you’re referring to was an open-source, unclassified email referring to an assertion made on a social media site that everyone in this room had access to and knew about instantaneously.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton noted that the email “is not in and of itself evidence” and suggested that they were being “cherry picked” by the media.

But why, then, did the White House run with the theory that this was a protest over a YouTube video? They were pretty conclusive in their statements about that in the days after the attack. At the very least, given that they were aware of alternate explanations for the attack, why did they push the protest theory so hard?

Other than the fact that it was the most politically self-serving theory?