(
)
WASHINGTON — The White House scrambled yesterday to counter the damaging leak of internal government e-mails that showed the State Department deliberately excising mention of al Qaeda links to the Benghazi attack that killed four Americans.
Outraged Republicans are now calling the administration’s actions a coverup.
A top aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton persuaded colleagues in government to omit any mention of al Qaeda affiliates in the “talking points” the administration created in the immediate days after the attack on the US diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, the leaked e-mails reveal.
The bombshell e-mails shed new light on the heated inter-agency negotiations that went on before UN Ambassador Susan Rice appeared on a series of Sunday talk shows to stress that the attack grew out of a protest — a claim the administration subsequently admitted wasn’t accurate.
The official, State press secretary Victoria Nuland, was able to nix a paragraph from the talking points on warnings the CIA had received about the “threat of extremists linked to al Qaeda in Benghazi and eastern Libya” as well as mention of “at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi.”
In an e-mail to the White House and other agency officials obtained by ABC News, Nuland said the information had to be stricken because it “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warning, so why would we want to feed that either? Concerned.”
The version proposed by the CIA said the attack may have been “spontaneously inspired” by protests at the US embassy in Cairo — but added, “That being said, we do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda participated in the attack.”
That qualification never made it into the final talking points that the CIA distributed, one of 12 drafts obtained by ABC.
Nuland argued in the deliberations that she didn’t want to prejudice the investigation then in its infancy — and on one occasion invoked higher-ups.
“These changes don’t resolve all of my issues or those of my buildings leadership,” she wrote.
The revelations had White House press secretary Jay Carney on the defensive.
Carney said the only edit was making the minor tweak on the subject of what to call the diplomatic facility in Benghazi.
“The CIA was the agency that made changes to the talking points and produced the talking points,” he said.
Although that’s technically accurate, other e-mails show broad input while they were being drawn up.
At one point, Carney griped that the White House had provided the information to Congress months ago.
“Were we trying to play down that there was an act of terror and an attack on the embassy? It’s completely hollow, because the president himself in the Rose Garden said this was an act of terror,” Carney added.
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) yesterday called it “the most egregious coverup in American history,” telling talk-radio host Rusty Humphries, “People may be starting to use the ‘I’ word,” meaning impeachment.