Searching for Godot

Nope, Still No Cover-Up

By ANDREW ROSENTHAL, NYT

Now that the White House has released 100-pages worth of emails between the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency over how to craft post-Benghazi talking points, we know three things.

First, this White House has no clue how to handle a public relations crisis; it should have released those emails ages ago. Second, the more we learn, the clearer it is that there was no cover-up. Third, the Republicans in Congress don’t care about the truth of the matter. They’re going to keep attacking President Obama (to cause him pain right now), and Hillary Clinton’s State Department (to cause her pain if she runs in 2016).

On Wednesday, pretty much every dispassionate news organization reported that the newly released emails do not contain evidence of a scandal. President Obama’s national security team did not try to alter the talking points to shield Mr. Obama’s re-election chances.

As The Times put it, “While the e-mails portrayed White House officials as being sensitive to the concerns of the State Department, they suggest that Mr. Obama’s aides mostly mediated a bureaucratic tug of war between the State Department and the C.I.A. over how much to disclose—all under heavy time constraints because of the demands from Capitol Hill.”

(More here.)