Judicial Watch: Email ensuring ‘Obama looked good’ was post-Benghazi priority
Key communication chiefs at the White House waged an all-out strategy to rally behind President Obama and help him push the mantra that the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attacks on the U.S. facility in Benghazi were due to an Internet video — and not policy failure, a watchdog just revealed.
Key to the messaging: Making sure the president appeared strong in the face of adversity, the nonprofit Judicial Watch found, in a recently received FOIA request.
Judicial Watch found — after sifting through documents that were requested from the Department of State on June 21, 2013 — an email from Ben Rhodes, then-White House deputy strategic communications adviser, that showed he joined with others to devise a public relations campaign to “reinforce” Mr. Obama’s statements that an anti-Islam video spurred the attacks.
The main point of the White House team’s strategy was to paint the terrorist attack as being “rooted in an Internet video and not a failure of policy,” Judicial Watch said in an emailed release. Meanwhile, the State Department — at the same time that message was being shaped — initially considered the incident simply an “attack,” and perhaps even a kidnap try, the watchdog said.
The email from Mr. Rhodes, dated Sept. 14, 2012, read in part: “Goal: … To underscore that these protests are rooted in [an] Internet video and not a broader failure or policy.”
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/apr/29/email-ensuring-obama-looked-good-was-post-benghazi/#ixzz30IlZSDTC
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Makes me wonder if Ben Rhode’s brother - who would have access to video editing equipment and crew- might have helped modify the video to make it fit their storyline after the fact, then plant claims or have a Muslim Bro claim, after the attack when they were trying to create this video mee- that the video had been seen by an imam or two in Egypt before the attack. We know the video was altered from its original script, people just assume the video maker modified it. But did he?.