HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (43 page)

But some CIA officials were
unhappy with the draft because it didn’t mention warnings the agency had given to State about a possible disturbance at the Cairo embassy. In an internal CIA e-mail time-stamped 4:42 p.m. that Friday, a new version of the talking points deleted the specific mention of Al Qaeda. The previous version had referred to the “attacks” in Benghazi as being inspired by the protests in Egypt and evolving into a “direct assault” against the compound and the annex. That didn’t make sense—it said the attacks evolved into an assault. The word “attacks” was changed
to “demonstrations” in the internal CIA edit. There were also two new lines added. “On 10 September we warned of social media reports calling for a demonstration in front of the Embassy and that jihadists were threatening to break into the Embassy,” read one of the new bullet points. The other said that the CIA had “produced numerous pieces” about the threat of Al Qaeda–linked terrorism in Libya.

Surely it didn’t take a world-class intelligence agent to know Benghazi was a dangerous place full of armed extremists. The additions were the equivalent of saying the CIA monitored Twitter and read the newspaper, but they were also a signal that there would be a fight between the CIA and State in avoiding blame. Had the CIA failed to predict and prevent the attacks on the compound and the annex, or should the State Department have taken more precautions, given the intelligence provided by the CIA?

On a separate track, Dag Vega, who headed up broadcast bookings for the White House, confirmed at 6:16 p.m. that Rice would be appearing on all five Sunday shows. In an e-mail to the producers, with whom he had negotiated a common set of rules, Vega outlined the lineup of in-studio interviews, which would be pretaped on Sunday: CNN at 7:15 a.m., Fox at 7:45 a.m., ABC at 8:15 a.m., NBC at 9:00 a.m., and CBS at 9:40 a.m.

“Each interview should be no longer than ten minutes,” Vega wrote. Neither the State Department nor Rice’s team at the United Nations had been looped into the e-mail discussion of the talking points for the House Intelligence Committee yet.

Toria Nuland, the State Department spokeswoman, was the first to get a copy early in the evening, after the CIA and White House had been tweaking them for a few hours. Nuland wondered why the administration would give members of Congress talking points that could prejudice a probe by the FBI, which, under standard operating procedure, was investigating the crime on the American soil of the Benghazi consulate. She also caught on to the danger that the CIA’s additions created for her department.

“
The penultimate point could be abused by Members [of Congress]
to beat the State Department for not paying attention to [CIA] warnings, so why do we want to feed that either? Concerned,” she wrote at 7:39 p.m., copying Sullivan and another State Department official, David Adams, into an e-mail chain.

“I’m with Toria,” Adams replied. “The last bullet, especially, will read to members like we had been repeatedly warned.”

The CIA revised the talking points but did not delete the references to threat assessments. “These don’t resolve all my issues or those of my building leadership,” Nuland wrote in an e-mail she later forwarded to Sullivan with the letters FYSA (for your situational awareness) to ensure he knew that there were still red flags for the State Department. “They are consulting with [National Security Staff].”

Republicans would later use the phrase “building leadership” to suggest that Clinton was engaged in the editing of the talking points. Hillary has said she was not.
But Sullivan, according to the publicly released e-mails, was acting in the interests of his boss and her department by making the case to Vietor and Rhodes—members of the National Security Staff—that the CIA’s additions should be dropped.

“Talked to Tommy,” Sullivan wrote back to Nuland at 9:32 p.m. “We can make edits.”

At 9:34 p.m. Rhodes called a halt to the discussion. The issue would be taken up at a “deputies meeting” in the morning. Among other things, that ensured that any decision making would be done face-to-face, without the risk of e-mail chains being leaked or later made public in archives or through press requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

Under political pressure to clarify the origin of the talking points, the White House would eventually release what it touted as one hundred pages of Benghazi talking-points e-mails. But the document was puffed up by the repeated inclusion of long e-mail chains from messages that were replied to and forwarded. More important for anyone attempting to do a forensic analysis of the decision-making process, the e-mails represented only a slice of the
conversations that were going on within and between agencies on phone calls and through other forms of communication.

“Needless to say, there were other exchanges on other systems,” said one senior government official familiar with the debate over the talking points.

In the end, the talking points sent to lawmakers—and to Susan Rice—the next day were pared to three bullet points.
The language that had bothered State was removed. The exercise had started out as an effort to answer the request of a single lawmaker involved in national security issues. It then morphed into a set of talking points vetted by the public relations folks, and more-senior officials, at the various agencies involved.

At some point deputy CIA director Michael Morrell had made similar edits without sharing them among the agencies, according to the White House. Petraeus, his boss, was not pleased with the outcome. “
No mention of Cairo cable, either?” Petraeus wrote to officials at the agency, referring to the CIA’s effort to make State aware of the planned protests in Egypt. “Frankly, I’d just as soon not use this, then.…”

Rice went out on the Sunday shows and delivered talking points drawn from the set sent to Capitol Hill. The difference was that she drew a straight line from the anti-Muslim video to the Cairo demonstration to the Benghazi attack, and she erroneously stated that a protest had morphed into the assault.

“
Putting together the best information that we have available to us today, our current assessment is that what happened in Benghazi was in fact initially a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired hours before in Cairo, almost a copycat of—of the demonstrations against our facility in Cairo, which were prompted, of course, by the video,” Rice said on
Meet the Press
. “What we think then transpired in Benghazi is that opportunistic extremist elements came to the consulate as this was unfolding.”

But there had been
no demonstration in Benghazi. Rice gave
slightly varying versions of the same talking points to all five of the programs. There’s little doubt that anyone representing the
administration in that hot seat would have said something similar. Hillary had sidestepped a political minefield—or so it would seem later, when Republicans focused in on Rice’s appearances on the Sunday shows as evidence of an Obama administration cover-up. At the time, it was Obama, in the stretch run of a campaign against Romney, that Republicans hoped to score points against. All the better to hit him through Rice rather than the still-popular Hillary. Rice would pay a stiff price for the talking-points fiasco, and for not showing expected deference to senators, when she lost out on the nomination to succeed Hillary at State.

“Susan just got fucked,” said one White House official.

Four days later, on September 20, Hillary organized separate classified briefings on the Benghazi attack for the House and Senate. Along with deputy defense secretary Ash Carter, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Sandy Winnefeld, director of national intelligence James Clapper, and other senior administration officials, Hillary delivered a presentation to the House members in a cavernous auditorium in the Capitol Visitor Center and sat for a question-and-answer session. The meeting was both uneventful—save for Hillary shooting Representative Michele Bachmann a death stare after one question—and long.

That meant senators had to wait for the caravan of Hillary and deputy secretaries and deputy directors from various agencies to arrive on their side of the Capitol. The senators, unaccustomed to waiting for anyone, much less administration staff and a former colleague, were growing antsy, and Hillary’s Senate legislative affairs team sent word ahead to the staffers with her that Majority Leader Harry Reid was on the verge of disbanding the group.

When Hillary walked in, she and her aides could feel the tension. Reading the room, she said she would dispense with her prepared remarks and just answer questions. Clapper told the senators he’d better get started because he knew from delivering the remarks to the House that they would take up a little less than fifteen minutes.
Reines noticed Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) growing increasingly irritated. “Watch him,” Reines told Mills. “He’s going to blow.”

When Clapper wrapped up, Carter began speaking in his painfully deliberate style, adding to the feeling that senators in the back were beginning to express, in just-audible-enough comments, that the administration officials were wasting their time. McCain, a former Navy pilot and longtime Armed Services Committee bull, interrupted Carter, telling him he didn’t need an assessment of U.S. naval assets. When Carter resumed speaking, McCain stormed out of the room. Winnefeld seemed to take the hint and quickly dispensed with his opening remarks.

“They went right to questions, and it was pretty bad,” one State Department source said. “It was the moment they decided that Susan lied.”

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) quarterbacked the GOP assault, dispensing questions for colleagues to ask. Finally he stood up to make his own point. “Every time we ask you a question about something you don’t want to answer, you tell us you can’t talk about the investigation or you don’t know the answer,” he said. “But every time there’s a fact you want us to know, you sit here and make us listen to it for twenty minutes.”

Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine), for whom Hillary had once thrown an engagement party, asked the panel how five diplomatic security agents had made it out of the compound alive when their protectees were killed.

During the briefings, lawmakers later recalled, Hillary had distinctly suggested that the attack had been staged by terrorists, a marker that contrasted subtly but importantly with Rice’s account of the events.

Soon afterward, as administration officials appeared in classified briefing after classified briefing for various committees on Capitol Hill, partisan lines broke down, and Rice became the focal point for members of Congress. “In subsequent hearings, if you closed your eyes, you couldn’t tell friend from foe. Mostly because there were no friends,” the State source said. “What’s most notable about
those briefings is that we volunteered them. Nobody asked for them. We said, ‘Let’s go up there and brief the entire Congress,’ and it was effectively kicking a beehive.”

In the short run, Rice got stung. Obama had planned to make her secretary of state, but the talking-points flap cost her any chance of winning Senate confirmation. Moreover, the Benghazi attack deprived Hillary of the ability to point to Libya as her crowning achievement. And once the 2012 election ended, Republicans were intent on making sure it cost her much more than that.

Down the home stretch of the 2012 election cycle, Bill Clinton checked in regularly with two men: Obama campaign manager Jim Messina and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee executive director Guy Cecil. With each man, Bill had bonded over the nuts and bolts of politics. Cecil, a gay former Southern Baptist minister and high school teacher, had kept Clinton engaged during the early phase of the 2008 campaign, when much of Hillaryland had wanted the former president as far from the day-to-day operations as possible. Cecil was close enough to the Bill wing of the Clinton political operation that he had briefly gone into partnership with Mark Penn after the primary, before landing a job as Senator Michael Bennet’s top aide. Messina had given slide show briefings to the data-munching Clinton in Harlem at the end of 2011 and in Chicago in June 2012, and they spoke regularly by phone.

Now Messina and Cecil were facilitators of a dual-track political mission that fall that promised to build more capital for Bill and Hillary within the Democratic Party, one that would allow the Clintons to help Obama
and
continue to take care of Clinton family priorities. “They didn’t necessarily schedule him only to have his travel coincide for Obama,” said one Democratic official familiar with Bill’s campaigning in 2012.

After the final debate between Obama and Mitt Romney in late October, Messina hopped an early morning flight from Boca Raton to Chicago, where he met with Bill on the 34th floor of the Hyatt
Regency, high above the Chicago River. There were just two weeks to go before Election Day, and it was time to map out Bill’s last dash for Obama. The two men agreed: no interviews, all hustings. “Time on the stump made more sense and was a better venue for him,” said an Obama campaign source.

“We want him to go talk to voters, not you guys,” one Clinton camp source said of reporters.

Messina came up with what he thought was an aggressive travel schedule for Bill, but the former president was insatiable. He called back time and again with the same message, according to an Obama campaign source familiar with the calls. “More, more, more,” Bill said. “I want more than this.” The only thing Bill wouldn’t do for Obama was break a date in Washington to watch his nephew Zach Rodham’s final high school football game for Maret against Chelsea’s alma mater, Sidwell Friends, three days before the election. Even better for Bill, a lot of the Obama stops were twofers, where he could validate the president and also ask voters to help House, Senate, and gubernatorial candidates, who might return the favor for Hillary in a few years’ time.

The
New York Times
counted thirty-seven campaign rallies that Clinton did for Obama over the last seven weeks of the campaign, many of them backloaded in the final weeks. Bill offered help that no other surrogates could. In addition to being what Messina called the Obama campaign’s “economic validator” because of his record of governing during a time of surpluses, he could rally Democrats of all ideological stripes.