Benghazi Without the Shame
This time, they don’t even bother lying.by James Taranto
It’s a leap year, which means it’s even more important than usual for the Obama administration to deny the threat of Islamic terrorism. In September 2012, it fell to Susan Rice, then ambassador to the U.N., to make the rounds on the Sunday-morning talk shows and peddle the falsehood that the attack at Benghazi, Libya, was just a high-spirited reaction to an amateur video.
Yesterday—a week after the biggest terror attack on American soil since 9/11—the Rice role fell to Attorney General Loretta Lynch. This time, the administration didn’t even bother pretending it was going to tell the truth.
Here’s the transcript, from NBC’s “Meet the Press”:
Lynch: What we’re announcing tomorrow is that the FBI is releasing a partial transcript of the killer’s calls with law enforcement, from inside the club. These are the calls with the Orlando PD negotiating team, who he was, where he was . . . that will be coming out tomorrow and I’ll be headed to Orlando on Tuesday.
Host Chuck Todd: Including the hostage negotiation part of this?
Lynch: Yes, it will be primarily a partial transcript of his calls with the hostage negotiators.
Todd: You say partial, what’s being left out?
Lynch: What we’re not going to do is further proclaim this man’s pledges of allegiance to terrorist groups, and further his propaganda.
Todd: We’re not going to hear him talk about those things?
Lynch: We will hear him talk about some of those things, but we are not going to hear him make his assertions of allegiance and that. It will not be audio, it will be a printed transcript. But it will begin to capture the back and forth between him and the negotiators, we’re trying to get as much information about this investigation out as possible. As you know, because the killer is dead, we have a bit more leeway there and we will be producing that information tomorrow.
Michael Del Moro, who worked alternately at the Obama White House and ABC News (and is currently with the latter), tweeted the transcript as released this morning by authorities (which we are quoting verbatim, including the bracketed portions):
continued at:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/benghazi-without-the-shame-1466441599
