House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa has more or less been handed his hat by House leadership, but he’s still conducting himself as if Benghazi is his divine conquest.
After reading the latest round of leaks from Issa’s office, it becomes more clear than ever why House leadership has chosen to sideline him.
A still-classified State Department e-mail says that one of the first responses from the White House to the Benghazi attack was to contact YouTube to warn of the “ramifications” of allowing the posting of an anti-Islamic video, according to Rep. Darrell Issa, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
The memo suggests that even as the attack was still underway — and before the CIA began the process of compiling talking points on its analysis of what happened — the White House believed it was in retaliation for a controversial video.
What this leak from Issa’s office shows is that the White House really did believe the attack was motivated by a video. That has been the administration’s position from the start.
Issa doesn’t view it that way, however, because Issa is an obtuse horse’s ass.
“The e-mail shows the White House had hurried to settle on a false narrative — one at odds with the conclusions reached by those on the ground — before Americans were even out of harm’s way or the intelligence community had made an impartial examination of available evidence,” Issa said.
If you’re asking why it matters that the White House contacted Youtube about the video while the attack in Benghazi was still ongoing, the answer is I don’t know.
From my perspective that seems like a responsible thing to do if you believe it was a motivating factor, but from Issa’s point of view this is evidence of a grand conspiracy to, apparently, confuse the shit out of people or at least confuse Darrell Issa.
The problem for the Republican party now is that one of their memes has been inadvertently debunked by Issa on the lower committee.
If I didn’t know any better I’d think Issa was deliberately trying to undercut the Select Solyndra IRS Committee to Investigate the Benghazi ACORN Birth Certificate, but I don’t think he’s that crafty. He’s been caught lying on more than one occasion.
(ht Thomas Soldan)