| Politics I Was Promised a Cover-Up The White House Benghazi emails reveal a smoking gun. But it wasn't the one that Republicans set out to find. By John Dickerson
Posted Thursday, May 16, 2013, at 04:54 PM ET  I was told there was going to be a cover-up. After reading the 100 pages of emails related to the Benghazi media talking points, I'm hard-pressed to find evidence for the most damning accusations against the president and his staff. If they were involved, they were once again leading from behind. The most incendiary charge aimed at the president is that, in order to insulate himself in an election year, he and his team made up a fake story about a "spontaneous uprising" in Benghazi and downplayed intelligence that it could have been a premeditated attack by known terrorist organizations. There has been so much spinning from the president and his staff in the aftermath of the attack, this storyline seems possible—when the public spin is this bad it is easy to imagine deeper rot. The emails help your imagination along. They destroy the impression left last November by White House spokesman Jay Carney that only a single word was changed in the process, which can get your adrenaline up. But when you pull on the thread in search of evidence for the Big Story, your heartbeat slows. The emails show a lot of CIA and State Department action, but comparatively little White House meddling, and certainly nothing near the level of meddling that would be required to put in the big fix. One of the challenges of figuring out what's a cover-up, what's a lie, and what's just spin in this Benghazi drama is ... To continue reading, click here.
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