What is Sen. Tom Coburn getting at here?
Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn revealed that he believes “the State Department has real trouble” after yesterday’s House Oversight Committee hearing on Benghazi, but said this morning that, at the moment, he can’t reveal why.
“Having sat on the Intelligence Committee and seen the review of e-mails that went back and forth as they developed the list, there’s a glaring problem there that will eventually come out — and I can’t talk about it now — but there was an omission that was given to the intelligence committee,” Coburn said on Morning Joe today.
An “omission.” What could that be?
Ed Morrissey speculates that it could have to do with Greg Hicks’ conversations with Hillary Clinton and Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs Beth Jones. Hicks testified that he briefed Clinton during the attack and never said anything about a YouTube movie. The movie was, in his words, a “non-event” in Libya. Clinton, Rice, et al blamed the movie starting on September 12, and Hicks asked Jones why. She answered that she didn’t know, and soon after that she went on the bureaucratic warpath against Hicks resulting in his eventual demotion. But an email produced by Rep. Trey Gowdy showed Jones telling the Libyan president that Ansar al-Sharia was behind the attack. That email was from September 12, before Ambassador Rice went on her magical Benghazi movie tour on five Sunday talk shows, so the State Department was already aware that the movie had nothing to do with the attack. Yet they blamed the movie, from the top down. They even cut a PSA in Pakistan apologizing for it, one of the more craven acts ever undertaken by a US administration, even if the movie had caused the attack. Which it didn’t.
The email is significant in addressing the state of knowledge at the top level of the State Department during and immediately after the attack. I don’t think that that email is the omission, unless State failed to provide it to the ARB. If State did fail to provide it to the ARB, that in and of itself would be significant, and open up obvious questions about what else State omitted delivering to its hand-picked internally controlled “investigation” that failed even to interview Clinton herself.
More: While we await the shoe and its drop, you must read and disseminate Nice Deb’s chronology of Jay Carney’s Benghazi tales.
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