JAMES TARANTO: Benghazi Without the Shame: This time, they don’t even bother lying.

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. . . .

There’s no mystery here; it’s been widely reported (including by the Washington Post) that the attacker pledged allegiance to the Islamic State—though the second “pledge” in this transcript appears to refer to a man, perhaps the one known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

So why the censorship? We can understand withholding the audio, lest ISIS incorporate it into its own audiovisual propaganda. But the Mad Libs blanks are easy enough to fill in. Indeed, the transcript as released is an invitation to any terrorist group to insert its name and take “credit” for the attack.

It seems clear the administration’s purpose here is not to frustrate terrorist propaganda but to further its own propaganda. As with Benghazi, a terror attack on President Obama’s watch could imperil Democratic prospects in November. Thus the administration has been at pains to pin the Orlando attack on armed Americans, not Islamic terrorism.

In public, Obama himself has consistently refused to acknowledge the reality of Islamic terror—even though, as we learned last week from the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, in private he acknowledges the truth. And many in the news media have played along with the official lie. . . .

Something is very wrong with the government and the news media when Bill Maher is a voice of sanity. The same can be said of Donald Trump.

Something is very, very wrong indeed.