What the A.P. and Benghazi Scandals Have in Common

What does the A.P. scandal, in which the Justice Department grabbed A.P. journalists’ phone records with the indiscriminate eagerness of someone stuffing packets of Saltines in his pockets, have in common with the questions raised about Benghazi? In the next days and months, a number of answers will be offered, and measured in different balances: abuse of power, debased Republican scandalizing, the muddles of a second term. (The I.R.S. is also in the mix.) One story concerns twenty different phone lines, among them home numbers whose records would include personal calls that the government has no business knowing about; the other is about four diplomats, whose obituaries we shouldn’t have had to read for many years. But both have to do with transparency and, even more so, with how the Administration’s alternating evasions and manipulations of the legal requirements surrounding war and security have distorted its actions.

When it comes to Benghazi, one has to sort out which story line one is talking about. The first has to do with the actual chain of events surrounding an attack on the American Consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012; the other is a fight over talking points—how honest the Administration was about the incident, and, as the issue became a cover-up, how honest it was about its honesty. The latter is where there might be the most obvious surface similarity to the A.P. case: a fixation on controlling a message leads to bad behavior—though a difference is that this particular aspect of Benghazi has been subject to a good deal of disingenuous G.O.P. hysteria. Shortly after the attacks, Susan Rice, the U.N. Ambassador, was sent on the Sunday morning talk shows with talking points that were, to put it charitably, inadequate. She was a stand-in for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who did not want to go on. (She’d had a long week, apparently; when she did testify about Benghazi, months later, it didn’t go well.) The Republican use of those appearances to make sure that Rice wouldn’t be nominated as Secretary of State was ugly and, given that Rice was relying on vetted talking points, unfair—and in many ways gave the entire inquiry into Benghazi a bad, politicized name.

[Update: Here, I'd originally gone on to discuss a report by ABC News's Jon Karl, about edits of the talking points and associated E-mails. But as CNN’s Jake Tapper has reported, at least one of the E-mails was badly misquoted, and Karl's own explanation makes it unclear whether other quotes are verbatim. As TPM and others note, his description suggests that he may have been misled by Congressional staffers. So I've cut that passage.]

The A.P., meanwhile, had actually reported on an Obama success: the U.S. had stopped a terror plot centered in Yemen. What’s more, the A.P. had, for several days, held off on publishing the story—written by Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, with contributions from Kimberly Dozier, Eileen Sullivan, and Alan Fram—after the Administration had cited security concerns. The A.P. was rewarded for this careful non-absolutism with an aggressive criminal-leaks investigation, led by U.S. Attorney Robert Machen—one of too many such investigations that this White House has put in motion. (John Cassidy has more on that.) That search for leaks has been the sorry excuse for the Justice Department getting the phone records of all the reporters involved in the story, as well as those of their editor, Ted Bridis, and, according to a letter of protest that Gary Pruitt, the President of the A.P., sent to Holder, “an AP general phone number in New York City as well as AP bureaus in New York City, Washington, D.C., Hartford, Connecticut, and at the House of Representatives.” The pursuit of these records affected perhaps a hundred journalists in all. As Pruitt writes,

    There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection…. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know

The Justice Department obtained this information secretly and, it would appear, mendaciously. According to the D.O.J.’s own rules, it is supposed to tell a news organization before it subpoenas such records, to see if it can get them any other way (and as narrowly as possible), and to give the news organization a chance at getting the subpoena quashed. In this case the D.O.J. got the records some time ago, but only told the A.P. on Friday. The Washington, D.C., U.S. Attorney’s office, in a statement, cited an exception: it was allowed to not to tell if giving such a warning “would pose a substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation.” How did that apply in the case of the A.P.? The office didn’t say. Given the A.P.’s long and distinguished record—we are not talking about Inspire, the Al Qaeda magazine—its restraint in delaying publication, and the fact that it would be hard to alter phone records, invoking that exception strikes one as close to slander.

Maybe the Justice Department’s idea of the “integrity of the investigation” in a national-security leaks case is that it gets to not be disturbed. This notion—that the White House ought to be left alone when it comes to questions of terrorism and war—may present the strongest parallel of all to Benghazi, and to the attacks themselves, not just the talking points.

The Administration has chosen practical answers when people ask why the diplomats couldn’t have been rescued, having to do with things like the distance of carrier groups and the refuelling needs of planes. “It’s sort of a cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces,” Robert Gates, the former Defense Secretary, said on “Face the Nation” this past weekend, referring to the idea of planes or soldiers swooping in. But the security situation before the attack may have reflected a cartoonish impression of non-war. When examining Obama’s motives in Libya, one has to return to his decision to initiate military action in March, 2011, without acceding to the War Powers Act, so that he wouldn’t have to get Congressional approval if it went on for sixty or ninety days (as it did). In explaining why, the Administration said that “U.S. military operations are distinct from the kind of ‘hostilities’ contemplated in the law,” even as we were bombing Libya and handing out guns, supposedly because it was limited and small and no Americans would get hurt. That never made any sense. And it may have committed the Administration to the idea that the Libyan denouement was a simpler story than it was. One of the lines edited out of the talking points was this:

    The wide availability of weapons and experienced fighters in Libya almost certainly contribute to the lethality of the attacks.

That may have been the worst cut of all. One could at least argue that there was uncertainty about the Al Qaeda intelligence, but this point, on the other hand, was simply true.

Avoiding the War Powers Act also meant that Congress—by the Administration’s own insistence—would have no full, true purchase on the project, however many Senators made speeches calling for no-fly zones. By avoiding legitimate political processes in starting a war, the Administration just made it easier for that war’s aftermath to be politicized.

What the A.P. and Benghazi cases might have most in common, then, is the Obama Administration’s strange belief that if it can just find the right words, that reality will comply and bend to meet it—that its challenges are so extraordinary that the use of any exceptions built into normal processes should be regarded as unexceptional. In fairness, almost every President is susceptible to this—George W. Bush conspicuously so. But Obama was supposed to learn something from that.

Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: Amy Davidson