Prologue Presents FIASCO: BENGHAZI

everyone, Leon Napok here.

There's no new episode of 5-4 this week, but I'm showing up in your feed to share with you an episode from the new season of Fiasco, a six-part series that tells the story of the Benghazi scandal.

If you're anything like me, your memory of Benghazi is vague, and your reaction when you hear the word is maybe closer to exhaustion than curiosity.

But as I think you'll hear in this episode, Benghazi was actually an incredible story that tells us a whole lot about how American politics got to where it is today.

If you like 5-4, I think you'll find a lot to be interested in here, and I hope you check it out.

To be clear, what you're about to hear is the fourth episode in the series.

But don't worry, you'll still understand everything.

It picks up right after the Benghazi attack itself and goes into detail about how Republicans turned Benghazi into a political weapon before the attack was even over.

If you like what you hear, please go subscribe to the Luminary channel on Apple Podcasts, so you can listen to the rest of the series.

Just go to apple.co slash fiasco.

That's apple.co.com/slash fiasco.

Thanks for listening.

The 11th anniversary of September 11th was kind of like a 31st birthday.

One year after a major milestone, it just didn't land with as much fanfare.

It's expected to be a quiet day as both candidates commemorate the 9-11 attacks, both President Obama and the

somber enough occasion that both candidates in the 2012 presidential race, the incumbent Barack Obama and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney, agreed to suspend all negative campaigning for the day.

Yeah, you will hear no negative campaigning.

Not today.

By the way, this is around the 9-11 attacks.

You know, we would see it not as an opportunity necessarily for politics.

I mean, we were going to keep making our case, but we were going to make our case affirmatively.

This is Lon Hee Chen.

He was Mitt Romney's chief policy advisor during the 2012 campaign.

Our hope and our intention was to go into it focused on what we needed to do looking ahead, rather than spending the day on September 11th talking about some of the challenges created by the Obama administration.

Chen is being polite here.

What he means is the two campaigns were going to take a day off from beating up on each other.

And one of the challenges the Romney team would not be talking about was Obama's policy in the Middle East.

His approach to the war on terror that had started more than a decade earlier under George W.

Bush.

Romney had been calling Obama soft on terrorism since the start of his campaign.

But on this day, he would hold his fire, out of respect.

But then, at around 1 o'clock in the afternoon D.C.

time,

some concerning news started filtering in from Egypt.

A large group of angry protesters had gathered in front of the American Embassy in Cairo.

thousand of them.

As you heard in our last episode, the crowd was protesting a video called The Innocence of Muslims that had recently been uploaded to YouTube by a man in California.

Today they are protesting a video they say defames the Prophet Muhammad.

Earlier in the day, the U.S.

Embassy in Cairo had denounced the anti-Muslim video in a written statement.

Saying, quote, the Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.

The statement was intended to diffuse the situation,

to distance the U.S.

government from the Islamophobic video.

But it did not prevent the protests in front of the embassy in Cairo from turning violent.

Protesters have stormed the walls of the embassy and pulled down U.S.

flags.

Now they have replaced them with black flags with Islamic emblems.

As footage of the chaos aired on American television, the U.S.

Embassy's statement from earlier in the day got the attention of conservative commentators like Lou Dobbs.

The Obama administration, the State Department, actually apologized to the very radical Islamists who were demonstrating in hurting the feelings of Muslims.

It's just disgusting.

Then, that evening, at around 7 p.m.

Eastern Time, the news out of Cairo was compounded with reports of a second incident nearby.

This one in Libya.

It appeared that the protests in Cairo had spread to Benghazi, Libya's second biggest city.

A mob had set fire to a diplomatic compound and killed an American.

As you can imagine, there is a degree of conflicting information coming out of nighttime Libya amid the chaos of an attack on the U.S.

consulate.

The Libyan government has now informed the State Department that an American consulate official has been killed in an attack on the U.S.

Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

We're just getting this information.

From his apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Lan Hee Chen watched the news and fielded requests from media outlets that wanted Romney's take on the day's events.

The media inquiries did start to pick up as the early evening wore into late evening Eastern time, and a number of conservative media outlets, some online, some radio, some television, and they were particularly ginned up.

They were very concerned about why the Romney campaign hadn't yet used this as something with which to attack President Obama.

Between the breaking news of the attack in Benghazi, the protest in Cairo, and the embassy statement about the religious feelings of Muslims, the Romney campaign saw an opportunity.

Here was a perfect example of the Obama administration bending over backwards to show respect to the Muslim world at the expense of American power and security.

It didn't matter that the Cairo Embassy statement had been issued hours before the Benghazi attack.

It all just fit together.

station in Cairo, I think, accounted for essentially the, quote, hurt feelings that resulted because of the video.

And then as the Benghazi news came in, it sort of added to this notion that we were under attack.

And the response from the Obama administration was an apology to the Islamic world.

Mitt Romney was delivering a speech in Reno, Nevada at a conference of the National Guard when the gears of his campaign back in Boston started to turn.

I recall our communications director calling calling me at some point around dinner time, basically saying, I think it's not going to be possible for us to end this day without saying something.

As night fell, Lan Hee Chen initiated a conference call with other campaign operatives to discuss whether their candidate should weigh in.

We had a small closet that you could kind of walk into in our apartment.

And I remember going into that closet and shutting the door and doing the call in there amidst all of our clothes and shoes and everything else because I didn't want to disturb my wife.

I didn't want to disturb our son.

And a lot of the evening transpired with me in that closet trying to work all this out.

The consensus among the Romney staffers was that they would draft a statement that night and run it by the candidate, but hold the final product in an embargo from the press until after midnight, at which point it would be September 12th.

That way, they could skirt any backlash about negative campaigning on the anniversary of 9-11.

but still be seen as responding quickly to events on the ground.

We ended up with a statement that was aggressive.

We knew it was aggressive.

We debated the aggressiveness of it.

I will say that I was not 100% convinced, but by the end of that call, I was that the more aggressive posture was the right one.

Once the campaign team had their wording down, Chen called Romney and read the statement aloud to him.

It's disgraceful, it said, that the Obama administration's first response to the violence in Egypt and Libya was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who wage them.

And he sort of paused and said, okay, that sounds about right to me.

Has there been any other news that we should account for?

I said, no, I think that's it.

And he said, okay, sounds good.

Let it rip.

Let's do it.

And I thought, okay, case closed.

We're going to put out the statement.

I'm going to get to bed and we're going to see kind of where things develop.

And I'll wake up the next day to fight again.

A decision was made to lift the 9-11 embargo early after all.

And at 10.24 p.m., the Romney campaign sent the statement out to the media.

I think Romney certainly went to bed feeling pretty good about the statement.

I know I did, and a number of us did as well because we'd spent so much time thinking about that evening.

You know, I think we all really felt like this was the right approach, and this was evidence of exactly what we had been talking about.

Mitt Romney responded in a statement saying, it's disgraceful that the Obama administration's first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who wage the attacks.

Romney's statement was the first volley in what would become the long political war over Benghazi.

In calling Obama disgraceful mere hours after the attack was first reported, and in doing so, as it turned out, while the attack was still unfolding, Romney was taking a risk, maybe even crossing a line.

If you'd said to me that night when we were getting together to put together that first statement that we would still be talking about that night and the events that transpired years later, I would have said, yeah, maybe it's a blip in history.

I'm Leon Napok from Luminary and Prologue Projects.

This is Fiasco.

This is a political cover-up of some kind.

What's being called Benghazi gate?

Intelligence officials acknowledge they originally got it wrong.

We got the classified cable.

That was chilling.

Why should anybody have any credibility in what the administration says given its shifting narrative?

It was a fucking mess, man.

It was a fucking mess.

It was really hard to figure out what was going on.

In this episode, the attack in Benghazi collides with an American election.

And this really is what New Hampshire is all about, isn't it?

A day like this at a farm like this?

Doug and Stella, thank you so much.

Mitt Romney announced his candidacy for president on a New Hampshire farm in 2011.

He was wearing slacks and a checkered button-down shirt, and he spoke from a podium with a picturesque barn behind him.

It was the perfect setting for Romney to make his case that Barack Obama didn't understand everyday Americans.

And this is what America's about as well, don't you think?

Oh, gosh.

The kickoff was mostly focused on the economy.

But Romney also took the opportunity to distinguish himself from the president on foreign policy.

At a time of historic change and great opportunity in the Arab world, he's hesitant and uncertain.

A few minutes into office, he traveled around the globe to apologize for America.

Romney was referencing a trip that Obama had taken to the Middle East in 2009 at the start of his presidency.

It included a high-profile appearance in Egypt,

during which the president called for a new era of mutual respect between the Muslim world world and the West.

I've come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.

One based on the United States.

In his speech, Obama recalled growing up in Indonesia, surrounded by practicing Muslims.

He spoke reverently of Islamic contributions to Western civilization, like algebra in the treatment of infectious disease.

He even quoted from the Quran: As the Holy Quran tells us, be conscious of God and speak always the truth.

Six Six years after the start of the Iraq War, Obama's speech was an implicit critique of the Bush administration.

The new president seemed to be saying that the American government would no longer hold an antagonistic attitude towards the Middle East or tolerate the Islamophobia and jingoism that had been awakened under his predecessor.

And I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.

Back home, Republicans framed Obama's posture as weak and naive.

They called it an apology for America.

As we investigate the Obama apology tour and how it has systematically dismantled America's credibility around the world, but first, the apology narrative took hold on Fox News and other conservative media outlets.

Obama was undermining the United States by acting like Americans had something to be sorry for.

There, you heard the president's apology tour.

Apology tour?

His apology tour.

Apology tour.

A president who apologizes to Muslim religious fanatics.

Can we stop apologizing?

I'm tired of the apologies.

Can we stop apologize?

When it came time for Mitt Romney to put out a campaign book, he even named it after this idea.

Back with Mitt Romney, his book, No Apology, The Case for American Greatness.

The Obama argument was that they were looking for a more nuanced view of the Islamic world.

Again, Romney advisor Lan Hee Chen.

They took pains, for example, to distinguish between Islamic fundamentalism or Islamic terrorism, and they were very careful about how they approached the region and what they wanted to do, in part because I think President Obama felt that there could be common cause made with parts of the Islamic world.

Obama's insistence on making common cause with the Muslim world gave Romney an opening during the 2012 race, an easy way to communicate to voters how he and the incumbent were different.

Think about this.

Internationally, President Obama has adopted an appeasement strategy.

In Barack Obama's profoundly mistaken view, there's nothing unique about the United States.

But we are.

Obama did have one massive advantage when it came to his record on fighting terrorism.

Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda.

A little over a year before the attack in Benghazi, Obama had ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

He had eliminated the leader of al-Qaeda and dealt the organization an existential blow.

Naturally, Obama's re-election campaign placed this achievement at the center of his foreign policy record.

I said we'd go after Al-Qaeda and bin Laden.

We did.

Obama's vice president made hay of it as well.

Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motters is alive.

By the end of the summer, polling showed that Obama was leading Romney on foreign policy, and the race was widely seen as his to lose.

On September 12th, the morning after the attack in Benghazi, Lanhee Chen started his day the same way he always did, by poring through news coverage to see what people were saying about his candidate.

On an ordinary day, by the time I'd wake up, you know, there might be 25, 30, 35 articles.

On that morning, I recall waking up and clips were coming fast and furious.

Chen was curious to see whether the aggressive stance Romney had taken the night before was having its desired effect.

The statement did seem to be getting a lot of attention, but not in the way the Romney campaign had hoped.

Whether you agree or don't agree with the Romney statement, it just sounds cynical and gross.

And I have to say, I'm stunned.

They put out this release when they did, before we knew all the facts, before daybreak, just so patently political, it really gives you pause.

A political hand grade, and I think shame on that campaign, personally.

Normally, when a campaign is under this kind of heavy criticism, the candidate can marshal a battalion of loyal, credentialed partisans to get on TV and mount a defense.

They're called surrogates, and typically, the Romney campaign had a deep bench of surrogates at their disposal.

In this case, though, support was slow to come.

It appeared that even Romney's fellow Republicans thought the campaign had gone too far.

We found a reticence amongst a number of our key national security surrogates who would have been forceful voices on the outside.

They were either not on board or they wanted to speak to me or someone on the campaign to give them some sense of our thinking before they were willing to get out there and say something.

That morning, Chen dialed into a conference call with other top campaign officials and Romney himself, who was not happy.

According to one account, he gripped the armrest of his chair as he spoke.

He expressed his sense that perhaps we had been too quick with the statement and that there was a brewing controversy over it.

But it was something to the effect of, guys, I think we may have made a mistake here.

We may have misfired.

Romney knew it didn't look good.

Four Americans, including an ambassador, were dead.

And here he was pouncing on it to try to win an election.

It wasn't just Obama partisans who were outraged.

Establishment Republicans also seemed to agree the Romney campaign had improperly politicized a national security crisis.

And I'm a hawk, but you do not want to have this become a political election issue right now.

We should have one president of the United States at a time when it comes to foreign policy.

I don't think he should be a second voice of foreign policy.

Now, if Obama- Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, the two highest-ranking Republicans in Congress, offered statements condemning the Benghazi attack, but neither took the opportunity to criticize Obama or come to Romney's defense.

John McCain also declined to address Romney's statement, saying only that Ambassador Chris Stevens was one of his dear friends.

But not everyone in the conservative movement had the same qualms.

But what really is going on, right there, is a coordinated effort by the media in coordination with the White House.

On talk radio, Rush Limbaugh gave a full-throated defense of Romney and suggested that the outrage of the campaign statement was a distraction from Obama's mishandling of the attack.

We're in the middle of an absolute disaster,

a foreign policy disaster.

And there's a coordinated effort to make it about Romney, whether or not it's presidential for Romney.

One commentator on the website Breitbart.com dismissed the notion that Romney had done anything wrong and called on the Obama campaign to direct their outrage at the murderers instead of Romney.

And so the Romney campaign faced a choice.

Were they going to give in to the criticism they were hearing from more moderate Republicans?

Or would they stay on message and hope the rest of the party fell in line?

How do do we address this now going forward?

That was really more the focus of that call and the tone that Romney took that morning.

And it was really a division between do we walk it back or do we double down on it?

After some debate, the Romney campaign decided not to backtrack.

The guy who wrote a book called No Apology simply could not apologize.

It would have been seen as a sign of weakness.

It would have been seen as a rebuke of our own line of thinking about not just this event, but perhaps more broadly about Obama.

So, the Romney campaign was going to stay the course.

Yes, what happened in Benghazi was a tragedy, but it was an avoidable one that illustrated the failures of Obama's foreign policy.

As Lon Hee Chen told a reporter at the time, the attack was a direct result of the Obama administration conducting its foreign policy in a feckless manner.

That word, feckless, was a callback to a critique that Romney had been leveling against Obama for the better part of a year.

The very real dangers that America faces if we continue the feckless policies of the past three years.

Mitt Romney said that you are America's most feckless president since Carter.

What would you like to say to Mr.

Romney?

I'd tell him to go feck himself.

That's enough.

And I think that word feckless describes a timidity, and that's the reason why that critique stuck.

Whatever had happened in Benghazi, it was proof of Obama's fecklessness, particularly when viewed alongside the conciliatory statement issued by the U.S.

Embassy in Cairo.

It was true that making this point required Romney to conflate the Benghazi attack with the administration's response to the Innocence of Muslims video.

But the point here was to level a general critique of the president, not get into specifics.

Back to our breaking news in a matter of moments live in Jacksonville.

Governor Mitt Romney is prepared to make a statement, and we understand he may take questions.

As criticism continued to pour in the day after the attack,

the Romney campaign pulled together a press conference in which Romney would address reporters directly.

Hillary Clinton had just done the same thing at State Department headquarters, and Obama was getting ready to deliver his own statement in the White House Rose Garden.

The setting for Romney's press conference was less official.

It took place at a strip mall in Jacksonville, Florida.

Good morning.

Americans woke up this morning with

tragic news and

felt heavy hearts.

So he was having a press conference in a strip mall where there was a reptile store of some kind.

And I don't know why that sticks with me, but it does.

It was sort of fitting for the time, I guess, that we were in a pit of vipers and there was a reptile store nearby.

I think it's

a

terrible course for America to

stand in apology for our values.

That the first response to the United States must be outrage at a breach of the sovereignty of our nation.

Reporters echoed the questions Lan Hee Chen had seen in the press clippings that morning.

Why had the Romney campaign weighed in so early?

It was the anniversary of 9-11.

Shouldn't they have at least waited till after the attack was over?

We have a campaign for presidency of the United States and are speaking about the different courses we would each take with regards to the challenges that the world faces.

Last question.

So if you had known last night that the ambassador had died, and obviously I'm gathering you did not know.

I'm not going to take hypotheticals about what would have been known one and so forth.

We responded last night.

It was a rough press conference and a rough morning for the candidate overall.

But it was still possible that Romney's fellow Republicans would get behind him.

Pictures here from protests and anti-American demonstrations in more than a dozen countries.

The Abenghazi attack happened on a Tuesday.

The day we were all watching

was Friday because of Friday prayers.

This is Tommy Vitor.

He's best known today as a co-host of Pod Save America.

Back in 2012, he was the 32-year-old spokesperson for the National Security Council, a panel of advisors responsible for helping the president make decisions on foreign policy and terrorism.

Because what happened in a lot of places was everyone would go to the mosque.

If you had an imam who was giving a sermon about the innocence of Muslim videos, you could see more protests and more violence and more attacks on U.S.

facilities.

American diplomatic missions across the globe are on high alert.

They are expecting an explosion of anti-American protests after Friday prayers.

Protesters demonstrated outside U.S.

diplomatic outposts in Morocco, Mauritania, Pakistan, Indonesia, Kuwait, even Australia and the Philippines.

You know, it don't mean it's like the chain reaction.

We're seeing more protests in Arab capitals.

There were small demonstrations in front of Tunisia.

There were other ones in the Gaza Strip.

Today, the unrest came to Sudan.

Protesters shouting with our soul, our blood, we defend you, Prophet Muhammad.

And so that led to a whole series of meetings and conversations about how to harden various facilities all around the globe and to really review whether U.S.

personnel were safe.

I mean, that was the real focus.

Some of the demonstrations were peaceful.

Others turned violent.

In Yemen, protesters breached the gates of the U.S.

Embassy.

In Tunisia, they set vehicles on fire.

In Sudan, they climbed over the walls of the U.S.

Embassy and raised a black Islamic flag.

Wherever there is weak security, we're seeing some radicals take advantage of that and using this opportunity to attack the embassy.

In truth, like we didn't really have time to immediately mourn and focus on the Benghazi attacks and do an after-action report because we were so worried about whether there could be another Benghazi someplace else.

We were worried about personnel all over the world, diplomatic personnel, intelligence personnel, military personnel.

It was a total rethinking of our security situation all over the globe.

Meanwhile, the U.S.

intelligence community was trying to get to the bottom of who was responsible for the attack in Benghazi and how they had managed to kill four people.

Even with the entire

intelligence capability of the United States government, you are still scrambling to figure out what happened in situations like this.

From the start, a central question was how the Benghazi attack began.

Did it grow spontaneously out of peaceful protests inspired by the video?

Or was it a terrorist attack that had been planned separately?

At stake was whether the tragedy had been preventable, whether someone in the U.S.

government had screwed up by not thwarting the attack or better preparing the compound to withstand it.

That's just the nature of diplomacy.

It's nature of like the fog of war.

Like there was no way to quickly vet and get people on the ground to sort through the aftermath.

Even with enormous intelligence capability, it still took hours and hours and hours to figure out what exactly happened.

As investigators sought witnesses and made contact with Libyan authorities, President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton delivered public speeches and met with the victims' families.

Obama also visited the State State Department, where grief over losing two of their own was still just setting in.

A sitting American ambassador had not been killed in the line of duty since 1979.

To you,

their families, and colleagues,

to all Americans, know this,

their sacrifice will never be forgotten.

On Friday afternoon, Obama and Clinton presided over a solemn ceremony as the victims' bodies were returned from Libya.

Family members stood by for a military salute as servicemen loaded flag-draped caskets into hearses.

The event was carried live on national TV.

We bring home four Americans who gave their lives for our country and our values.

To the families.

The ceremony took place in the midst of a fevered rush in the media to get clarity on whether the attack in Benghazi had been pre-planned or linked to a protest.

Reporters initially had a hard time getting a definitive picture.

The Washington Post cited a Libyan journalist who described the attackers as racing towards a protest.

The New York Times seemed to back that up, citing a Libyan official who said the first part of the attack had evolved from protests while the second on the CIA base had been coordinated.

However, the same article also cited two Libyan guards who had been wounded in the attack, who said there had been no indication of a protest outside the compound before the shooting started.

Separately, the president of Libya described the attack as highly organized.

The president of Libya says that this was something that had been in the works for two months, this attack.

He blames it on al-Qaeda.

It was a lot of scrambling in the initial days.

This is Pamela Kay Brown.

In 2012, she was an executive producer at Fox News.

Before that, she had spent time building an international Rolodex at NBC, ABC, ABC, and CBS News while reporting on conflicts like the First Gulf War and the breakup of Yugoslavia.

I had good contacts I made in Saudi Arabia.

I had friends in Egypt.

I had friends in the UAE.

And I say friends, people that would take my phone call and do their very best to answer my question or help me in my quest.

The evening after the attack in Benghazi, anchors at Fox News were running with a definitive claim that the attack was pre-planned and likely linked to al-Qaeda.

It had nothing to do with the innocence of Muslims video.

Fox News has obtained information that those killings were apparently planned, not a spontaneous demonstration.

One thread that I developed from a source on the ground that there was no protest and the attacks were not spontaneous.

The attack was planned and had nothing to do with the movie.

I was confident, highly confident.

That's something you just have to lock and load on when you really have it.

There is growing consensus tonight among the intelligence community that the attack in Libya had little or nothing to do with Muslim protests against an anti-Islamic film report.

In addition to Brown's source on the ground, top Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee were arguing that the weapons used in the attack were proof of premeditation.

Specifically, they noted that the CIA facility in Benghazi had been hit with mortars, meaning the attackers would have needed exact coordinates for the building in order to target it.

It was such such an area that they knew the way the mortar rounds were coming in, people that we spoke to, it showed that there had been pre-planning.

The FBI later theorized that the assailants may have gotten the coordinates needed to launch the mortars when they raided the Benghazi compound.

In other words, the attack on the CIA base may have been planned, but planned in one night.

In the days after the attack, there was a lot riding on this point for Republicans.

If the attack in Benghazi was pre-planned, it meant that the Obama administration was exactly as weak on terror as Mitt Romney had been saying.

The potential link to al-Qaeda meant that Obama hadn't conquered the terrorist organization after all, and that while he was outrunning his victory lap over bin Laden's death, the group had managed to murder an American ambassador.

On Thursday, September 13th, the intelligence community provided a classified briefing to the President and to Congress.

Their assessment reiterated that the attack had begun spontaneously following the protests in Cairo, but that extremists with ties to al-Qaeda were involved.

All right.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

Thanks for being here.

At a press conference the next day, ABC's Jake Tapper pushed White House press secretary Jay Carney to square the idea of a spontaneous protest with emerging evidence about the weapons used in the attack.

The group around the Benghazi post was well-armed.

It was a well-coordinated attack.

Do you think it was a spontaneous protest against a movie?

Look, this is obviously under investigation.

We do not at this moment have information to suggest or to tell you that

would indicate that any of this unrest was pre-planned.

What is true about Libya?

On the Sunday news shows that weekend, UN Ambassador Susan Rice further amplified the government's official assessment by appearing on every major network: CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, and Fox News.

This was a feat known as the Full Ginsburg, named after Monica Lewinsky's lawyer, who was the first to ever do it in 1998.

Hey, Madam Ambassador, thank you for joining.

Good to be with you, Candy.

Dr.

Rice, thank you so much for coming here today and answering our questions.

Good to be with you.

In each interview, when the Benghazi attack came up, Rice crafted her answers based on the intelligence briefing submitted to the president three days earlier.

What happened in Benghazi was, in fact, initially a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired hours before in Cairo, almost a copycat

of the demonstration.

Rice made it clear that the investigation was still underway and cautioned that there was a lot the administration didn't know.

We'll wait to see exactly what the investigation finally confirms, but that's the best information we have at present.

It didn't take long for more solid intelligence to come in.

Within a week of Susan Rice's tour of the Sunday shows, it was clear the Obama White House had been wrong to suggest the Benghazi attack grew out of a protest against the innocence of Muslims' video.

There had been no protest against the video in Benghazi.

Security camera footage obtained by the CIA showed that the diplomatic compound was quiet that night until an organized group of armed assailants broke in.

Intelligence officials acknowledged they originally got it wrong.

On September 19th, a counterterrorism official from the Obama administration testified that the assault was in fact a coordinated terrorist attack.

The intelligence community now believes it was a deliberate and organized attack.

Some of those involved, it says, were linked to groups affiliated with or sympathetic to al-Qaeda.

To the Romney campaign and their fellow Republicans, it looked like the administration was dramatically changing its story on Benghazi.

Last week, the administration insisted the attack was a spontaneous reaction to a YouTube video.

But today, Secretary Clinton has said it was indeed terrorism.

Mitt Romney said today it raises questions about how those first statements could be so wrong.

There was a great deal of confusion about that from the very beginning on the part of the administration.

Why should anybody have any credibility in what the administration says given its shifting narrative?

Tommy Vitor, Obama's National Security Council spokesman, acknowledges that the administration's narrative did shift.

But all these years later, the notion that there was anything nefarious about it still exasperates him.

It was a fucking mess, man.

It was a fucking mess.

It was really hard to figure out what's going on.

You know, when something happens thousands of miles away in the dead of night night in complicated circumstances, you have to allow for shifting explanations.

It takes time to figure out what happens.

I promise you, when I would walk into the situation room meetings, there was not some conversation about how do we spin this.

The conversation was, hey, intelligence guys, what do we know?

The messy reality is that there was disagreement among intelligence officials as information about the Benghazi attack rolled in.

At one point, the executive coordinator of the Presidential Daily Brief had written that the presence of armed assailants on the ground suggested that this was an intentional assault and not an escalation of a peaceful protest.

But that statement was removed from the initial briefing because other analysts didn't think there was enough evidence to support it.

There was clearly a difference of opinion among various parts of the government about what happened.

And so those dissenting views would start to leak out, which would cause reporting that was just off or confused or wrong.

But Pamela Brown, the producer at Fox News, saw something suspicious in the Obama White House's insistence on bringing up the Innocence of Muslims video.

The fact that the administration had been so attached to the spontaneous uprising theory suggested to Brown that they were trying to get away with something.

It was a very

big deal for them to pin all of this on the video when somebody goes out and sticks to a story like like that and it's just not true

this sense that Obama was hiding the truth pervaded Fox News soon the network was calling it a cover-up more on the Benghazi cover-up what's being called Benghazi gate probably more serious than Watergate to call what was your theory at the time of like

why the Obama people

wanted to blame it on the video.

What was in it for them to blame it on the video?

I I have no idea.

This is a larger question for someone enmeshed in foreign policy.

So the question is, why were we there?

Why was it so important to have Ambassador Stevens in this position in a temporary mission compound?

And what was the hope?

That I cannot answer.

Fox's primetime hosts were less circumspect.

In the weeks after the attack, Sean Hannity was mapping out a vast conspiracy designed to cover up what really happened to Ambassador Stevens.

It's clear to me that either they are totally stupid or they have the worst intelligence or that this is a political cover-up of some kind because they didn't want to admit what is obvious to everybody that on the anniversary of 9-11, they should have had some protection for our embassies and they didn't.

As Pamela Brown reported the Benghazi story, she filed several Freedom of Information requests with the State Department to see if there was anything that didn't match up to the official narrative.

For instance, the administration had said that there was no indication prior to the attack in Benghazi that the diplomatic compound was under imminent threat.

But Brown's FOIA requests turned up State Department cables indicating that some alarms had been sounded in the weeks leading up to the attack.

We got the classified cable, which said that the compound could not withstand a coordinated attack.

That was chilling.

That cable cable was sent in August of 2012, and it indicated that the State Department knew that there were al-Qaeda cells in Benghazi.

The message was approved by Ambassador Chris Stevens.

I really believe having read it that it is this smoking gun warning here.

You've got this emergency.

Now, it's worth saying that the cable Brown received in response to her FOIA request did not say that an attack in Benghazi was imminent, but it did suggest that if one did occur, the compound would be vulnerable.

Brown considered the cable damning.

And Catherine Haridge, the reporter she worked with most closely on Benghazi coverage, characterized it on the air as proof that the Obama administration should have done more and was now knowingly trying to deflect blame.

I can't think of anything that would be more specific than if these groups had emailed the State Department and said, here's the time, here's the place, and here's the method of the attack because the cable names.

That fall, Fox News continued to put out stories about the attack that sounded extremely damning.

For instance, they reported that the administration knew within 24 hours of the attack that groups associated with al-Qaeda were involved.

They also ran segments suggesting that the president could have stopped the attack, but chose not to.

Lawmakers demanded to know how lax security may have been and whether warning signs were simply ignored.

Meanwhile, Congress questioned State Department personnel who confirmed that a request for more security in Benghazi had been denied.

There wasn't sufficient resources provided.

That was one of the main reasons I continued to ask for those resources.

Yes.

Those statements prompted Republican lawmakers to hit Fox's airwaves and call for more investigations.

This is why we need an independent counsel and we need the investigations to begin immediately.

These questions about what the Obama White House knew and when they knew it dovetailed perfectly with the administration's evolving account of how the attack had started.

And when the intelligence community's assessment was revised to reflect the fact that there had been no protest in Benghazi, It looked like even more evidence that the administration was hiding behind the innocence of Muslims video.

Well, they lie.

I mean, there's no question about it.

And by the way, if the Republicans did that, they'd be held to pay.

Everybody would call for resignations and it would be terrible.

But they lie.

About a month before the 2012 election, the Romney campaign saw a change of fortune in their poll numbers.

This was in part due to Romney's stellar performance in the first presidential debate.

Under the president's policies, middle-income Americans have been buried.

They're just being crushed.

Now,

that may not seem like a big deal when it just is

numbers on a sheet of paper.

But if we're talking about...

It's hard to say exactly what role the Benghazi controversy played in Romney's surge.

But ongoing questions over the administration's handling of the attack had seemingly validated validated the Romney campaign's aggressive posture from the night of.

It wasn't just Breitbart and Fox News either.

Even the mainstream media didn't seem to completely trust Obama.

Patience is starting to wear thin with shifting explanations from the administration.

The president is also facing a lot of questions about the death of American Ambassador Stevens, but getting answers to exactly what did happen has not been easy.

Lon Hee Chen saw victory in sight.

There definitely was a point where it turned.

We saw an appreciable shift in public opinion in our own internal polling in all of the key states.

And Romney was very competitive, if not ahead, in all the states he needed to be ahead in, at least according to our polling, and by the way, a number of public polls as well,

that he was really closing in on the possibility of winning the presidency.

A new poll shows Governor Romney surging and closing the gap, especially in some key swing states.

I think the race is very close.

I think the wind is at Governor Romney's back, and there's clearly momentum.

You can see it

on the trail.

You can see it in the data.

But I believe momentum is clearly on the bottom.

The second presidential debate was set for October 16th.

The first one had been focused on domestic policy, so Benghazi had not come up.

This time, it was bound to.

We were in the driver's seat.

So in some ways, the second debate took on additional importance in our minds because we felt that it was important to continue momentum, but also to open up some lines of attack potentially on Obama, areas where we felt he could be weak.

But Romney was squeamish about continuing to beat the Benghazi drum.

It was an issue that the Republican base cared about, but one that swing voters who could decide the election didn't want to dwell on.

We knew it was a topic that had to be delicately navigated and traversed because of the initial reaction and because of how hot the event had become.

As Romney took the stage, he looked cautious but confident.

This is Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, the site of tonight's debate.

This second goal.

The Benghazi attack came up about halfway through the debate.

The president addressed the question with a pointed jab at his opponent, emphasizing that the attack was still going on when the Romney campaign put out its statement.

While we were still dealing with our diplomats being threatened, Governor Romney put out a press release trying to make political points.

And that's not how a commander-in-chief operates.

Romney responded with an argument that had been made repeatedly on Fox News.

that it had taken the administration two whole weeks to call the storming of the compound in Benghazi a terrorist attack.

There were many days that passed before we knew whether this was a spontaneous demonstration or actually whether it was a terrorist attack.

And there was no demonstration involved.

It was a terrorist attack.

And it took a long time for that to be told to the American people.

Romney's implication was that the administration had tried to hide the fact that on Obama's watch, America had suffered a deadly blow in the war on terror.

Obama was ready with a response.

The day after the attack, Governor, I stood in the Rose Garden

and I told the American people and the world that we are going to find out exactly what happened,

that this was an act of terror, and I also said that we're going to hunt down those who committed this crime.

I think it's interesting the President just said something which is that on the day after the attack, he went in the Rose Garden and said that this was an act of terror.

I want to make sure we get that for the record because it took the President 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.

Get the transcript.

He did, in fact, sir.

So let me call it an act of terror.

Can you say that a little louder, Ken?

He did call it an act of terror.

It did as well.

Romney fumbled for words.

The administration indicated that this was a reaction to a video.

Am I incorrect in that regard?

Lon Hee Chen was watching the debate from the green room.

I do recall at the time thinking

he's going to want to know after the debate.

What did Obama say,

and was I right or wrong?

I knew he was going to ask me that right afterwards, because it was one of those things that was like a factual question, right?

It wasn't like, hey, what do you think I did?

It was like, tell me what he said.

Chen called back to Romney headquarters to make sure he knew the exact words the president had used in the Rose Garden the day after the attack.

And he braced himself for Romney to step off the debate stage.

After the debate, he comes off the stage, he comes into the green room, he makes a B-line for me, and he says, you know, was it accurate?

And I told him it was,

that I thought he had not misrepresented what had happened.

The truth was, it had taken Obama about two weeks to characterize the Benghazi attack as more than just a mob action.

But it was also true that on the morning of September 12th, the president had stood in the Rose Garden and said, No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.

Chen says he still thinks act of terror and terrorism are different.

There was a distinction between terror and terrorism.

That in fact Obama had not called it terrorism.

He called it an act of terror, but not an act of terrorism or terrorism.

That was the distinction.

Why was that a meaningful distinction?

We felt it took on a different tone when you were willing to call it terrorism.

versus an act of terror.

An act of terror, in some ways, almost disassociates it a little bit from the emotion of it being a terrorist attack, a terrorist attack, an act of terrorism, versus an act of terror, which we thought it was Obama's effort to disassociate it from the severity or the degree to which it was an attack on the United States.

More than a month had passed since four Americans died in Benghazi.

The administration and Congress had begun investigations to understand how and why it happened.

But the debate between the sitting president and the man who wanted to replace him,

it just came down to semantics.

By now, you can tell there were multiple threads to the Benghazi story that wound together to form the outline of a scandal.

Whether the attack was pre-planned or spontaneous.

Whether had been a protest in Benghazi over the Innocence of Muslims video or not, why the compound in Benghazi had not been better protected.

Whether the Obama administration initially downplayed the terrorism angle for political purposes.

Each of these threads became fodder for debate and speculation.

Together, they created an air of intrigue.

Soon, the attack in Benghazi became simply Benghazi.

All right, let's turn to Benghazi.

Misleading America on Benghazi.

All of the emails relating to Benghazi.

Benghazi was a place most Americans had never heard of before Ambassador Stevens and his colleagues died there.

But within weeks, the word alone was enough to conjure any number of questions and theories.

On the night of the attack, Mitt Romney looked uncouth and opportunistic for trying to score political points over Stevens's death.

By the time the election ended, those days were long gone, and Benghazi had become a political event first and foremost.

Fox News election alert.

Fox News can now project that President Obama will win the state of Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral votes.

As election results rolled in on the night of November 6th, the Romney team was stunned.

Their internal polling had been showing Romney with a lead.

Instead,

CNN projects that Barack Obama will be re-elected President of the United States.

He will remain in the White House.

They're excited in Chicago.

They're excited at Times Square in New York.

On Fox News, it took some time for reality to set in.

Yes, I think this is premature.

We got 70.

We got a quarter of the vote.

Now, remember, here's the.

One of their analysts, former Bush strategist Carl Rove, objected to the call, prompting anchor Megan Kelly to question the statisticians in the election unit live on TV.

Now, here are the guys.

This is the decision desk.

You tell me whether you stand by your call in Ohio, given the doubts Karl Rove just raised.

We're actually quite comfortable with the call in Ohio.

Basically, right now there's just too much Obama vote that's outstanding there that we...

But Benghazi was not going away.

Now that Obama had secured his second term, all eyes turned to Hillary Clinton, whose intention to run for president in 2016 was considered a foregone conclusion.

As Secretary of State, Clinton had appointed an independent review board to investigate the State Department's failure to protect the compound and the ambassador.

Meanwhile, congressional oversight committees were continuing to ask their own questions.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee on Benghazi kicks off at the top of the hour, focusing on what happened before, during, and after the attack.

In December, Clinton was set to testify about Benghazi before the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

But her testimony was delayed after she fainted and sustained a concussion.

She became dehydrated, fainted, apparently hit her head, and had that concussion.

She did not go to the hospital.

Doctors are said to be monitoring her, but this means that she will not testify this week about the attack on the mission in Benghazi and the killing of ours.

According to Fox News, something was up.

This is a duck and cover, let's be honest.

And the cleansings are great at this.

Apparently, she's suffering from acute Benghazi allergy.

We can't verify this because she's barricaded in her Rock Creek Park mansion here in Washington.

He doesn't want to answer the question.

I bet that we might never hear her testimony on this.

Thanks for listening to Fiasco.

To hear more of the series, including all six episodes of the Benghazi season and all three seasons we put out previously, subscribe to the Luminary channel on Apple Podcasts.

Go to apple.co slash fiasco.

That's apple.co not dot com slash fiasco.