CIA Chief Who Edited Benghazi Talking Points, Works for Hillary Adviser, Endorses Hillary, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, August 5, 2016
If only Ex-CIA boss Mike Morell had done as good of a job serving his country as he did serving Hillary Clinton.
Former CIA director Michael Morell endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and blasted GOP rival Donald Trump, accusing him of becoming an unwitting agent of Russian President Vladimir Putin in an op-ed on Friday.
Well we know that Morell is a better editor than a writer.
Mike Morell, then-head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC), had the task of helping to prepare talking points for then-U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, who was slated to appear on five Sunday morning talk shows a few days later. Morell was personally responsible for “cutting some 50 percent of the text,” including all “references to Al Qaeda” and the many earlier terror attacks against U.S. and other Western targets in Benghazi. When the Senate Intelligence Committee finally succeeded in prying loose the emails that had flowed back and forth to the CIA, State Department and the White House during the talking points editing process, it was clear that Morell not only had misrepresented his own role, but also had been less than forthcoming about the close oversight role played by the White House in ensuring that all references to al-Qa’eda 15 terrorism would be scrubbed. Morell also made sure to scrub from the talking points the honest assessment that “We cannot rule out that individuals had previously surveilled the U.S. facilities, also contributing to the efficacy of the attacks.”
There’s a lot of details in this new report by Fox News, much of it stuff we already know. But the big takeaway from this report is that the CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell, who edited the talking points that were used by Susan Rice on Sept. 16, was told in a secure video call less than 72 hours after the attack by our people on the ground in Libya that they were ‘baffled, angry, and dismayed, with Washington’s singular focus on the video. They were upset with Morell because he seemed to dismiss their reporting — none of which suggested in any way that a video was the cause of the attack. That video conference call included CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell, the CIA Chief of Station in Tripoli, survivors who had been evacuated to Germany, and Greg Hicks (Deputy to Ambassador Chris Stevens).
After Hillary blamed the video at the funeral of the four men who were murdered in the attack, the Chief of Station in Tripoli then emailed Morell directly saying that the video was NOT an escalation of protests.
Despite that email, Morell still edited the talking points to blame the video, which is the same talking points Susan Rice used on the 16th in her infamous appearance on all five Sunday morning political talk shows.
Bear in mind that on Sept 12, the day after the attack, the CIA Chief of Station in Tripoli sent situation reports with the raw intelligence from the attack to the leadership of the CIA which included Morell, none of which indicated a video was responsible for the attack.
So yes. Mike is quite the author. But he’s not an unwitting agent, but a witting one.
STEVE HAYES: I will give you two examples… One, he complains bitterly in the book about cherry-picking, critics are cherry picking information that supports their case and leaving out information that doesn’t. He does the exact same thing throughout his entire two chapters on Benghazi and he does it in his interview with you. A perfect example was when you were talking about/he writes about whether this was a pre-planned attack or not.
You [Bret Baier] interviewed the CIA contractors who wrote the book 13 Hours — it said there had been surveillance of the facility, and in their book they wrote that that surveillance put them into high alert. It was a big deal that they were casing the facility before the attack. It doesn’t appear in Mike Morell’s book. He simply leaves it out. You can have questions about what they say, you can disagree, but you can’t just set it aside. And that is what he does, repeatedly.
And, oh yes, guess where Mike works.
HH: And a very last question, you’re now working for Beacon Global Strategies. One of your partners is Philippe Reines. Now I have partners at my law firm, which is Arent Fox, who are not, you know, they’re left wing Democrats, and I get along fine with them. Philippe is Hillary’s guy. And so…
MM: Yeah, yeah.
Reines was a Hillary Clinton adviser.
WarSclerotic 
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