As for the content of the Rhodes email, in a raucous back and forth with ABC News’s Jonathan Karl Jay Carney insisted that the instructions from Ben Rhodes issued on Sept. 14 to prepare then ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice to go on multiple Sunday shows to stress the anti-Muslim video and to deny this represented a presidential lapse didn’t refer to Benghazi.
That was too much for a number of news people. Fox News’s Bret Baier remarked:
This was a surreal answer from Jay Carney. Now, this is a prep session with Susan Rice, getting ready for five Sunday talk shows. This is three days after 9/11 when four Americans, including the American ambassador to Libya, are killed.
Everybody in the chain has said it’s a terrorist attack, everyone in the chain is saying there’s no protest.
And yet this email, if we’re to believe Jay Carney at the White House, had nothing to do with Benghazi.
It was more about the broad scope of the region. Now, imagine that. What are they going to ask about on five Sunday talk shows when you have four Americans who were killed just days before?
They’re not going to ask about the other protests that didn’t see any Americans killed.
They’re going to ask about that. So then he said that the reason they didn’t originally put forward this email to the committee — they eventually got it to the committee redacted — was because it didn’t deal with Benghazi.
Now, that really strains credulity, I mean it is really out there.
Jake Tapper was similarly dubious, observing “The context of Rhodes’ emails is, of course, that President Barack Obama was in the midst of a heated re-election campaign where one of his talking points was that he had brought a steady hand in fighting terrorists, indeed that ‘al Qaeda is on the run.'”