Page 21 - Interagency Process News Today

Collectively these emails make clear that the interagency process, including the white houses interactions were he focused on providing the facts as we knew them based on the best information available at the time and protecting an ongoing investigation. after 11 hearings, 25,000 pages of documents, and now this release, we can hopefully spend our time working on whats important. what we can do together to ensure those serving their nation overseas are better protected than they were last septem...

Was an agency facility. and so, state department i think felt why is cia trying to set it up like they were warning, doing everything right when, in fact, the cia facility just as vulnerable as the diplomatic one and an early effort to say lets not jump to conclusion of whos more at fault and whose facilities were more at risk. taking it out of context like that, doesnt reflect positively on the state department but, you know, putting sum of loss on the talking points hardly earth shattering, ha...

And so, state department i think felt why is cia trying to set it up like they were warning, doing everything right when, in fact, the cia facility just as vulnerable as the diplomatic one and an early effort to say lets not jump to conclusion of whos more at fault and whose facilities were more at risk. taking it out of context like that, doesnt reflect positively on the state department but, you know, putting sum of loss on the talking points hardly earth shattering, hardly the stuff of waterg...

I think the intelligence community should not be doing talking points for members of congress and our report will in essence say that. talking points cant be done by committee either. and these were. they were passed from one to the other to the other. and changes were made. the white house made virtually no changes. the word consulate was changed to mission and john brennan made a change inning syntax of one sentence. that was it. >> but you had the state department pushing back on what the tal...

Being subpoenaed. >> that was a couple of weeks ago. congressional intrusion was his fear. now, what were talking about with regard to benghazi does not involve a presidents e-mail but it involves e-mails in whats called the interagency process, and what your critics have asked is, are you reading into something that is not there? discussions about what happened, about what the various inputs of information are? are you overreading? >> well, were obviously having a debate in federal court becaus...

I think the talking points should not be written by the intelligence community. i think the intelligence community should not be doing talking points for members of congress and our report will in essence say that. talking points cant be done by committee either. and these were. they were passed from one to the other to the other. and changes were made. the white house made virtually no changes. the word consulate was changed to mission and john brennan made a change in syntax of one sentence. t...

I -- i was fearful of congressional intrusion into my e-mails. so -- which is kind of sad, really, because a lot of history is lost when presidents are nervous about their personal papers being subpoenaed. >> that was a couple of weeks ago. congressional intrusion was his fear. now, what were talking about with regard to benghazi does not involve a presidents e-mail, but it involves e-mails in whats called the interagency process, and what your critics have asked is, are you reading into somethi...

Changes, these were content changes. so, again, what role did the white house play, not just in making but directing changes? >> well, thank you for that question. the way to look at this, i think is to start from that week and understand that in the wake of the attacks in benghazi, an effort was under way to find out what happened, who was responsible. in response to a request from the house permanent select committee on intelligence, two of the cia -- the cia began a process of developing poin...

Prior to that, had very few inputs on it. the other discussions that went on prior to this, in an interagency process, reflected the concerns of a variety of agencies, who had a stake in this issue, both the fbi, because it was investigating, cia, and other intelligence agencies, and the state department because an ambassador had been killed, a diplomatic facility had been attacked. and what i think the concern was is that these points not provide information that was speculative in terms of whe...

Congress. and that information was available, again, in late february to members of congress, and through march and once that information was reviewed, in the case of the senate, senate republicans, a number of whom went on record saying i feel like i know what i need to know, then allowed the process for the confirmation of john brennan to go forward and he was confirmed in early march. >> why were those e-mails provided in a legal fashion? >> it is a standard procedure for administrations of b...