Inside the Latest Benghazi Emails: No One Knew Much of Anything

Four days after the attacks on 9/11 anniversary attacks in Benghazi, Libya, the U.S. intelligence community knew very little about who did it, how it happened, and whether it was planned or not, according to 100 pages of internal emails released Wednesday afternoon by the White House.


President Barack Obama prays at a recent event in Washington, DC. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

Those emails provide the clearest record to date of the genesis of government-wide talking points for senior Obama administration officials that asserted that the Benghazi attacks stemmed from a demonstration that never occurred.

House Republicans have been calling for weeks for the White House to release the emails, claiming in a report issued last month from Republican leadership that the emails show the edits to the talking points were not done to protect classified information as the White House initially claimed.

The talking points were first generated by the CIA for a briefing of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.