Despite numerous congressional hearings, “no one has asked about the underlying mission in Benghazi,” said Jeff Steinberg, senior editor at Executive Intelligence Review.

“The U.S. was running an operation dealing with terrorist networks that are part of the extended al-Qaida apparatus,” he charged.

Citing multiple sources, including the Congressional Research Service, Steinberg said there are “three levels of complicity” by the Obama administration.

“First, the president promised 9/11 families that he would try to declassify 28 pages of a joint congressional report” that reputedly linked the Saudi Arabian government to the attacks that killed more than 3,000 Americans in 2001.

Sept. 11 Terrorist attack on US consulate in Benghazi

“Instead, (Obama) went the other way and had his solicitor general argue that (the 9/11 families’) case should be dismissed because of sovereign immunity of the Saudis.”

“Second, the overthrow of (Libyan President Moammar) Qaddafi was an unconstitutional war because Obama refused to go to Congress for war powers authorization.

“Third, there was the cover-up of Benghazi itself.”

Steinberg said Washington, along with Britain and France, intended “to move immediately from the overthrow of Qaddafi to regime change in Syria and to create conditions to deal with the Iran situation from a position of strength.“

As reported previously, a covert U.S. operation shipped weapons from Libya to Turkey and on to Syrian rebels who are attempting to oust President Bashar Assad.

Mapping a falling-domino scenario, Steinberg suggested that Washington’s goal is “to create conditions to deal with Iran.”

“If the Saudi involvement (in the original 9/11) had come out, it would have been impossible to pursue the insane regime-change policies in the Mideast and North Africa,” he said.

But under cover, “more weapons got into Mali, Algeria and the black market. These networks were honeycombed with al-Qaida capability.

“Obama is complicit in this mess, collaborating with terrorists.”

Steinberg said Congress is equally to blame.

“Republicans focused on (then-Secretary of State) Hillary Clinton regarding aspects of Benghazi, but have dodged the serious questions.”

Susan Rice
Photo Credit: Foreign Policy

Newly released emails illustrated how the Benghazi investigation has gone off track. Republicans contend that the correspondence and “revised talking points” implicate the White House. Democrats argue the opposite.

“These documents undercut the reckless accusations by Republicans that the White House scrubbed the Benghazi talking points for political reasons,” said Rep. Elijiah Cummings, D-Md., ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

CBS News’ Major Garrett reported Thursday that leaked versions of the White House emails sent out by the GOP to the network last Friday had “visible differences” from Wednesday’s official batch.

Will Wertz, of LaRouchePAC, a national activist group critical of both parties, said the emails reflect that the talking points used by Ambassador Susan Rice in the immediate aftermath of the attack were “ultimately shaped and approved by the National Security staff of the Obama White House.”

After examining the 100-plus pages of emails, Wertz noted:

“While it is true that the State Department in the person of Victoria Nuland expressed various concerns about the initial talking points prepared by the CIA, the involvement of (then-Deputy National Security Adviser) Denis McDonough and (then-National Counterintelligence Director) John Brennan in the editing process is much more important. Neither writes any emails that have been reported and neither receives any emails.

“If you follow the email trail, it leads directly to Obama and his top advisers,” Wertz asserted.But they are both in the center of the action.”

On Jan. 25 of this year, McDonough was made Obama’s chief of staff. Brennan assumed the office of director of the CIA on March 8.

To dig deeper into Benghazi and its aftermath, Steinberg said “convening a congressional select committee is the right way to go. It would have members from the intelligence and oversight committees, with full-time professional staff with subpoena power.”

As for now, “Congress is acting irresponsibly by not fulfilling a decisive check and balance on excessive presidential power,” he said.

Keystone XL is a done deal.

In Baltimore Friday — a helicopter hop away from all-scandal-all-the-time D.C. — President Obama announced he is “directing agencies across the government to do what it takes to cut timelines for breaking ground on major infrastructure projects in half.”

Actress Darryl Hannah is arrested during a pipeline protest in Washington.

Obama never mentioned Keystone by name, but at 1,700 miles long and expected to create about 16,000 jobs, the pipeline to carry Canadian oil to the Gulf Coast  is about as “major” as infrastructure gets. And the only agency “across the federal government” standing in its way is the Obama State Department.

It will do what it takes.

On Friday, congressional Republicans noted that the president made the speech at a Baltimore company — Ellicott Dredges – that’s run by a man who testified before Congress on Thursday about how important the pipeline is to the economy.

“For us, it’s all about jobs,” Ellicott Dredges President Peter Bowe told the House Committee on Small business, according to the Los Angeles Times. The project will mean jobs “every year for decades to come, all related to the production of oil from the Alberta oil sands deposits.”

Think that never came up while Bowe was showing Obama around the plant on Friday? Or that Bowe’s business was the only place on the Eastern Seaboard that Obama could have spent the afternoon?

But even before Friday — and last week’s storm of scandal in D.C. that gave Obama a reason to seek TV time out of town — the real tea-leaf tipoff on Keystone came in the May 8 New York Times.

An article about Keystone that day led with the likelihood that the pipeline would be approved, “profoundly disappointing environmental advocates.”

It included the usual whining — “climate change” etc. – but the story was built around one paragraph:

“But could some kind of deal be in the offing — a major climate policy announcement on, for example, power plant regulation or renewable energy incentives — to ease the sting of the pipeline approval?”

The story knocks down one possible trade-off after another, but as the unofficial mouthpiece of the Obama administration, the Times wouldn’t even have published it if the pipeline weren’t going through.

Obama’s Baltimore speech was the clincher.

Keystone’s a lock.

Have fun watching the greens howl.

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer brought up on Friday’s Fox News Channel’s “Special Report” panel discussion that President Obama chose his words with surgical precision at a joint press conference held the day before. In doing so, he didn’t come close to answering a reporter’s question.

At that conference, the reporter asked, “Can you assure the American people that nobody in the White House knew about the agency’s actions before your Counsel’s Office found out on April 22nd?”

The question was important because the reporter noted that the White House counsel had knowledge as far back as May 22, long before the president previously claimed he knew of the matter.

“I can assure you that I certainly did not know anything about the IG report before the IG report had been leaked through the press,” the president said, which would have been May 10.

Krauthammer noted that the president parsed his words very carefully, to the point where “it wasn’t Nixonian — it was Clintonian,” adding that, “Obama’s parsing words makes [Bill] Clinton look unsophisticated.”

The reporter asked if anyone at the White House knew of the scandal before Apr. 22 — not just if he knew. In addition, the question was asked about the IRS’s conduct — not the IG’s report of that conduct.

Krauthammer then discussed the problems with the dates.

“If his own counsel learns about this three weeks before, how can the counsel — if any — when any of us heard about this, we knew instantly it’s a massive scandal. So his counsel hears about this and doesn’t tell the president for three weeks, about what was a massive scandal?”

This very issue became the subject matter of a White House petition filed Friday.

Photo credit sytereitz.com

The petition calls into question the truth of these statements, made in connection with the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups seeking tax exempt status.

The petition notes that “Carney said on May 13 that the White House’s counsel first learned about the Inspector General’s IRS report the week of April 22,” but points out that the president claimed during a joint May 13 press conference that he first heard about the IG report from the news on May 10.

The very notion that the president’s own counsel would have kept a scandal as monumental as this from Obama for close to three weeks is preposterous.

The petition reads as follows:

White House press secretary Jay Carney said on May 13 that the White House’s counsel first learned about the Inspector General’s IRS report the week of April 22. On May 13, President Obama said he didn’t learn about it until Friday, May 10, and not from the White House counsel but from media reports. In order to ascertain both the President’s veracity on the matter and to understand why the WH counsel would commit an act of such egregious negligence as to not communicate to the President a matter of the utmost importance to the public interest in a timely fashion, we the people have the right to, and so demand, an explanation as to why the White House counsel had not told the President of the existence of this report for the weeks & days between April 22 and May 10, 2013.

Read the White House petition here.

Host Jay Leno asked Romney about the AP, IRS and Benghazi scandals, to which Romney shares his opinion of how President Obama is handling these issues.

At one point, captured in the video below, Leno asked Romney what he thinks Obama has done well. Romney points to the handling of the terrorist attack in Boston and mentions education, but quickly adds that he is “not a fan.”

“I’m not a fan of the president, in case you didn’t know that,” he told Leno. “But look, I believe he cares for the country and wants to make America a better place for the American people. But I think he’s not being successful as he would have hoped to have been.”

Romney then adds, “I wish he were more focused on doing what’s necessary to keep America strong and to grow our economy and to get people back to work. There are a lot of people hurting.”

Interestingly, NBC titles the video: “Mitt Romney compliments Obama”

Romney would send out this “tweet” afterwards, with the attached picture:

“@anndromney and I had a great time on the #TonightShow. Thanks @jayleno for the lift home!”

Illinois Rep. Aaron Schock drilled acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller on the IRS’s inappropriate questioning of the Coalition for Life of Iowa and two other pro-life groups during a hearing before Congress Friday.

Miller, who spent most of the day answering questions on the IRS scandal saying he didn’t know, couldn’t answer, or couldn’t recall, answered Schock’s question pretty much the same way.

Schock began by asking Miller about the IRS asking the Iowa pro-life group to  “Please detail the content of the members of your organization’s prayers.”

“Would that be an appropriate question to a 501(c)3 applicant?” Schock asked. “The content of one’s prayers?”

“It pains me to say I can’t speak to that one either,” Miller responded yet again.

“You don’t know whether or not that would be an appropriate question to ask?” Schock asked.

“Speaking outside of this case, which I don’t know anything about, it would surprise me that that question was asked,” Miller said.

According to the Thomas More Society, a national public interest law firm who represents these three pro-life groups, the request for details on member’s prayers, prayer meetings, educational seminars and even signs held outside a Planned Parenthood establishment were just some examples of the harassment endured by these groups since 2009 from the IRS’s misconduct.

Watch Rep. Schock grill Miller via NRO on YouTube here:

Read the report from the Thomas More Society on IRS harassment of pro-life groups here.

Darrell Issa and Thomas Pickering on “Meet the Press.”

House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa officially subpoenaed former Ambassador Thomas Pickering to appear for a deposition by the committee next Thursday about the State Department’s Accountability Review Board report on Benghazi.

Pickering co-authored the ARB report on the Benghazi terrorist attack along with former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen, but only Pickering was subpoenaed, The Hill reported.

Though Pickering has offered to testify publicly before Issa’s committee, the subpoena was issued to force Pickering to first submit to a “transcribed interview,” which he had previously refused to do.

Issa told Pickering in the subpoena that his committee has many unanswered questions about how the ARB conducted its investigation on the events of Sept. 11 in Libya, including why then Sec. of State Hillary Clinton was never interviewed and why a Foreign Emergency Support Team was never sent to help those under attack in the Consulate.

“The ARB worked behind closed doors. It did not record its interviews. No transcripts of ARB interviews exist. Even now, months after the ARB report was released, the ARB’s investigative process has remained opaque,” the subpoena read.

Issa continued:

At this point, the only publicly available information about the ARB’s methodology is contained in the 39-page unclassified version of the report itself. The public version of the report does not contain footnotes or list the witnesses that were interviewed. A fully informed hearing, in which the Committee begins with a factual understanding of how the Board reached its conclusions, is critical to engaging in a public discussion with you about criticisms career State Department officials levied at the ARB’s efforts and recommendations.

Pickering’s refusal to sit for a taped interview with Issa’s committee defies Pickering’s “commitment to be tough and transparent,” Issa wrote.

Issa concluded by saying that if Pickering submitted to the taped interview voluntarily before next Thursday, he would “consider lifting the subpoena.”

Read Issa’s subpoena to Pickering here via The Hill.

Photo Credit: US News and World Report

When things hit the fan for the Internal Revenue Service last week, a strategic decision was made to have a random tax lawyer ask a seemingly innocuous question and then have Lois Lerner answer with the bombshell admission that the IRS was targeting conservative groups.

The story of the IRS’s egregious targeting of tea party groups broke after the head of the tax-exempt organizations unit, Lois Lerner, answered a question from tax attorney Celia Roady on the shenanigans of her division that stunned a roomful of tax attorneys at an American Bar Association conference on May 10.

Roady’s question, “Lois, a few months ago there were some concerns about the IRS’s review of 501(c)(4) organizations, of applications from tea party organizations. I was just wondering if you could provide an update,” was actually planted by Lerner herself.

US News and World Report explained the circumstances:

Celia Roady, a prominent tax lawyer in the firm of Morgan Lewis, said she was called personally by Lois Lerner, the IRS head of the tax exempt division, on May 9.

“I received a call from Lois Lerner, who told me that she wanted to address an issue after her prepared remarks at the [American Bar Association] Tax Section’s Exempt Organizations Committee Meeting, and asked if I would pose a question to her after her remarks,” Roady said in a statement to U.S. News and World Report.

“I agreed to do so, and she then gave me the question that I asked at the meeting the next day. We had no discussion thereafter on the topic of the question, nor had we spoken about any of this before I received her call. She did not tell me, and I did not know, how she would answer the question.”

Acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller confirmed the question was planted in his testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee Friday.

In an exchange with Rep. Devin Nunes, Miller said, “it was a ‘prepared Q and A,’ and the question…had been discussed in advance as well,” The Daily Caller reported.

Miller also admitted the public confession was timed to coincide with the damning new Inspector General report that was coming out.

Left-leaning pollster John Zogby found President Obama losing ground even with his base, according to a poll reported on the Zogby Analytics website Friday,

Rasmussen Reports, meanwhile, found Obama has only a 48 percent approval rating among voters, with a disapproval rating of 39 percent.

That number sounds worse when you consider that . the poll was weighted toward Obama’s own party. Thirty-seven percent of those polled were Democrats, 33 percent were Republicans.

Zogby’s weekly White House report card said the “scandal-filled disaster week has cost (Obama) his majority support and sapped enthusiasm for his second term.”

“As Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth might have said, this was ‘weekus horribilis’ for President Obama,” Zogby says in the report. “Three fires in the form of three scandals to put out in one week. Are locusts next?”

Zogby, of course, was referring to the confluence of controversy over the administration’s changing stories about the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in September; the disclosure that the Internal Revenue Service had targeted conservative groups for scrutiny in the run-up to last year’s election; and the Justice Department’s collection phone records in three Associated Press offices.

“This looks like First Term Obama all over again,” Zogby says in the report. “In addition to giving his opponents plenty of ammo, he is starting to see his liberal base erode. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney’s earlier dismissal of Benghazi as ‘a long time ago’ event was arrogant. This week he has been reduced to ‘no comment.’

“Seems like second terms are mainly about the arrogance and a sense of entitlement. I don’t think we will see the president’s numbers plummet, but dropping a few points from 51 percent to 48 percent is about losing a majority and a whole lot of enthusiasm.”

The White House’s grade for May 14-17, according to Zogby: F.