During the online portion of Fox News Channel’s “Special Report” on Wednesday, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer used some particularly harsh words to describe the media’s coverage of the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attack on the Benghazi embassy.
“This is really a journalistic scandal,” Krauthammer said. “I mean, the fact there was not a word about any of this in the Times or the Post today.”
Krauthammer pointed out that recently released emails proved the White House, contrary to its assertions, was aware of terrorists’ connection to the attack almost immediately.
“And there is one thing that was very new and very interesting — you know, the White House has been trying to insulate itself on this the whole time,” Krauthammer said. “You get Joe Biden saying in his debate ‘we didn’t know.’ And of course, everybody knew. They say, ‘Well the White House didn’t know.’ These emails went to the situation room. What this story does is it punctures the myth that everybody might have known — the intelligence guys, the State Department, but the White House did not. It was in the situation room.”
“The last email speaks of the mortar attack,” he continued. “Now, there are people in the situation room who know about how operations are conducted in the field — and the mortar attack is not a bunch of guys who hop off the back of a truck and start attacking with AK-47s. This has to be planned. You have to have a lot of skill. You have to be trained. And when you do it at night, you got to have a spotter — I mean, there are all kinds of stuff that goes into this. And that’s on the first day. This is the fourth email at midnight essentially of that day.”
Krauthammer compared the significance of the Benghazi situation to the Watergate scandal.
“This all has echoes of Watergate,” Krauthammer said. “It wasn’t as sort of complex and long-term as the Watergate scandal. However, the timeline is the same — election year, basically ignored by most of the news outlets. The president is re-elected, and then the scandal erupts. And I think that’s what the administration is hoping will happen, and they expect it will be tamped down afterwards. That’s all they want to do, is get past the finish line.”