Watching Darrell Issa squirm over new revelations about Benghazi.

The above was the exchange between David Grefgory, Andrea Mitchell, and a clearly uncomfortable Darrell Issa. Transcript courtesy of Mediaite:

“You’ve said repeatedly that it was al Qaeda,” Gregory said. “The reason that matters is that you and other critics said that the president specifically won’t acknowledge that it was al Qaeda because it was an election year and he wants to say that after bin Laden [al Qaeda] has been decimated, and it would make him look bad if it as al Qaeda.” 

“Al Qaeda is not decimated and there is a group there involved that is linked to al Qaeda,” Issa replied. “What we never said—and I didn’t have the security to look behind the door, that’s for other members of Congress—of what the intelligence were on the exact correspondence with al Qaeda, that sort of information—those sorts of methods I’ve never claimed.” 

“Why use the term al Qaeda?” Mitchell asked, somewhat rhetorically. “Because you and other members of Congress are sophisticated in this and know that when you say al Qaeda, people think central al Qaeda. They don’t think militias that may be inspired by bin laden and his other followers. So it is a hot button, for political reasons, from the administration’s view.” 

“But Andrea, it was accurate,” Issa responded. “There was a group that was involved that claims an affiliation with al Qaeda. Now, al Qaeda is not a central command and control. It was, in fact, a loose group that could take general statements and act on them…The fact is people from this administration, career professionals, have said under oath there was no evidence of any kind of a reaction to a video and, in fact, this was a planned attack that came quickly. That’s the evidence we have by people who work for the U.S. government and were under oath.” 

Issa is a slippery POS but he is caught repeatedly during this exchange in lie after lie, and simply changes the focus every time he is cornered.

By the way his contention that the video was not "widely seen in Benghazi" at the time of this attack is essentially irrelevant. It only had to have been seen, or at least heard about, by the actual attackers.

And that fact is reported in the New York Times piece: 

The violence, though, also had spontaneous elements. Anger at the video motivated the initial attack. Dozens of people joined in, some of them provoked by the video and others responding to fast-spreading false rumors that guards inside the American compound had shot Libyan protesters. Looters and arsonists, without any sign of a plan, were the ones who ravaged the compound after the initial attack, according to more than a dozen Libyan witnesses as well as many American officials who have viewed the footage from security cameras.

So though a rather unspecific attack HAD been in the planning stages before the assault, it was the anger over the video that provided the spark.

Now Susan Rice did not yet have the information about nonspecific plans for an attack, all she knew as that there were no direct ties to al-Qaeda at the time she went on TV in an attempt to head off a full frontal attack from the Right during an election year.

This is what she said:  

MS. RICE: Well, Jake, first of all, it’s important to know that there’s an FBI investigation that has begun and will take some time to be completed. That will tell us with certainty what transpired. 

But our current best assessment, based on the information that we have at present, is that, in fact, what this began as, it was a spontaneous — not a premeditated — response to what had transpired in Cairo. In Cairo, as you know, a few hours earlier, there was a violent protest that was undertaken in reaction to this very offensive video that was disseminated.

As it turned out there was no evidence of any protests outside this compound, but based on reports around the world of similar occurrences, and the limited eyewitness accounts at this time, there is every reason to believe the administration was relating what they believed to have taken place in good faith.

What the Republicans did in response, was anything but in good faith.

And what Darrell Issa did in particular should be categorized as either criminal or treasonous behavior.