Jake Tapper: Jay Carney “Dissembling, Obfuscating and Often Insulting” To Reporters On Benghazi

Considering the Correspondent’s Dinner is going on right now, it seems a good time to note what one correspondent has to say about how the White House acts toward the press and with regard to a genuine scandal. Jake Tapper lays it out there in a revealing interview with Hugh Hewitt.

Do we look surprised? This is our surprised face. We practiced. The Obama administration is the most open and honest administration every. Excluding all the other ones.

Via the invaluable RCP Video:

HUGH HEWITT, HOST: We’re talking about Jay Carney. If I was a Doonesbury guy, I could have pulled up the ‘liar, liar, liar’ Doonesbury clip and put it out there. He’s just lying and it’s horrible.

JAKE TAPPER: They have an interpretation of events that does not sit with what I think happened. But, you know, calling somebody a liar is it’s not normally the kind of language I use. I think that the comments that are being made are dissembling, obfuscating and often insulting. I don’t disagree with those who don’t care for what’s going on at the press conferences.

I think that when it comes to these e-mails — look, one of the documents in the e-mails that were just released was a story that I wrote for ABCNews.com and I did on the air as well in September 2012 saying that there were people in the administration who didn’t understand and questioned why the White House is still blaming the Benghazi attacks on the video.

Now, what the people in the White House who were circulating this article were saying was redacted. So I don’t know why they were e-mailing it around. But that’s in my position, my judgment, the information I had from the very beginning of this affair is that intelligence and diplomatic officials on the ground did not understand why the White House was so aggressively leaning into the idea that this was all because of a video and it was a spontaneous attack.


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