Issa's CLASSIFIED Benghazi leak - which hurts the Republicans - was on the floor of the House

[karynnj]

--- therefore it is protected speech. His claim is that classification is being used to hide things.

Here is a link to his full House comments:

http://beta.congress.gov/crec/2014/05/21/CREC-2014-05-21-pt1-PgE797.pdf

His goal was apparently to justify the need to subpoena Kerry. However, this does remind me that in 2012, he released a huge amount of information that was classified - and he identified CIA locations inadvertently.

He is now arguing that he has still should call Kerry, even though it is fair to say that Boehner took this investigation away from him.

[AceAcme]

1. "Besides, I'm a freakin Republican and we don't do rules, laws or integrity." - Issa

[karynnj]

2. That to -- in fact, I looked at the House record, because I wondered

why every article referred to a CLASSIFIED document and there was no comment on why a classified document was leaked. I actually remember when Senator Leahy was blasted for speaking of some Iran/Contra stuff --- in a REAL scandal, where there were several illegal things done by the administration.

Here, it is not clear that they are even saying that anything done was illegal. Even accepting their version as absolute truth (not a good idea), there is still nothing illegal.

Their strongest claim is that the Obama administration tried to spin something that happened to make it look less bad before an election. However, isn't spinning kind of normal.

As to outright lying, the President did have people do that right before an election --- in 2004. Remember that Kerry was speaking of how OBL was cornered in Tora Bora and the Bush team "outsourced the effort to capture him to Afghan warlords, who had been allied with the Taliban just weeks before". (Kerry first claimed this WHILE it was happening and then revived the charge before the election.)

In an October 2004 opinion article in The New York Times, General Tommy Franks wrote,

"We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001. Some intelligence sources said he was; others indicated he was in Pakistan at the time...Tora Bora was teeming with Taliban and Qaeda operatives ... but Mr. bin Laden was never within our grasp.[

In 2005, when Gary Berntsen's book "Jawbreaker" was released, many here (at least in the DU JK group) noted that Kerry had been right. Berntsen had been the CIA lead on finding OBL. In 2009 with Kerry as chair, there was a full SFRC report completed that "

placed the blame with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks for not assembling enough U.S. troops to seal the mountainous area during the operation. After studying the matter, the Committee came to a conclusion that Osama bin Laden most likely was present at Tora Bora and his subsequent escape prolonged the war in Afghanistan."

Both quotes from :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tora_Bora

The crux of the issue on Benghazi is that a President distorted a foreign policy failure to avoid it being a bigger negative than it became. (Ignore that few would have seen it differently - no matter what the cause).

In the Tora Bora case, the goal was to both discredit Kerry for stating the truth and to distort that Tora Bora was a major error in the Afghanistan War.