“So how did it go from what you said on the twelfth based on good reporting, to what Rice said on the sixteenth? What happened during those days that fundamentally turned the story around?” Graham asked Rhodes.
“Therein lies the question,” Rhodes replied, according to Graham.
Graham also told Rhodes that he didn’t think his brother alone could have been responsible for the spontaneous protest narrative.
“Probably not,” Rhodes said, according to Graham.
| FACT-CHECK
If one compares the Obama administration’s first accounts of the Benghazi fiasco—the pages from the novel, if you will—to the facts that have trickled out since, the contrasts are stark.
CLAIM Nobody ever denied security requests for Libya.
FACT A long-documented trail of denied security requests was produced.
CLAIM The Defense Department pulled out Wood’s team.
FACT The Defense Department offered Wood’s team at no cost for the State Department’s use as long as they wanted it. It’s the State Department that ended its mission.
CLAIM Wood’s team never left Tripoli so wouldn’t have helped in Benghazi had they stayed.
FACT Wood and his team had been to Benghazi on numerous occasions and would have helped guard Stevens there.
CLAIM The administration didn’t even know Stevens was going to Benghazi on 9/11.
FACT Stevens’s trip and schedule were widely distributed in advance and during the trip.
CLAIM Stevens went to Benghazi independently and nobody really knew why.
FACT Headquarters was informed Stevens was filling the Benghazi post while it awaited arrival of a new principal officer and he was also said to be on a personal tasking from Secretary Clinton.
CLAIM The attackers were spontaneous protesters inspired by a YouTube video.
FACT Extensive eyewitness testimony and documents reflect terrorism from the very start. Nobody thought it was spontaneous or YouTube inspired.
CLAIM Security in Benghazi was adequate on 9/11.
FACT Security in Benghazi was sorely lacking on 9/11.
CLAIM The White House photo office will answer our CBS News photo request by the end of the day.
FACT The White House photo office never fulfilled our request.
CLAIM The FEST team doesn’t have any expertise relevant to the Benghazi attacks.
FACT The Benghazi attack scenario fits precisely what the team says it’s trained for.
CLAIM President Obama called the Benghazi attacks “terrorist attacks” in the Rose Garden the day after they happened.
FACT President Obama acknowledged in a 60 Minutes interview that day that he had intentionally avoided calling them terrorist attacks.
CLAIM Everything that could be done was done to attempt an outside rescue.
FACT No rescue airspace clearance from Libya was sought, no aircraft was sent to buzz the crowd, the nearest Special Forces team was not immediately dispatched, a special FBI team in the United States was stood up and down throughout the night but never left the States, President Obama did not call Libyan leaders for assistance, NATO was not contacted seeking possible help, one of the small teams in Tripoli that planned to fly to Benghazi was ordered to stay in Tripoli, the specialty FEST team in the United States was prevented from responding, the Counterterrorism Security Group tasked with providing advice on options was not convened even though it’s required by presidential directive.
CLAIM The White House made no substantive changes in the talking points.
FACT The White House made substantive changes in the talking points.
| BENGHAZI SELECT COMMITTEE
In June 2014, I’m on Capitol Hill to meet with Democrats and Republicans about the upcoming Select Committee on Benghazi.
I have little doubt that, as the committee spins up, there are meetings going on not far away. Meetings of PR officials strategizing how to delegitimize the Select Committee and its work, even before it’s begun. PR officials who are digging for dirt on the chairman of the committee, Trey Gowdy, a Republican former prosecutor from South Carolina.
These PR officials may not be the smartest kids on the block. But they have money. They have access to powerful people. And best of all, many in the news media are on their side.
| EPILOGUE
WOOD I heard about it in the evening, that there had been an attack on the compound in Benghazi. And I heard that there was a fatality. I didn’t find out till the next morning—when I woke up my son informed me—that the compound had been attacked and Ambassador Stevens had been killed.
ME Your friend.
WOOD Yes. (pause) I took it pretty hard. He was a great boss and a great man to know. The United States lost a lot when they lost him. He was a great diplomat. He was the president’s personal representative. It was an assault on the United States. It was a loss to the Libyans as well.
ME From a security standpoint, what are the thoughts that went through your head as you heard what happened?
WOOD We just lost, we lost big. . . .
ME Did you wonder if your team might have been able to do something to prevent that from even happening?
WOOD Yes, those thoughts go through your head. You do wonder. I won’t know. That’s one thing I guess we’ll never know. . . . But I do wonder about that from time to time. What could have been done differently. I think in the military you’re taught to war-game things a lot and you do wonder if different pieces had been on the ground what might have happened, what might have there been to avoid, perhaps.
CHAPTER 5
| The Politics of HealthCare.gov |
(and Covering It)
It’s Thursday, October 31, 2013, and it’s about to be a very scary Halloween for the Obama administration. I’m working the monstrously frightening Obamacare launch.
The administration is withholding most of the relevant public information, whether it’s regarding HealthCare.gov’s tenuous security, failed tests prior to the rollout, or dismal enrollment figures. The key to getting real facts is going to be the congressional committees that have the power to demand documents and issue subpoenas.
Republicans must sense an advantage. This is the most self-assured and aggressive I’ve seen them behave since Senator Obama became president. Previously, Republican house speaker John Boehner has tempered many of his colleagues’ attempts to exploit the administration’s vulnerabilities. He slow-walked their demands for a joint select committee to investigate Benghazi. He delayed subpoenas on Fast and Furious. But the Republican response to the HealthCare.gov susceptibilities is different. Full speed ahead.
Of course, if history accurately predicts the future, the Obama administration will thumb its nose at Congress and its document demands for as long as possible. There are few repercussions to this approach. Republicans usually wring their hands but don’t do much about it. The media shrugs its collective shoulders but stays mute. And the only true enforcement authority is the very administration that’s committing the offenses.
But there are other keepers of revealing information: government contractors that worked on HealthCare.gov. Some of them aren’t so cavalier about ignoring requests from Congress. Some of them will turn over relevant materials. I need to stay close to the essential congressional committees that stand the best chance of getting information that can be released to the public. They’re all in the House: Oversight, Ways and Means, and Energy and Commerce. My producer Kim Skeen and I hit them up with phone calls and emails. Ways and Means and Energy and Commerce have good background material and context to balance all the information the Obama administration is releasing, but there’s nothing particularly noteworthy from them . . . yet.
But I haven’t heard back from Oversight. Four days pass and they still haven’t responded to my emails and calls. Sometimes that means they’ve got no
thing. But it can also mean the opposite. I’m left to guess.
Everyone wants to know what the early Obamacare sign-up figures are. They’re significant because trusted experts I’ve consulted, including well-informed insiders, say the business model relies on two simple factors: the number and quality of customers. First, there needs to be seven million enrollees by March 31, not counting Medicaid customers. That’s roughly 38,000 a day. Second, there needs to be the right mix: plenty of healthy, young enrollees—“young invincibles,” in insurance industry jargon—to balance the cost of older and sicker customers. If either measure falls short, it could jeopardize the entire program. At the very least, premiums skyrocket.
There should be nothing secretive about how many Americans are enrolling: the figures belong to the public. And unlike Benghazi and Fast and Furious, the government can’t withhold the information on the grounds of national security or “ongoing investigation”—two of their favorite stonewalling excuses.
Nonetheless, the administration simply says it’s not going to announce enrollment numbers until it’s good and ready, and then will produce them once a month. They justify this methodology by saying it’s how the government handled the release of Medicare Part D figures. It’s an invalid argument for the government to claim that statistics for HealthCare.gov must be disseminated the same way they were for the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit when it started back in 2006. That’s akin to declaring that everything in the future must be done the same as it was in the past, for no particular reason. If we all operated that way, we’d still be chiseling on stone tablets. Because that’s how things used to be done.
But more important, the administration insists there is no enrollment data, yet. Experience, knowledge, and common sense lead me to suspect they’re telling a fib.
So, on Halloween at about 3 p.m., I finally get a return call from Republicans on Oversight. It seems they’ve obtained so-called War Room notes taken by a HealthCare.gov contractor during emergency meetings convened when the website first failed at the start of October. The notes refer to a “dashboard” that’s tracking enrollment and is apparently working better than the rest of the website. What does it reveal? On the first day of Obamacare, six people enrolled.
Six.
For a moment, I’m at a loss for words. No wonder the administration wants to run and hide. Everyone thought it would be bad. But not this bad.
“Did you say six? Are you sure?” I ask my contacts who are listening on speakerphone.
“Yeah,” they say. “It’s pretty clear.”
I look at the documentation myself and consult additional sources for context. Then I call my senior producer, Linda Prestia.**
“I have some enrollment figures for the first day.”
“And . . . ?”
“Apparently, six people signed up.”
Pause.
“Six?” she asks. “How can that be?”
As I prepare to report this revelation on that night’s CBS Evening News, I contact the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the primary government agency overseeing implementation of the Affordable Care Act. I already know the drill. The press spokesman will use the opportunity to attempt to pump me for what I know without giving up a shred of information.
Until now, HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters has largely ignored questions I’ve raised in emails and phone calls. But the moment I ping her that I need confirmation on enrollment figures, I have her interest. My phone rings. It’s Peters.
“I need to know how many people enrolled on the first few days,” I tell her.
“We’ll be releasing those figures in mid-November,” she answers, repeating from the talking points that HHS has used for weeks.
“So if I were to give you numbers that I have, you couldn’t confirm them?”
“There are no numbers,” she insists. “They don’t exist.”
We go back and forth. I tell her that I know enrollment numbers are being collected and I have some of them. She continues to say there aren’t any. I’ve long dealt with government officials who beat around the bush when they don’t want to give an honest answer. Lately, it seems they’re bolder. They say things that are provably false. And they say these things with conviction. Indignation. We’re not getting anywhere and I draw the call to a close.
“Wait,” says Peters. “I’d like to know what numbers you have.”
“I’m sure you would. And I’d like you to give me your enrollment numbers but it looks like neither of those things is going to happen.”
“There are no numbers,” Peters shoots back once more. She’s sticking to script—but sounding worried now. She needs to report back to her superiors. They need to prepare their spin. It’s a game whereby they constantly modify their story as contradictions surface, necessitating formulation of an evolved position that’s more consistent with the newly unearthed facts. We didn’t mean that, I’m afraid you must have misunderstood. Here’s what we meant. . . . The game is tedious but pro forma.
“You’re going to go on the Evening News and report numbers, I’d like to know what they are!” Peters tries one last time, sounding testy.
She’s got it backward. She gets a public salary and her agency is collecting information about the public that belongs to the public. She’s the one who’s obligated to provide information.
“I was looking for help from you to confirm enrollment numbers,” I say. “But there’s no point in telling you what I have since you say you have no numbers, right?”
We hang up and I grab my files and notes to head over from my office to the main CBS building, up the street. As soon as I enter the newsroom, I swing by Prestia’s desk and tell her to expect a call from the White House. My chat with Peters has set the machine in motion. There’s some comfort in knowing the routine. So predictable.
It’s not long before I overhear Prestia arguing on the telephone. I walk toward her desk, and she looks up and smiles as if she doesn’t mind the battle on the other end of the phone line. She scribbles on a piece of paper as she continues talking and hands it to me.
“White House.”
Fulfilling my prediction, a White House press officer has called to complain, and to try to find out what we know and how we know it. Prestia pushes back. Why would we discuss details of our reporting with them when they insist no enrollment figures exist?
She hangs up. “Really? That’s the best they can do is sic him on us?” referring to the White House press flack who had called.
“Somebody higher up the food chain is probably calling Isham [our bureau chief] and David [Rhodes, president of our news division],” I tell Prestia. She hasn’t been in her position long enough to know the whole routine. Their normal strategy is multipronged. They hope to reach somebody at CBS who might be intimidated or sympathetic. It just takes one. But today, it doesn’t work.
At 6:30 p.m., we air our report. It reads, in part:
The website launched on a Tuesday. Publicly, the government said there were 4.7 million unique visits in the first 24 hours. But at a meeting Wednesday morning, the War Room notes say ‘six enrollments have occurred so far.’ . . . The notes leave no doubt that some enrollment figures, which the administration has chosen to keep secret, are available. . . . But head of [the government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] CMS Marilyn Tavenner would not disclose any figures when Rep. Dave Camp, chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, asked earlier this week. “Chairman Camp, we will have those numbers available in mid-November,” she said.
It’s big news.
Six-people-enrolling-the-first-day becomes an instant meme reflecting the HealthCare.gov disaster. It’s fodder for a song written and sung on the Country Music Awards on November 6 from Nashville: “Obama-care by Morn-ing . . .” croon Carrie Underwood and Brad Paisley on ABC, “ . . . over six peop-le served . . .”
&nb
sp; Jay Leno pokes fun on his late-night comedy show: “According to CBS News, only six people enrolled in Obamacare on the first day of the rollout. Six! That means more people have walked on the moon than have signed up for Obamacare.”
And casual observers can’t help but note that the number six happens to jibe with a skit that Saturday Night Live had performed five days before. In the parody, an actress portraying Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius tells Americans, “Millions of Americans are visiting HealthCare.gov, which is great news. Unfortunately the site was only designed to handle six users at a time.”
The next morning, a CBS News producer shares with the rest of us that White House officials are unhinged—“out of their minds”—over the media coverage, and are on a mission to excavate information to exploit to their advantage. They’re asking, Which reporters are working on the story? What are the names of their producers? There’s a hint of more desperation than usual as they execute their PR game plan, which looks something like this:
KNOW YOUR ENEMY Get to know the reporters on the story and their supervisors. Lobby them. If they don’t adopt your viewpoint, try to discredit them.
MINE AND PUMP When asked to provide interviews and information for a story, stall, claim ignorance of the facts, and mine the reporter for what information he has.
CONTROVERSIALIZE Wait until the story is published to see how much the reporter really knows. Then launch a propaganda campaign with surrogates and sympathizers in the media to divert from the damaging facts. Controversialize the reporter and any whistleblower or critics to try to turn the focus on personalities instead of the evidence.
The Obama administration’s downhill PR trajectory may have been a fait accompli from the moment Secretary Sebelius’s handlers scheduled her to appear on Jon Stewart’s Comedy Central program October 7, 2013. She cleared a spot in her tight schedule for the political comedy show after refusing Congress’s “invitation” to testify because she supposedly didn’t have time. It’s a classic Obama administration move: bypass the traditional news media. Circumvent Congress, if you can. Go straight to the popular media. There you’ll get friendly banter with no tough questions and no serious follow-up.
Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama's Washington Page 23