Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama's Washington

by Sharyl Attkisson

  And so, what should have been a quick and simple process devolved into what we came to refer to as “death by a thousand cuts.” After the senior read through the script, he reacted as if the story had disparaged his best friend. As if his best friend were Mr. Federal Government.

  “Well, this is all the states’ fault! It’s the states’ fault,” he sputtered, recasting blame for the waste and abuse that the HUD inspector general had flagged. Viewing the story through his own political prism, he defended the federal government by claiming the fault rested with the states that receive the federal HUD dollars. “They should be tracking the money!”

  “We can add your thought about how the states are to blame,” I offered in the spirit of compromise. “I can look for a sound bite from the inspector general [at the hearing] where he refers to something like that.”

  But he wanted more changes. And he conveyed them in the pattern of questioning that I had come to recognize so well in the last couple of years. It means they just don’t like the subject matter. Nonetheless, I tried to answer all the questions and revise the script to his satisfaction.

  Among the changes:

  REMOVED the mention that the IG had found $3.5 billion of HUD fraud or waste in a single year.

  DELETED the visual and compelling example of the historic Hotel Sterling in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, that was set to get a facelift with $6 million in tax dollars from HUD. But, as we wrote, most of the money was improperly used to demolish the building. With the hotel destroyed, none of the 175 promised jobs were created.

  DELETED an example of a fraud case that we had written in the story.

  CHANGED the inspector general’s sound bite.

  CHANGED a sound bite in which the interviewee was critical of the waste and replaced it with one that was less pointed and less interesting.

  REWROTE the example of misused HUD money in Louisiana (and changed the sound bite that referred to that).

  All of those alterations in a story that ran under two minutes. I needn’t have bothered to do the legwork and write it in the first place. In the end, it was reshaped by a New York producer, who hadn’t done the firsthand research.

  When the story aired, it was a shadow of its former self. And the last edit, removing a demonstrative example of waste from the final story, was made without anybody checking with me or Kim. We felt it was highly unusual and improper to make such a substantive editorial change without consulting us.

  I can’t help but think that viewers walk away from a story like that entirely confused. What was the point? In its final form, it seemed as if there were really no cause for major concern. It was a bland nonstory that revealed little of interest.

  We found no sense in complaining. This was the new reality.

  It was the last attempt we made to get a government waste story on CBS News.

  So what did the Evening News want from us during this time? A spot news story on the regional earthquake. A feature about renovation of the National Cathedral after the earthquake. A feature about renovation of the Washington Monument after the earthquake. A feature about damage to the Capitol Building after the earthquake.

  Meanwhile, the whisper campaign continued. If I offered a story on pretty much any legitimate controversy involving government, instead of being considered a good journalistic watchdog, I was anti-Obama. If I offered a story on alleged corporate misdeeds, instead of being seen as a reporter holding powers accountable, I was a troublemaker. If I wrote a normal follow-up on national controversies with unanswered questions, instead of being viewed as a classically trained journalist, I was considered obsessed.

  None of this was said to me directly. It was passed around by certain managers and colleagues to undermine my reporting and justify their own misguided decisions to censor it.

  If I were still thirty years old, I might be convinced that they were right about all of it. That I really had, quite suddenly, without explanation, become the purveyor of all bad story ideas. I might adapt to the new reality by agreeing to do the stories they want, shaped in advance according to their personal views. Happily copy stories from the competition. Forget about developing my own sources and leads. Devote my time to chasing down and confirming rumors from tweets, blogs, and other reporters’ leads.

  But, at this stage in my career, I knew better.

  | WORRIED ABOUT THE WRONG THINGS

  At this stage, I also knew better than to be party to journalism that I viewed as wrong. Over the years, when I raised concerns with the CBS ethics czar or expressed disquietude to my superiors, I always did so in the best interests of CBS News, which I considered my home. But my actions weren’t always viewed as being conscientious. As I’ve explained, the network culture has an inclination—as do many corporate and government cultures—to worry about the wrong things and not worry about the right things. To label the one who’s raising concerns as a troublemaker rather than view him as someone working to protect the company.

  I’d seen that sort of marginalization used againt whistleblower Special Agent John Dodson in Fast and Furious. Against whistleblowers inside the FDA, the National Zoo, the American Red Cross, the U.S. Agency for International Development, Firestone, Enron, the National Institutes of Health, the State Department, the military, Los Alamos National Laboratory—so many over the years. Some of those whistleblowers saved human lives. Few, if any, were offered anything other than retaliation and ridicule at the hands of their employers. There are no rainbows for those who risk their careers to stand up for what they think is right. There’s usually only a stormy aftermath filled with heartache that never ends.

  I’d been at CBS a decade earlier, in September 2004, during Rathergate, when we’d worried about the wrong things.

  Prior to the airing of Dan Rather’s infamous story on 60 Minutes II, a CBS senior producer hustled me into his office and said he had documents that 60 Minutes II was billing as the “smoking gun” against President George W. Bush regarding his Vietnam-era National Guard service: military letters dated 1973. The senior said he was sharing them with me because if Rather’s soon-to-air story made a “big splash” on 60 Minutes II and merited a follow-up the next day on the CBS Evening News, I would be the correspondent assigned to do it.

  He handed me the military letters. After reviewing them for no more than thirty seconds, I questioned their authenticity.

  “Where’s the source?” I asked, referring to the signatory.

  “He’s dead,” answered the senior. “His widow apparently found the letters in storage in the attic.”

  “So did 60 get them—from the widow?”

  “No. Rather’s producer got them from a group of Republicans in Texas,” he answered. (Note: the CBS investigation into Rathergate later showed this to be untrue.)

  I handed the papers back to him. He looked at me quizzically.

  “I sure hope they have a lot more evidence than this,” I said. “I assume that they do.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked the senior.

  “These look like they were typed by my daughter on a computer yesterday,” I answered. (My daughter was nine at the time.)

  I knew very well what a typed letter from the era should have looked like. In 1973, I was a devoted student of a secretarial typing class at Brookside Junior High School in Sarasota, Florida. We used top-quality, modern IBM Selectrics—and even they weren’t good enough to type with the uniformity of these obviously computer-generated documents. Heck, in the 1990s, some military bases I visited on assignment were still using old manual typewriters whose finished product was instantly recognizable by its rustic nature. Uneven lines. Corrected mistakes impossible to hide. Varied darkness and clarity of the individual letters, depending on the strength with which the user pounded the key. Even the electrics of the era had distinguishable, trademark irregularities.

  Whoever had peddled these docu
ments as genuine had to be a child of the computer age, otherwise they’d understand how unconvincing they looked. And whoever believed them had to be ignorant or blinded by their desire to push the story.

  In the embarrassing aftermath of Rathergate, with the documents ultimately exposed as fakes, my colleagues and I suffered the fallout. We lived through the incredibly painful process of watching some insiders who knew the documents were bogus defend them anyway. They were banking on Rather surviving the scandal and were betting that when the dust cleared, Rather would take down anyone not on his side.

  Prior to an Evening News conference call one morning, I advised my senior producer to strongly push our New York superiors to bring in an independent entity to oversee any news coverage we attempted to do on Rathergate as it unfolded. My rationale was that we shouldn’t risk digging ourselves into a deeper hole by dabbling in conflicts of interest and covering our own story unfettered. The senior said it was a good idea, but, as far as I know, he didn’t pass along the suggestion.

  One day, the senior approached me to say that I would have to cover that day’s Rathergate story.

  “I can’t do that,” I told him.

  “Well, you may have to. You’re the only choice today.” The regular reporter who’d been covering the story was off.

  I doubted that I’d be given the independence to address questions about Rather’s actions—in a story that Rather would be approving, to air on Rather’s broadcast.

  A couple of hours later, I found my senior producer in front of our M Street offices on a break.

  “I can’t do the story,” I told him again.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I saw the documents ahead of time and I told you what I thought about them. My contract states that I’ll uphold certain ethical standards. I can’t report a story that says something that I know to be false.”

  He was quiet.

  “And if you make me,” I continued, “I’ll have to call to my lawyer.”

  Nobody ever again suggested I report on Rathergate.

  As predicted, CBS was later criticized for attempting to cover our own story when we, ourselves, were at the center of the probe. In my view, it was another example of the company being worried about the wrong things and not worried about the right things.

  Such was the case once again in 2013 after 60 Minutes apologized for what it said was a “deeply flawed” story on Benghazi, as reported by another correspondent, who relied upon a later-discredited witness. This new scandal led managers, already skittish about original and investigative reporting, to embark on illogical overreactions. CBS This Morning had asked me to report on the new book, written by Fast and Furious whistleblower John Dodson. There would be nothing legally precarious about this feature, but I had my script approved by the CBS legal department anyway, because I knew how fearful the broadcast producers were. The supervising producer approved the script as well.

  Still, that wasn’t enough.

  “They also want John Miller to approve your script,” the supervising producer informed me, referring to a fellow CBS News correspondent who had well-placed sources at the FBI, where he used to work. The backstory is that some inside the network believed if 60 Minutes had asked Miller to check out its Benghazi source for their story, his FBI contacts would have waved him off and that CBS scandal would’ve been avoided.

  Whatever the truth of that matter, it was silly to try to thrust Miller into the script approval chain on my story. A generous, smart, and well-connected colleague to be sure, he was nonetheless no better suited to “approve” my stories than I was to approve his. And he certainly wasn’t better sourced on Fast and Furious.

  In the end, I got word that Miller “approved” my script. To this day I have no idea what that approval could have possibly added or entailed.

  While they were busy heaping unnecessary worry on my feature story, there were very real issues they should have been paying attention to.

  But, by this time, I’d long since made up my mind that I would leave CBS at the end of my contract in December 2014, if not sooner. And the event that sealed that decision for me was related to Benghazi.

  | BENGHAZIGATE

  I should have known something was up when I received an unsolicited phone call from a White House official a few days before the second debate between President Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney on October 16, 2012.

  The president was coming off a tough loss in the first debate, after which uncommitted voters, by a 46 percent to 22 percent margin, said Romney won; and 56 percent had an improved opinion of the Republican candidate.

  The White House official and I chatted casually about unrelated topics and then he introduced a non sequitur: “The president called Benghazi a ‘terrorist attack’ the day after in the Rose Garden,” he told me.

  At the time, I hadn’t given any thought to whether the president had or hadn’t termed the Benghazi assaults “terrorism.” The debate on that point hadn’t widely emerged and I was still focused on the State Department’s denial of security requests from Americans in Libya prior to the attacks.

  Since I really didn’t know what the president had said in the Rose Garden the day after, I didn’t offer a comment to the White House official on the other end of the phone. He repeated himself as if to elicit some sort of reaction.

  “He did call it a terrorist attack. In the Rose Garden. On September twelfth.”

  I had no idea that the question of how the administration portrayed the attacks—and whether it was covering up the terrorist ties—would emerge as a touchstone leading up to the election. But the White House already seemed to know.

  A couple of days later, I’m watching the Obama-Romney debate at home on television as moderator Candy Crowley of CNN asks a Benghazi-related question. My ears perk up when the president replies using very similar language to that of the White House official on the phone.

  OBAMA The day after the attack, Governor, I stood in the Rose Garden and I told the American people and the world that we are going to find out exactly what happened. That this was an act of terror and I also said that we’re going to hunt down those who committed this crime.

  I now feel as though the White House official had been trying to prep me to accept the president’s debate claim that he’d called the Benghazi assaults an “act of terror” on September 12.

  The Benghazi question and the president’s response are all Romney needs to try to seize control of the debate and score big points. He accuses the president of downplaying terrorist ties to protect his campaign claim that al-Qaeda was on the run.

  ROMNEY I—I think [it’s] interesting the president just said something which—which is that on the day after the attack he went into the Rose Garden and said that this was an act of terror.

  OBAMA That’s what I said.

  ROMNEY You said in the Rose Garden the day after the attack, it was an act of terror? It was not a spontaneous demonstration, is that what you’re saying?

  OBAMA Please proceed, Governor. . . .

  ROMNEY I want to make sure we get that for the record because it took the president fourteen days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.

  OBAMA Get the transcript.

  The exchange feels strangely awkward. Romney seems genuinely bewildered and President Obama seems oddly anxious to move on. Then, the moderator, Crowley, comes to the president’s rescue.

  CROWLEY It—it—it—he did in fact, sir. So let me—let me call it an act of terror. . . .

  OBAMA Can you say that a little louder, Candy?

  CROWLEY He—he did call it an act of terror.

  Crowley is quick with her take. It makes me wonder if she, too, had gotten that call from a White House official in advance, telling her that the president had immediately labeled Benghazi a terrorist act.

  Why is this point so
important to the Obama administration?

  The next day, I look for a transcript of the president’s Rose Garden statement to see if I can figure out the puzzle.

  When I locate and review the remarks that the president made in the Rose Garden on September 12, 2012, I find that he did not say Benghazi was “an act of terror,” as he’d claimed in the debate. In fact, at each point in his speech when he could have raised the specter of “terrorism” or “terrorists,” he’d chosen a synonym (examples of this from his speech are bolded):

  THE PRESIDENT Good morning. . . . Yesterday, four of these extraordinary Americans were killed in an attack on our diplomatic post in Benghazi. Among those killed was our Ambassador, Chris Stevens, as well as Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith. . . . The United States condemns in the strongest terms this outrageous and shocking attack. . . . And make no mistake, we will work with the Libyan government to bring to justice the killers who attacked our people. Since our founding, the United States has been a nation that respects all faiths. We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. But there is absolutely no justification to this type of senseless violence. None. The world must stand together to unequivocally reject these brutal acts. Already, many Libyans have joined us in doing so, and this attack will not break the bonds between the United States and Libya. Libyan security personnel fought back against the attackers alongside Americans. . . .

  Nope, no mention of terrorism there.

  Where the president may be granted some wiggle room, though there’s no doubt he overstated it in the debate, is when his speech segued to the fact that the attacks happened on the anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. That’s when he used the word terror. But not referring directly to Benghazi.

  THE PRESIDENT Of course, yesterday was already a painful day for our nation as we marked the solemn memory of the 9/11 attacks. We mourned with the families who were lost on that day. I visited the graves of troops who made the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq and Afghanistan at the hallowed grounds of Arlington Cemetery, and had the opportunity to say thank you and visit some of our wounded warriors at Walter Reed. And then last night, we learned the news of this attack in Benghazi. As Americans, let us never, ever forget that our freedom is only sustained because there are people who are willing to fight for it, to stand up for it, and in some cases, lay down their lives for it. Our country is only as strong as the character of our people and the service of those both civilian and military who represent us around the globe. No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for. Today we mourn four more Americans who represent the very best of the United States of America. We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done. But we also know that the lives these Americans led stand in stark contrast to those of their attackers. . . .