Will a GOP aide be fired over Benghazi email changes? [View all]

[ProSense]

Will a GOP aide be fired over Benghazi email changes?

In 1998, a top aide resigned after a similar flap. And there were even calls for the Congressman to resign

By Alex Seitz-Wald

Now that we know a GOP congressional aide misleadingly edited — intentionally or not — Obama administration emails on the Benghazi attack, one wonders if he or she will face repercussions. There’s some precedent here. Former GOP Rep. Dan Burton used to hold Darrell Issa’s job as Chairman of the House Oversight Committee and used it to aggressively go after Bill Clinton on a host of controversies of various degrees of merit, much as Issa is doing now.

In 1998, as Burton was investigating alleged campaign finance violations from Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign, his office released a doctored transcript of an audiotape of a former Clinton aide. Burton’s top aide took the blame for the deception and resigned, as the New York Times reported on May 7, 1998:

The top investigator for the House inquiry into President Clinton’s 1996 campaign finance practices resigned under pressure today, amid growing bipartisan criticism of his role in releasing edited tapes of Webster L. Hubbell’s jailhouse conversations. The aide, David N. Bossie, has been for 18 months the point man and alter ego of the inquiry’s chairman, Representative Dan Burton, the Indiana Republican who heads the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee. But since Mr. Burton released transcripts of some of Mr. Hubbell’s prison conversations late last week, the lawmaker has weathered intense attacks by Democrats maintaining that exculpatory information was edited out of the transcripts.

The situation is a good analog for the Benghazi emails in that Republicans made some small alterations to otherwise accurate raw information which fundamentally changed the meaning to advance their political agenda...difference is that other Republicans joined Democrats in expressing outrage at the misleading editing 15 years ago. Burton even had to apologize to fellow Republicans after then-Speaker Newt Gingrich said Burton was running the investigation like a “circus.”

Today, at least so far, Republicans have been mum on the apparent tampering of White House emails for political gain by one of their own. Of course, it’s entirely possible that the GOP staffers who leaked the Benghazi emails made an honest mistake when transcribing emails they were shown in a closed-door briefing with intelligence officials, but no one has come forward with an explanation and a mea culpa.

- more -

http://www.salon.com/2013/05/17/will_a_gop_aide_be_fired_over_benghazi_email_changes/singleton/

Here is the NYT report: http://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/07/us/testing-president-congressional-aide-top-investigator-for-house-panel-leaves.html

One point of contention with the Salon article: We don't know if this was the doing of an "aide." Given the deliberate nature and the fact that the tampered e-mail were used in a Congressional hearing, this goes way beyond a aide distributing false information.

This was no "honest mistake."

Maybe this was just an innocent mistake, rather than a deliberate attempt at deception? Nope: "On Monday, Mother Jones noted that the Republicans' interim report included the correct version of the emails, signaling that more malice and less incompetence may have been at play with the alleged alterations."

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022857236

And the media have gone virtually silent on this issue.