Maddow blasts erroneous Benghazi reporting: 'ABC blew it'

On Wednesday night's edition of "The Rachel Maddow Show," host Rachel Maddow tore into TV network ABC for its recent reporting on the Benghazi attack and President Barack Obama's administration's response to the tragedy.

Maddow opened the piece by discussing a McClatchy report that Ambassador Chris Stevens had repeatedly turned down offers of increased security at the consulate in Benghazi. No one is certain why, but Maddow said that this is the only real scandal in the Benghazi attack.

"Could the attack have been prevented?" she asked. "Why wasn't it prevented? Why wasn't there better security there? Why did those four Americans die? That remains the big issue."

Last Friday, however, reporter Jonathan Karl at ABC ran with an anonymously sourced "scoop" in the form of a White House email chain detailing the administration's response to the crisis. If the ABC story was true, the Republicans, who had been trying to make political hay of the Benghazi attack, finally had an angle they could work.

According to ABC, the State Department (and therefore Hillary Clinton) had desperately tried to micro-manage the talking points to be used about the attack in order to shield the institution and its leadership from criticism. The White House weighed on the State Department's side, as evidenced by emails first quoted in The Weekly Standard and then ABC.

"According to ABC News," said Maddow, "the White House, in that email that they quoted, clearly planned to massage the story about Benghazi at the direction of the State Department."

Then on Tuesday of this week, CNN's Jake Tapper published the entirety of the White House email, which showed ABC's take on the story to be completely false.

"That ABC article, turns out, was totally wrong," she explained. "ABC blew it. Turns out they weren't actually quoting White House emails at all."

Watch the video, embedded via MSNBC, below:

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