"And if Allen is right that the roots of Russiagate reach much further back than 2016, then that missing Letterman interview may be a small piece of a much larger story about who shaped the narratives Americans were given, who repeated them and what eventually disappeared from view."
"(Mark Anthony) — Seven days after the Benghazi attack, Barack Obama went on David Letterman’s show.
"The date was September 18, 2012. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were dead. The Obama administration was under mounting pressure to explain what had happened, the election was less than two months away, and the administration’s explanation that the attack had grown out of a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Islam video was already under scrutiny.
"So Obama went to Letterman. Naturally.
"That was one of the more striking moments in A.J. Rice’s Dangerous Laughter conversation with Drew Thomas Allen, author of Clinton Hoax, Obama Coup: The Declassified Story of the Trump-Russia Delusion. Allen’s book argues that the political and intelligence controversies that exploded around Donald Trump in 2016 did not begin with Trump. To understand Russiagate, he argues, you have to go backward through the Obama years, Benghazi, Hillary Clinton and the intelligence community.
"But the Letterman story is where the conversation gets genuinely strange.
"Allen says that while researching the book, he found references to Obama’s Letterman appearance in material associated with the Benghazi investigation. Finding the actual interview, however, proved to be another matter. According to the discussion, only a small portion of the September 18 appearance remains readily available, while the section dealing with Obama’s explanation of Benghazi is the part that cannot readily be found. Rice points out that plenty of Letterman interviews from that period remain online, making the absence of this particular material difficult to ignore.
"Let’s be careful about what that does and does not mean. The missing footage does not prove who removed it, why it disappeared or whether anyone deliberately removed it at all. Television archives are complicated, rights change hands and old material can disappear for mundane reasons. Rice and Allen themselves discussed trying to obtain a complete copy or transcript rather than treating the missing footage as proof of a conspiracy.
"But it does raise a pretty remarkable question: why is a presidential interview, important enough to be referenced in the Benghazi investigations, so difficult to watch today?
"Rice’s answer was almost tailor-made for Dangerous Laughter: it has been “memory holed.'”. . . More...
No comments:
Post a Comment