The 100 pages of e-mails showed a disagreement between David H. Petraeus, then the director of the C.I.A., and his deputy, Michael J. Morell, over how much to disclose in the talking points, which were used by Susan E. Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, in television appearances days after the attack.
Mr. Morell, administration officials said, deleted a reference in the draft version of the talking points to C.I.A. warnings of extremist threats in Libya, which State Department officials objected to because they feared it would reflect badly on them.
Mr. Morell, officials said, acted on his own and not in response to pressure from the State Department. But when the final draft of the talking points was sent to Mr. Petraeus, he dismissed them, saying “Frankly, I’d just as soon not use this,” adding that the heavily scrubbed account would not satisfy the House Democrat who had requested it.
“This is certainly not what Vice Chairman Ruppersberger was hoping to get,” Mr. Petraeus wrote, referring to Representative C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, which had asked Mr. Petraeus for talking points to use with reporters in discussing the attack on Benghazi.
bttt
VERY good catch.
Benghazi re-set?
Also today: President Barack Obama announced Morell’s appointment to the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board.
The President’s Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB) is an advisor to the Executive Office of the President of the United States. According to its self-description, it “...provides advice to the President concerning the quality and adequacy of intelligence collection, of analysis and estimates, of counterintelligence, and of other intelligence activities.”[1]
The PIAB, through its Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), also advises the President on the legality of foreign intelligence activities. [Wiki]
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Morell will be replaced by Avril Haines [bio from WH]
“Avril D. Haines is Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Counsel to the President for National Security Affairs at the White House.
Prior to joining the White House Counsel’s office in 2010, she was Assistant Legal Adviser for Treaty Affairs at the Department of State. She previously worked in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the Department of State from 2003 to 2006, first in the Office of Treaty Affairs and then in the Office of Political Military Affairs.
From 2007 to 2008, she worked on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations as Deputy Chief Counsel for the Majority. Ms. Haines clerked for Judge Danny Boggs on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit from 2002 to 2003.
From 2001 to 2002, she was a Legal Officer at The Hague Conference on Private International Law. She received a B.A. in Physics from the University of Chicago and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center.”