The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto on Thursday offered a plausible explanation for why President Barack Obama, during Tuesday night’s debate, felt confident he could count on moderator Candy Crowley of CNN to back him up on how he had uttered the phrase “acts of terror” the day after the Benghazi attack.
On her CNN State of the Union show back on September 30, Crowley interviewed David Axelrod and during that segment she was as incredulous as Mitt Romney was at the debate that Obama had initially referred to “acts of terror” in any relationship to Benghazi....
◼ Was Candy in Cahoots? Almost certainly not. Occam’s razor suggests Obama took advantage of her - James Taranto/Wall St. Journal
Yesterday Tony Lee of Breitbart.com dug up a transcript of the Sept. 30 episode of "State of the Union," which included an interview with David Axelrod of the Obama campaign. The two had an exchange on this very topic:
Crowley: There's a back and forth now about why didn't this administration--why did it take them until Friday after a Sept. 11 attack in Libya to come to the conclusion that it was premeditated and that there was terrorists involved. John McCain said it doesn't pass the smell test, or it's willful ignorance to think that they didn't know before this what was going on. Your reaction?Crowley wasn't buying what Axelrod was selling. "First, they said it was not planned, it was part of this tape. All that stuff. . . . didn't the administration shoot first? Didn't they come out and say, listen, as far as we can tell, this wasn't preplanned, this was just a part of"--at which point Axelrod interrupted her.
Axelrod: Well, first of all, Candy, as you know, the president called it an act of terror the day after it happened.
...Here’s what almost certainly happened: After the interview, Axelrod, or someone else from the campaign, called Crowley’s attention to the White House transcript. She read the relevant portion and conceded that Axelrod was right: Obama had called the attack an act of terror. As we wrote yesterday, such an interpretation was reasonable, although it was a matter of opinion because the President’s statement was ambiguous. Obama was briefed on all this during his debate preparation.
If this surmise is correct, then Crowley knew about the “acts of terror” Easter egg hidden in Obama’s Sept. 12 speech, and Obama knew she knew. Romney did not know and was as incredulous as Crowley had been, because the administration had spent weeks peddling the claim that the video dunnit. Obama brought the matter up expecting incredulity from Romney and backup from Crowley. She therefore unwittingly played her role in Obama’s little ambush of his opponent. She was just clarifying the facts – or so Axelrod & Co. had led her to believe....
