I believe that he feels it will clear his name.
It took me a while to figure out what was so off about former acting CIA Director Michael Morell’s forthright statement that he supports the House investigating committee on Benghazi:
Speaking to a forum founded and run by his former boss at the CIA, Leon Panetta, Morell said he hopes that the House effort can lay to rest lingering questions Americans’ have about the attack which killed the U.S. Ambassador to Libya and three other Americans.
“A lot of people have looked at this, but the polls show that the American people still have questions. I want to make sure that all of those questions are cleared up. There are still some questions about the role of the agency. And there are still questions about my own personal role and I want to clear that up,” Morell said during a panel discussion at the Panetta Institute in Monterey, Calif. “It might be surprising for you to hear me say this, but I am a supporter of the creation of this committee because I want all the facts to come together in one place and be presented as one—by one entity as one thing, so the American people can see all of this.”
…and then it hit me: Michael Morell sounds like a guy who thinks that he can walk into House hearings on Benghazi and walk back out again with his scalp intact. I don’t know whether that’s because of a clean-enough conscience, self-confidence in his abilities to finesse a House committee, a certain warm awareness of knowing where all the bodies are buried, or a combination thereof: at any rate, it is an attitude that is in stark contrast to everybody else in this administration (current and former) that was involved in the Benghazi mess. And since Morell is acting how you would expect an innocent (or innocent-enough*) civil servant to act… why aren’t the rest of them? Because if the rest of the Obama administration responded as did Morell and the Pentagon, this issue would have been over a year ago…
Via @amandacarpenter.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
*Nobody is ever truly innocent in this business. But the CIA’s involvement in this particular outrage is easily overshadowed by the actions of the State Department and the White House.
I bet real money the Benghazi consulte was there to spy on the CIA annex.
The Dems have a sitting president and their two front-runners to succeed him at stake.
Scorched earth tactics will be in full effect.
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So there *is* a fourth option. He could be cynically calling for the investigation with the full knowledge that it won’t happen. It makes him look like he’s got nothing to hide. The appearance of exoneration is almost as useful as the real thing.
Of course, his doing that would likely be self-defeating as it quickly turned into a round robin of chronic-backstabbing disorder and selective leaks. So I do believe that some combination of the first three is most probable.
There is the possibility that he knows this investigation will exonerate the CIA and demonstrate the Obama Administration is the one that came up with the “video” song and dance routine.
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Considering who Speaker Boehner appointed to lead the investigation, it’s fairly safe to say the investigation will happen.