Heritage: Honey, I Shrunk the Benghazi Talking Points

The White House release of the e-mail chain regarding the Benghazi talking points on Wednesday has opened up a slew of new questions.
Covering only two days—Friday, September 14 and Saturday, September 15—and focused only on the production of the hapless talking points, they raise the question: What communication took place internally within the government before and after those two days?
And yet what is amply clear is that the production of the talking points, which had been requested by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) in anticipation of media inquiries, became a bureaucratic exercise in protecting the government’s major players. White House and State Department officials involved showed no inclination to want to actually inform the public or the media. Instead, they seemed to be motivated by deflecting blame and protecting the Obama Administration from congressional scrutiny.
Reproduced below are the three major iterations of the talking points. The first reproduction is the initial set produced by the CIA and sent out on September 14 at 2:27 p.m. by its Office of Public Affairs for comment. It is brief but quite informative, mentioning specifically the potential al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Sharia connections in the attack. Read On