Quotes gathered from government emails after the assault on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, indicate that officials were immediately concerned about how to describe the attack — what to say, what not to say and how to say it. The State Department and the White House were far more involved in crafting the Benghazi talking points than they have admitted, NBC News' foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell reported Friday. In the course of 12 separate drafts of talking points, all mention of the possibility of it being a terrorist act was omitted — but kept was a mention of the protests in Cairo as a possible instigation for the Benghazi attack, which left four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, dead. The administration says the back-and-forth between government agencies was part of a turf war, not election-year politics.
