Weekly Standard writer Stephen Hayes reacted to the release of the Benghazi emails Wednesday on "Hannity."
Chief among the revelations from today's release of 100 Obama administration emails related to Benghazi is there was no mention of a YouTube video at any point, yet it became a central part of Ambassador Rice's case during her appearances on Sunday morning television, Hayes said.
Additionally, Hayes also noted that the emails provide further evidence that changes to the talking points were principally driven by the State Department and not the intelligence community, contradicting testimony by former Secretary Hillary Clinton:
SEAN HANNITY: There's specific references here, like on page 51. "I spoke with Tommy. We'll work through this morning, we'll get comments back," meaning they'll get the comments back from the State Department and White House. Similarly page 47, Victoria Nuland, from the State Department, "these don't resolve all of my issues or those of my building leadership." All of this points to political consideration, when we now know they knew the truth. So the word "cover-up" has to come in to play here. Your reaction.
STEPHEN HAYES: Yeah yeah, look. I think it's very clear that many of the things that the White House told us about the talking points, and told us about the attacks, then told us about this process, are not true. You have to go back and sort of look at this in totality. One of the things that I think is most striking about these documents is that nowhere in the 12 drafts of the talking points was there reference to a YouTube video, and only on page 93 and 94 is there any reference at all to a movie. Those emails, with that reference to a movie, the emails that come out of this deputies committee meeting on Saturday morning where many of these changes were implemented. So I think, you know, that raises additional questions about if -- if all of these people are contributing their ideas, trying to figure out what to tell the American people about what happened in Benghazi, and there aren't any references to the YouTube video in the actual talking points, and nobody in all of this email traffic makes any suggestion that we include this point about the YouTube video, which of course became a central part of the administration's explanation as to what had happened in Benghazi.