Ruh-roh - looks like Sen. Lindsey "DuBois" Graham may have coordinated illegally with the awful Lara Logan on her Benghazi smear piece. From Media Matters:
While the walls were collapsing around Lara Logan at CBS News last year in the wake of her bungled Benghazi report on 60 Minutes, and as more and more holes appeared in her poorly-sourced report about the terror attack, the foreign correspondent reached out to a Republican senator and fierce White House critic for advice and counsel.
The partisan move, in which Logan solicited help from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) -- who's been professionally committed to pushing the tale of a White House cover-up surrounding the September 11, 2012 terror attacks -- suggests Logan viewed both Benghazi and her spin control mission through a political prism.
Indeed, Logan even met several times with Graham while preparing the initial Benghazi story, according to a new report in New York magazine. The senator did not appear in the 60 Minutes report but when the report aired he immediately took to the television airwaves to tout it as a "death blow" to the Obama administration's telling of the Benghazi attacks and their response to it. In retrospect, this looks suspiciously like coordination: Graham helped shape the Benghazi story with an anti-White House angle and then forcefully cheerled it, even announcing he'd block every White House appointee until he got answers about Benghazi. Once trouble erupted, the senator was naturally there for Logan when she called for help.
(my bold)
http://mediamatters.org/...
Here's a bit more from the New York Magazine article:
Benghazi had been thoroughly politicized from the beginning. But rather than steering clear of the political battle, Logan headed right toward it, consulting with Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a strong critic of the administration’s handling of the incident whom she’d met once in Afghanistan. “I really didn’t know her until she started doing this piece on Benghazi,” he told me.
The two met two or three times to talk about the Libya attack, with Graham telling Logan that from his point of view, it was “a fair thing to say” that there was a “build-up of Al Qaeda types” in the area—a major talking point for the right in arguments that the Obama White House tried covering up alleged terrorist links.
...
At one point, Logan called Graham and asked for help. “She called afterward and basically said, ‘What did he (Dylan Davies, star liar/witness of 60 Min. piece) tell the FBI?’ ” he recalls. “I’ve never seen the FBI interview, but I talked to the No. 2, who is now gone, and he said that he’s looked at the interviews and the guy never mentioned this.”
http://nymag.com/...
My stars, I do believe the Senator has some explaining to do! Now here's a scandal that actually has some legs...
Update 1:
Chris Hayes just teased this story - he'll be covering it shortly on tonight's MSNBC program, All In.
Update 2:
Here's a snippet of what Graham said about the 60 Minutes piece a day after it aired:
Graham called a "60 Minutes" report Sunday a "death blow" to the administration's initial narrative on what sparked the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. mission that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens.
"The '60 Minutes' piece conclusively proved ... that al-Qaida was behind this attack, that they had provided warnings to Washington, all of their additional security requests were ignored, and no one's been held accountable," he said.
http://www.newsmax.com/...
(warning - sooper right wing site)