Twenty years ago, when she was a young Foreign Service officer in Moscow, Victoria Nuland gave me a dazzling briefing on the diverse factions inside the Russian parliament. Now she is a friend I typically see a couple times a year, and I have watched her rise, working with everybody from Dick Cheney to Hillary Clinton, serving as ambassador to NATO and now as the spokeswoman at the State Department.
Over the past few weeks, the spotlight has turned on Nuland. The charge is that intelligence officers prepared accurate talking points after the attack in Benghazi, Libya, and that Nuland, serving her political masters, watered them down.
The charges come from two quarters, from Republicans critical of the Obama administration's handling of Benghazi and intelligence officials shifting blame for Benghazi onto the State Department.
It's always odd watching someone you know get turned into a political cartoon. But this case is particularly disturbing because Nuland did nothing wrong.
Let's review the actual events. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was killed on Tuesday, Sept. 11. For this, there is plenty of blame to go around. We now know that Benghazi was primarily a CIA operation. And intelligence officers underestimated how dangerous the situation was.
The next day, Nuland held a background press briefing, a transcript of which is available on the State Department's website. She had two main points. There's a lot we don't know. The attack was conducted by Libyan extremists. She made no claim that it was set off by an anti-Muslim video or arose spontaneously from demonstrations.
On Friday, Sept. 14, David Petraeus, then the director of the CIA, gave a classified briefing to lawmakers in Congress. The lawmakers asked him to provide talking points so they could discuss the event in the news media.
CIA analysts began work on the talking points. The first draft, like every subsequent one, said the Benghazi attacks were spontaneously inspired by protests in Cairo. It also said that extremists with ties to al-Qaida participated.
The CIA analysts quickly scrubbed references to al-Qaida, investigators on Capitol Hill now tell me.
On Friday evening of Sept. 14, the updated talking points were emailed to the relevant officials in various departments, including Nuland. She wondered why the CIA was giving members of Congress talking points that were far more assertive than anything she could say or defend herself. At this point, Nuland's participation in the whole affair ends.
On Saturday morning, a meeting was held at the White House. I'm told the talking points barely came up. Instead, the CIA representative said he would take proactive measures to streamline them. That day, the agency reduced the talking points to the bare nub that Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was given before going on the Sunday talk shows.
Several things were apparently happening. First, each of the players had their hands on a different piece of the elephant. If there was any piece of the talking points that everybody couldn't agree upon, it got cut. Second, the administration proceeded with extreme caution about drawing conclusions. Third, as the memos moved up the CIA chain, the higher officials made them more tepid. Finally, in the absence of a clear narrative, the talking points gravitated toward the least politically problematic story.
Did Victoria Nuland scrub the talking points to serve Clinton or President Barack Obama? That charge is completely unsupported by the evidence. She was caught in a brutal interagency turf war.
The accusations against her are bogus.
David Brooks writes for The New York Times.