Stephen Colbert did a takedown of Jonathan Karl’s bogus Benghazi scoop, and really, of all of us in media, and it was pure Genius.

H/T Crooks and Liars. And I associate myself with Heather’s take. But wait … there’s more!

There’s also Colbert “scandal booth” action on the IRS:

… and here’s part two, featuring Trevor Potter. There’s more substantive information in this segment than in anything you’ve seen in the actual news, sadly, including the fact that technically, tea party groups didn’t even have to apply for their 501(c)4 status.

**UPDATE: Scroll to the bottom of the post (I know it’s long…) for a bit of TRR sleuthing…

The revelation this week that emails provided to key congressional committees by the White House in response to Benghazi-hysteria among Republicans, may have been altered before being leaked to the conservative Weekly Standard and to ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl touched off speculation in at least some media quarters.

At issue, who altered or misrepresented the content of emails from Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting, Ben Rhodes, and from State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, to make the White House and State Department appear to have misled the American people, in a potential Benghazi cover up?

Karl touched off Beltway scandal-fever last Friday when he reported that:

…When it became clear last fall that the CIA’s now discredited Benghazi talking points were flawed, the White House said repeatedly the documents were put together almost entirely by the intelligence community, but White House documents reviewed by Congress suggest a different story.

ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack. [Emphasis added]

Karl went on to report:

White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department.  The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.

That would appear to directly contradict what White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said about the talking points in November.

Here’s what Carl alleged about State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland:

Summaries of White House and State Department emails — some of which were first published by Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard — show that the State Department had extensive input into the editing of the talking points.

State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland raised specific objections to this paragraph drafted by the CIA in its earlier versions of the talking points:

“The Agency has produced numerous pieces on the threat of extremists linked to al-Qa’ida in Benghazi and eastern Libya.  These noted that, since April, there have been at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi by unidentified assailants, including the June attack against the British Ambassador’s convoy. We cannot rule out the individuals has previously surveilled the U.S. facilities, also contributing to the efficacy of the attacks.”

In an email to officials at the White House and the intelligence agencies, State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland took issue with including that information because it “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either?  Concerned …”

The paragraph was entirely deleted.

And then came the all-important link to the White House itself, with a State Department chaser:

In an email dated 9/14/12 at 9:34 p.m. — three days after the attack and two days before Ambassador Rice appeared on the Sunday shows – Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes wrote an email saying the State Department’s concerns needed to be addressed.

“We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don’t want to undermine the FBI investigation.  We thus will work through the talking points tomorrow morning at the Deputies Committee meeting.”

After that meeting, which took place Saturday morning at the White House, the CIA drafted the final version of the talking points – deleting all references to al Qaeda and to the security warnings in Benghazi prior to the attack. [Emphasis added]

It was one hell of a bombshell. Except that it wasn’t true. Karl had not “obtained” any talking points emails at all. And the White House had not been shown to have weighed in on State Department revisions to the talking points that would be provided to Susan Rice, nor did a State Department spokeswoman evince a desire to cover up the true CIA assessment of the threat to the Benghazi compounds, who committed the Benghazi attacks, or why they happened.

The story began to unravel pretty quickly, starting with this “update” posted on the ABC News website under Karl’s story:

UPDATE:  A source familiar with the White House emails on the Benghazi talking point revisions say that State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland was raising two concerns about the CIA’s first version of talking points, which were going to be sent to Congress:  1) The talking points went further than what she was allowed to say about the attack during her state department briefings; and, 2) she believed the CIA was attempting to exonerate itself at the State Department’s expense by suggesting CIA warnings about the security situation were ignored.

In one email, Nuland asked, why are we suggest Congress “start making assertions to the media [about the al Qaeda connection] that we ourselves are not making because we don’t want to prejudice the investigation?”

One other point:  The significant edits – deleting references to al Qaeda and the CIA’s warnings – came after a White House meeting on the Saturday before Ambassador Susan Rice appeared on five Sunday shows.  Nuland, a 30-year foreign service veteran who has served under Democratic and Republican Secretaries of State, was not at that meeting and played no direct role in preparing Rice for her interviews.

Oh, so maybe the “emails” didn’t show the nefarious intent implied by the original story …

And then, it got worse.

CNN (of all outlets, given their recent history …) debunked Karl’s story altogether days later, after Jake Tapper, a former ABC News reporter and the current main-man at the Turner outlet, obtaining copies of the actual emails — not the “detailed summaries” of emails that it turns out Karl had used in his reporting.

The two-car pile-up soon included CBS News:

On Friday, Republicans leaked what they said was a quote from Rhodes: “We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don’t want to undermine the FBI investigation.”

But it turns out that in the actual email, Rhodes did not mention the State Department.

It read: “We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation.”

And…

The Republican version quotes Nuland discussing, “The penultimate point is a paragraph talking about all the previous warnings provided by the Agency (CIA) about al-Qaeda’s presence and activities of al-Qaeda.”

The actual email from Nuland says: “The penultimate point could be abused by members to beat the State Department for not paying attention to Agency warnings.”

In other words, this particular conspiracy theory is short a conspiracy.

It’s all a little bit ironic, given that CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson had reported on the bogus “emails” too… But that’s showbiz in Newsland.

Finally, in a “please proceed, governor“ moment, the White House released the more than 100 Benghazi emails on Wednesday, making the disparity between the ABC and Weekly Standard reports and the actual content crystal clear.

So far, few repercussions for ABC

Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, few in the mainstream media — who have gone ham over the supposed trio of “White House scandals” involving the Benghazi talking points, the IRS screening of 501(c)4 applicants between 2010 and 2012, and the investigation into a leak regarding a CIA operation to disrupt al-Qaida, which resulted in the Justice Department reviewing the phone records of something like 100 Associated Press journalists — have shown much interest in what happened here, despite what sure looks like a case of deliberate misinformation fed to news outlets by government officials, for the purposes of injecting a scandal narrative into the mainstream news cycle.

In fact, it has only been liberals in the media: including Salon.com, Rachel Maddow at MSNBC (who went directly at that point on her show on Friday, as reported by Tommy Christopher at the otherwise conservative Mediaite) who have been beating the drum on this story… This from Tommy’s most recent post on the matter:

It is in this context that Rachel Maddow ripped ABC News, describing hoe the Benghazi “scandal” had failed to gain any traction until “This time last week, ABC news blew this story wide open,” adding “When I say they blew this story, I mean seriously, they totally blew it.”

she played a clip of Diane Sawyer hyping Jon Karl’s report. “ABC’s Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl broke the story that created a storm today,” Sawyer said.

“He did create a storm,” Maddow said. “The ABC report caused all three network newscasts to report on the scandal of Benghazi,” and added that “then Sunday morning, oh, boy, all four Sunday morning talk shows. ABC and NBC and CBS and Fox News Sunday, all leading with Benghazi.”

“Wow, thanks, Jonathan Karl. Thanks, ABC. Now this is the biggest story in the country because of the damning e-mails that ABC News said it had obtained,” Maddow said, sarcastically, and if you don’t trust Maddow’s assessment of the significance of the invented quotes, then check out Major Garrett‘s.

Clearly, what’s at issue is Karl’s claim to have “obtained” the emails relating to the Benghazi talking points, when what he actually obtained were “detailed notes” summarizing the emails , from a “Republican source.” And the fact that the source appears to have added things to the email content that weren’t originally there.

Shouldn’t we kind of want to know who that source (or sources) was (or were), in case they have more false information to peddle to members of the press?

Karl’s source could be anybody on the Hill, but in a sense, the scope of possibilities for the identity of his source is relatively narrow, since only a finite number of Republican members of congress and their senior staff members would have seen the original emails, and taken detailed notes on them, before the White House released the 100 or so emails this week.

The timeline…

The Benghazi attack took place on September 11, 2012. Four Americans were killed in the twin, armed assaults on a diplomatic compound and a CIA facility in the Libyan town, including the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens.

September 16 - U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice appears on several Sunday talk shows, explaining what the administration knew up to that point about the attacks, which she indicates were believed by U.S. intelligence to have been related to protests around the Muslim world against an offensive video produced by a Coptic-American, called “Innocence of the Muslims.” That assessment, which came from the CIA, turned out to be inaccurate. And while the president soon termed the Benghazi attack an “act of terror,” Republicans pounced on him for not using their preferred term, “terrorist attack” – and for the fact that Rice didn’t name the al-Qaida affiliated group believed to be responsible for the attacks — Ansar-al-Sharia — on those Sunday shows.

September 2012 -January 2013 – It wasn’t long before conservatives were politicizing it, with the RNC even producing a Benghazi “3 a.m. phone call” TV ad that the Romney campaign turned down in the closing weeks of the presidential campaign. More than a few Republicans, including veterans of his campaign, believe Romney lost the election because he failed to capitalize on Benghazi as a way to get out the Republican base vote.

February 21-22, 2013 — The White House agrees to provide to lawmakers on Capitol Hill, its chain of email traffic related to the talking points on the Benghazi attacks that were provided to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice ahead of her appearance on several Sunday talk shows last fall. Arizona Sen. John McCain and South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham had declared themselves “hell bent” on viewing the emails detailing what Rice was told before her talk show appearances. The GOP’s hope: that the emails would yield a “smoking gun” proving the White House covered up its true knowledge about who was behind the Benghazi attack, to abet President Obama’s re-election. (Sen. Rand Paul filibustered Brennan’s nomination anyway, on a different issue: drones, on March 6th.)

February 25, 2013 — According to a senior administration source, the General Counsel to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Robert Litt, conducted a briefing for members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (chaired by Sen. Dianne Feinstein), their staff directors, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Senate “Ranking Member,” presumably Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and their “key staff.” Per the administration source, “the briefing walked members through the email traffic showing the development of the [Benghazi] talking points and also identified the changes that were made to each iteration of the talking points and the agency that suggested the change.  Members and staff were told that they had as much time as they needed to sit with the emails and were allowed to take notes.”

Below is the full list of the committee members from both parties:

2013-2014 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, members:
Democrats		Republicans
	Dianne Feinstein, California Chairman		Saxby Chambliss, Georgia Vice Chairman
	John D. Rockefeller IV, West Virginia		Richard Burr, North Carolina
	Ron Wyden, Oregon		James E. Risch, Idaho
	Barbara A. Mikulski, Maryland		Daniel Coats, Indiana
	Mark Udall, Colorado		Marco Rubio, Florida
	Mark Warner, Virginia		Susan Collins, Maine
	Martin Heinrich, New Mexico		Tom Coburn, Oklahoma
	Angus King, Maine

According to Salon.com’s Alex Seitz-Wald, Chambliss and Burr definitely attended the briefing. It’s not clear which other members of the committee were present.

February 27 - The same briefing is offered to members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), House Speaker John Boehner and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. According to the administration source, the briefing never happens, because “House committee members cancelled on us two times and then eventually went forward on March 19th.”

March 7 – After the Rand Paul 13-hour filibuster ends, John Brennan is confirmed by the Senate as CIA director. No members of the Senate Intelligence Committee raise the Benghazi emails as an impediment to Brennan’s confirmation. In fact, Paul’s filibuster was about the absurd suggestion that drones might be used on American soil to kill the president’s enemies, not about Benghazi.

March 19 – The Litt briefing with HPSCI members finally takes place. And as Seitz-Wald reported, Speaker Boehner didn’t even bother to attend, or send senior staff. Again quoting the administration source: “The briefing walked members and staff through the chronology of email traffic and identified the changes that were made to each iteration of the talking points as well as the agency that suggested the change.  Members and staff were told that they had as much time as they needed to sit with the documents and were allowed to take notes.”

May 6 – Stephen Hayes posts his story on the magazine’s website alleging White House involvement in editing the talking points. Hayes claimed that per the “emails” he obtained, “fresh evidence emerged that senior Obama administration officials knowingly misled the country about what had happened in the days following the assaults.”

May 7 – The Senate Foreign Relations Committee holds a hearing to consider the nomination of Deborah K. Jones to replace the late Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was killed in the Benghazi attacks on September 11, 2012. That same day, Senator Lindsey Graham predicts that a much-anticipated hearing the following day, in the House, would be a “turning point” for the Benghazi story.

May 8 – The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, led by relentless Obama-hunter Rep. Darrell Issa of California, holds its long-awaited (by conservatives) Benghazi hearings, featuring the deputy chief of mission for the U.S. in Libya at the time of the attacks, Gregory Hicks, the Republicans’ chief “whistle-blower,” who they claimed had been “intimidated” by the White House and/or the State Department to prevent his testimony from seeing the light of day. The hearings, which produced little new information, prompted wall-to-wall coverage from Fox News, and even congratulations to Fox from Senate Intelligence Committee member, and ubiquitous Republican TV presence Marco Rubio. Rubio high fives Fox for “Keeping on” the Benghazi issue, adding that he believes the White House tried to…

…cover up “any reference to terrorism” because of political motivations during an election year.

“What I think is sad is how many people that are around the administration — including the former secretary of state, Secretary Clinton — knew this to be the case and allowed this to move forward anyway,” he remarked. “You would have hoped that people would have stood up and said, ‘This is wrong, the American people deserve the truth.’ That didn’t happen.”

The Senate Foreign Relations committee, on which Rubio sits, had held its own Benghazi hearings in late January, during which Republican attempts to skewer former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton didn’t go so well... And the Senate Armed Services Committee had held its own Benghazi hearings on February 7th, which also failed to yield blockbuster mainstream news.

May 10 – Jonathan Karl’s big story making the same allegations as Hayes’ — that the White House weighed in on State Department requests to edit Benghazi talking points — goes live. It is quickly picked up by other mainstream media outlets. CBS News reporter Sharyl Atkisson does a version of the story too, though she avoids attributing the supposed “emails” to a specific individual in the White House or State Department.

May 14 – CNN’s Jake Tapper debunks Karl’s story. (Karl eventually blames his faulty reporting on … who else … the White House.)

May 15 – The White House releases 100 pages of the actual emails in the Benghazi talking points saga. As CNN and later CBS reported, the actual contents of the Rhodes and Nuland emails contradict Hayes, Carl’s and Atkisson’s reporting. House Republicans have since declared themselves “not satisfied” — clearly hoping additional emails, which it’s not even clear exist, will contain that long awaited “smoking gun…”

Bad note takers, or bad actors…?

So we know that the administration did not distribute the actual emails to members of the House and Senate leadership and the relevant committees, but that the members and/or their staffs were allowed to take copious notes, for as long as they wished, while being briefed on and viewing the emails in February and March.

And we know that someone leaked their notes about the emails to the Weekly Standard, and to ABC, but as has now emerged, with altered, or at minimum incorrect, information included.

How likely is it that in a situation where they were not being rushed, and had plenty of time to take very detailed notes, that someone who participated in one of those briefings, inadvertently added erroneous information to their recollection of what was in the Ben Rhodes email? How likely does it seem that someone just plain goofed, and accidentally mis-recorded information that implicated the White House and State Department in allegedly doctoring the talking points for Rice (and for members of Congress, we often forget, because the talking points were for them too) in a way that benefited the White House politically?

Is it plausible that House and Senate members or staffers who have had their notes on those talking points emails in their possession for months, suddenly came across damning new information about the White House and State Department such that they felt compelled to leak it to Hayes and Karl last week? Well of course that’s highly unlikely. So doesn’t that indicate that the doctoring may have been deliberate?

Of course, I suppose it’s possible that Karl simply misinterpreted what he was being told by his Republican source … although that would mean he misinterpreted the information in precisely the same way Stephen Hayes and the CBS reporter did …

And it can’t be said enough that THE “smoking gun” implicating the White House in a supposed Benghazi coverup, came from these two emails that Karl claimed he had reviewed, when in fact, what he actually saw or was read, were “detailed notes” — containing made up information — from a “Republican source.”

A motive to mislead?

So why, theoretically, would a Republican member or someone on their staff knowingly put wrong information into the hands of a reporter at ABC News?

If we go on the assumption that it was deliberate, one explanation could be that the right has finally learned a lesson, in the wake of Romney’s loss in 2012 and how blindsided they all were by it, about the limits to the efficacy of conservative media outside the right wing bubble.

Again, the faulty email notes were first given to Stephen Hayes at the conservative Weekly Standard. And Fox News, and Breitbart, and the Daily Caller and RedState and every other right wing outlet have been banging on about Benghazi since well before the election.

It certainly has worked among the right wing Republican base, where some in the online fringe have taken to calling President Obama “The Butcher of Benghazi” — and floating wild conspiracy theories that the president deliberately ordered the military to stand down and not protect the ambassador; or that the Joint Special Operations Command’s decision not to send two additional special forces troops to the compound, or to fly F-16s over the compound because they couldn’t make it in time is itself either a lie, or part of the “cover-up” … that the entire Benghazi presence was part of a secret CIA program to arm Syrian rebels (Rand Paul’s favorite) … or even that Obama watched the entire attack on a non-existent video feed. (Get more of the right’s favorite Benghazi conspiracy theories here.)

None of it got the story the national legs the GOP base so desperately craved.

Even multiple congressional hearings, which produced epic sound bites from GOP stars like Rand Paul and firebrands like Issa “taking it to the administration” have failed to give the “Benghazigate” meme sufficient lift-off to move it from the fever swamps of the right, and into the realm where Independents start to grasp it, and Democrats start to flee for the woods.

Republicans needed a mainstream outlet to do the story, and go big with it. And so they needed to give a mainstream outlet — not Fox News, but rather one of the Big Three networks — a scoop; one so big, the other networks would have to report on it too.

Enter Jonathan Karl, ABC News’ White House correspondent and a frequent jouster with the president at press briefings (whatever the assumptions about his ideology — which I’ve been pointed to several times by TRR readers — probably being far less important than his MSM street cred.) His reporting, as Rachel Maddow said on Friday, blew the story into the mainstream media universe.

Score one for Republicans who have been desperate to get Benghazi covered on a grand scale. And paired up with IRS and AP? It was like conservative manna from Heaven.

Whodunnit?

Maddow and others are calling on Karl to give up his source, since it appears he was used to transmit false information in order to plant the seeds of a media scandal. I doubt he will do that, both because it’s not in the nature of a journalist, especially in the small, cruel world that is Washington, to burn a source — even a bad one. Every political source has friends. And every reporter needs sources with friends.

The fact is, it will ultimately be up to good old fashioned sleuthing (or another, timely leak…) to figure out who fed bogus information to ABC and TWS. And my own sources say there is a fair amount of nervousness among Republican staffers on Capitol Hill right now over this potential story. So no one’s taking the risk of losing their jobs by talking.

So who could the leaker be?

The House Intelligence Committee is chaired by Mike Rogers of Michigan, who reports say is under consideration to be the next FBI director. It’s not clear whether he attended the briefing, but it would be really shocking if Rogers or his staff double-dealt the White House in that manner (though it’s Washington, so you never know…)

Speaker Boehner, as reported above, didn’t attend the House intelligence briefing or send staff, so it seems pretty unlikely that he or his staff had direct access to the “detailed notes” passed on to Hayes and Carl. Although, Politico did report that Boehner is “obsessed” with Benghazi. Could he or his staff have gotten their hands on those notes anyway?

The Senate got the briefing first, and had it the longest, so could a Republican on the SPSCI or their senior staffers could be the culprit?

Could Marco Rubio’s staffers have been looking to up the would be Republican savior’s chances against Hillary Clinton in 2016?

Could this be yet another Tom Coburn double cross of his supposed friend, President Obama?

The House had the hearings most concurrent to the leak, and the leak amplified the drama they worked very hard to create… So could Michelle Bachmann (who is inexplicably, a member of the House Intelligence Committee) have a staffer with a penchant for note-leaking? Or what about New York Republican Peter King?

Or could it be a less well known member, or even someone on a totally different committee?

The bottom line, as one source very familiar with the workings of Capitol Hill told me this week, is that it’s unlikely that any staffer would “go rogue” and do something like this on their own, without the direction or knowledge of their member. The level of staff who would have been invited to those briefings is quite high — probably the chief of staff and very little beyond that. Anything is possible, of course, and the source could indeed be an elected official … or not …

So who dunnit?

Inquiring minds want to know.

UPDATE: A very trusted source of mine gave me a cryptic piece of advice yesterday, which was to take a look at the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs. I didn’t know quite what to make of it at the time, but tonight it occurred to me: could someone on that committee also have been on the Select Committee on Intelligence, which is the one that got the email briefing in February?

Here’s the Republican membership of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee (the Committee is chaired by Democrat Thom Carper of Delaware):

• Tom Coburn,  (OK) Ranking Member
• John McCain (AZ)
• Ron Johnson (WI)
• Rob Portman (OH)
• Rand Paul (KY)
• Mike Enzi (WY)
• Kelly Ayotte (NH)

Pretty juicy list! Note how stacked the minority side of the committee is with presidential aspirants, potential aspirants, a former aspirant, and some of the most hardcore tea party Senators, including some, like Rand Paul, John McCain and Kelly Ayotte, who have gone after, first Susan Rice, and then Hillary Clinton guns blazing on Benghazi. But only one of those Senators ALSO sits on the Select Committee on Intelligence — which is the one that my administration source says got the February briefing”

And that person is Tom Coburn.

Now, what makes Coburn interesting?

On May 9th — literally the day before Jonathan Karl’s “bombshell” report went live, Coburn appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, with his old pal and fellow House of Representatives class of 1994 alumnus (and my work colleague) Joe Scarborough (Coburn left the House in 2000, per a term limits pledge, and then ran successfully for the Senate in 2004. He announced this year that he would be retiring when his term ends in 2016.) Coburn talked about his failed “tote your gun on federal land” amendment to an unrelated bill, and about Benghazi, among other topics. And and what he had to say on Benghazi was interesting indeed (per the conservative Washington Times):

Sen. Tom Coburn said Thursday that the State Department has “real trouble” because of “glaring omission” in the information that it turned over to lawmakers in relation to the attacks in Benghazi that led to the death of a U.S. ambassador and three others at a consulate in Libya.

“I think the State Department has real trouble,” Mr. Coburn, a member of the Senate intelligence committee, said during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

“Having sat on the intelligence committee and seen the review of emails that went back and forth as they developed the list, there is are glaring problem there that will eventually come out, and I can’t talk about now, but there was an omission that was given to the intelligence committee,” he said. [Emphasis added]

Asked by Mika and Joe to elaborate, Coburn said he “can’t talk about it and keep my obligation,” but he promised that it “will come out.”

Here’s the portion of the May 9 segment. The video has been cued to the relevant timecode:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

So what “glaring omission,” related to the State Department, and to the emails that were shown to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, on which Coburn sits, and for which he appears to have said on MSNBC he attended the Benghazi email briefings in February, was Senator Coburn talking about? Did he know about the Karl revelations to come the following day (false as they turned out to be…)? If so, how did he know??? Could be nothing, could be something…

UPDATE 2: Now just by way of additional clarification, this doesn’t mean that Coburn is necessarily Jonathan Karl’s source (though it doesn’t rule him out, either.) But it is intriguing, in that it calls into question whether Coburn saw the Karl version of the Rhodes and Nuland emails, which contained information that would not have been in the emails he reviewed during the ODNI Intelligence Committee briefing in February. A “glaring omission” could mean that he was being shown content in the “new” Rhodes and Nuland emails that was “missing” in February, and that he viewed the “new” information as having been “omitted” by State or the White House, rather than viewing the “new” information as the fabrication it was.

Now, of course, that would beg the question, if this is the case, and Coburn’s secret “glaring omission” had to do with the Karl bombshell, who showed him the “emails”/summaries? It wouldn’t make sense that it would be Karl. Why would he? So was it the leaker? And is the leaker, therefore, close to Coburn? Well how close? A colleague? A Staffer? The man in the mirror?

Tick tock…

UPDATE 3: Jonathan Karl apologized on Twitter for mischaracterizing the Ben Rhodes email, and for not making it clear his reporting was from summaries, not actual emails.

But then a funny thing happens: he stands by the fundamentals of his story. Huh. From  the Huffington Post:

On Sunday’s “Reliable Sources,” Howard Kurtz relayed a statement from the ABC News correspondent: “Clearly, I regret the email was quoted incorrectly and I regret that it’s become a distraction from the story, which still entirely stands. I should have been clearer about the attribution. We updated our story immediately.”

Two problems with that.

1. The original story does not in fact, stand. Because the “news” in the original story was that Ben Rhodes, who works for the White House, weighed in, on behalf of said White House, to support a State Department spin on the Benghazi talking points. That was all that was newsworthy in Karl’s report. But since Ben Rhodes never mentioned the State Department in his email — that was the entirely made up part of the “email” Karl claimed in his reporting to have “obtained” and that his news organization supposedly “reviewed” — the guts of the Karl story were false. Like, totally false. And worse, they were either deliberately planted falsehoods fed to Karl by his source … or Karl totally misinterpreted what he was told, in a way that created news where there was one. If Karl is absolving his source, and saying essentially that HE put that “state department” bit into Rhodes’ email himself, through his own error, then he has no business covering this story. He probably has no business working in news.

2. Karl’s report said that ABC exclusively “obtained” and “reviewed” the emails. That was the selling point of the story. Karl has apologized for making it appear he’d seen the emails, rather than the summaries, and that’s appropriate. But it doesn’t end the problem, or the story, as far as I’m concerned. Actually, it just makes me more curious. Namely, why would Karl’s bosses clear a story based on emails that neither Karl nor his editors ever saw? I know I’d never get a story like that approved. Doesn’t it seem likely, as @only4rm and others have pointed out, that the only way a big, risk-averse corporate news operation would EVER run with a story based on summaries of unseen emails, would be if the source was someone pretty high ranking, and trusted. So Karl’s defense implies that the source was a Republican member of Congress, or someone very senior on their staff, is he not?

3. As Jay Rosen and others have pointed out, the White House affirmatively accused Congressional Republicans of FABRICATING the emails in Karl’s report. Fabricating. Not misinterpreting. At this point, Jonathan Karl is covering for someone on the Hill who deliberately fabricated emails in order to plant a false story with a major media outlet. There’s no reason why, if he was simply misled by someone, that he should do that. I still predict he won’t burn his source — probably, again, because it’s a member of Congress or their senior staffer — but I’m increasingly in the camp that says maybe he should.

More Rosen:

When a confidential source burns a reporter, a reporter is within his rights to burn–that is, “out”–that source. But it almost never happens because reporters are concerned that potential sources will take it as a sign that the reporter cannot be trusted to keep their names secret. That’s bad enough. But this is worse. Karl had a chance to limit the damage to ABC News from his faulty reporting when he first responded to Jake Tapper’s report. He blew that. Inexplicably, an ABC News spokesperson then doubled down on Karl’s original reporting: strike two. They had a chance to recover by asking Karl to explain how he got misled on This Week. They blew that when they chickened out and asked Jeff Zeleny to appear instead.

In other words, the Jonathan Karl problem is now officially an ABC News problem. But the other issue for Karl, is that going forward, if he is still defending a bogus story, one begins to wonder if he’s more of a partisan than I initially felt comfortable speculating about. It also begs the question of whether when, in the future, Mr. Karl reports that a “source on Capitol Hill tells ABC” something, we should trust the story as real, as opposed to planted by opponents of the president.

Karl can fix all of that, and so can ABC. They can just tell us who gave that bogus information to their chief White House correspondent.

Mr. Coburn, anything to add?

UPDATE 4: Salon’s Adam Seitz-Wald has a good timeline of ABC’s response to their Benghazi “emails” problem. And Joan Walsh writes that Karl and ABC have only made things worse for themselves, not better.

Cartoon by Jim Morin (see Jim’s work here)

This week, I agree with those on the right who want to investigate the IRS for abuse of Americans when it comes to how it treats tax exempt status for organizations. So … can we start with what the Bush-era IRS did to the NAACP???

A clip:

I’m all for a thoroughgoing investigation of the Internal Revenue Service. Perhaps by a blue ribbon panel. Or maybe Rep. Darrell Issa could take some time off scouring Infowars for Benghazi “revelations” to have his committee look into it.

But any review of the IRS should not begin and end with the Tea Party. Shouldn’t we also want to know:

• Whether the IRS resumed the nefarious politicized practices of the Nixon era when in 2004 under then commissioner Mark W. Everson, it targeted the NAACP for an intrusive, two-year audit, which could have resulted in the loss of its 501(c)3 tax exempt status. The IRS at the time pegged the audit to criticism of then President Bush and the Iraq war by former NAACP chairman Julian Bond.

• Was the 2004 audit part of a pattern of harassment of the civil rights organization by the Bush-appointed commissioner, or his predecessor, Charles O. Rossotti, dating back to December 2000? At the time, a half dozen members of Congress, including Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, wrote to the commissioner to complain about NAACP leaders who were critical of the Supreme Court decision on the presidential election that favored the majority’s preferred candidate, George W. Bush. They also asked the agency to review, or revoke, the NAACP’s tax exempt status.

• Did the IRS respond to the St. Louis Tea Party’s 2010 call for the IRS to strip the NAACP of its 501(c)3 for passing a resolution calling on the tea party movement to repudiate any racists in their midst?

• What was behind the IRS’ 2006 hiring of a private contractor to inquire into the political affiliation of Americans in 20 states, including Florida, and the District of Columbia, which Sen. Party Murray, D-Wash., called “an outrageous violation of the public trust?”

• Who ordered the IRS probe of All Saints Episcopal Church, one of Southern California’s largest liberal congregations, which received an IRS warning letter in 2004 after its former rector delivered a sermon opposing the Iraq war?

• And most importantly, what is behind the IRS policy of so loosely interpreting its own regulations, that clearly political entities like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, the Republican political consultant-run Tea Party Express, and the Democratic-leaning Priorities USA, can operate as “social welfare organizations,” obtaining what amounts to a taxpayer subsidy for their blatantly political activities via this preferred tax status?

These groups collectively spent $1 billion in the last presidential election, 70 percent by conservative groups opposed to President Obama’s reelection, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. What form of social welfare were they promoting, exactly, and why should taxpayers subsidize their political speech?

Read the rest here.

Gallup (ok, it’s Gallup… ) found in 2010 that 78 percent tea partiers self-identified as  Republicans (62 percent “conservative Republicans,” 16 percent “moderate/liberal Republicans…”

Tea party support is 9 in 10 among Republicans … less than 50 percent among everybody else. From an ABC-commissioned poll in April 2012:

Within the Republican Party, Tea Party support peaks at 88 percent among conservative Republicans, with 32 percent “strongly” supportive. That declines to 69 percent of Republicans who do not describe themselves as “very” conservative – and notably, in this group, just 16 percent are strong Tea Party supporters. The movement also is backed by 64 percent of evangelical white Protestants.

Support is much lower outside the GOP and in non-conservative groups – 44 percent among independents, 40 percent among white Protestants who are not evangelical, 37 percent among moderates, 19 percent among Democrats and 18 percent among liberals.

They make up HALF of the Republican base…

Republicans are now reliant on the Tea Party. While the number of Tea Party supporters has declined since 2010, they still make up around half of Republicans, according to NBC/Wall Street Journal surveys. More important, they are the most active supporters when it comes to voting in primaries, volunteering on campaigns, and participating in various other activities political parties are reliant upon. Seventy-three percent of Republicans who attended a political rally or meeting identified with the Tea Party. The activists are vehemently anti-Democratic. Among the FreedomWorks sample, only 3 percent of people voted for Obama or a Democratic House candidate in 2008, and less than 6 percent identify as either independents or Democrats.

The biggest, most lucrative “tea party” groups (like Tea Party Express) are actually run by Republican consultants …

In August 2008, as the right wing of the Republican Party grew increasingly disenchanted with the party’s direction, the men from Russo, Marsh and Associates sensed opportunity: They created a political action committee, Our Country Deserves Better, and in time launched the Tea Party Express. Russo, Marsh — an established California outfit of Republican consultants — was just getting started. The firm formed a second political committee, this one with a pro-military agenda. And eventually, seizing on the president’s unpopularity in certain circles, it opened a third, the Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama.

And they’re making a lot of money starting numerous 501(c)4 groups…

Throughout the 2012 election cycle, the committees were relentless. In email after email, they pleaded for small donations to run ads supporting candidates who would defeat President Obama’s “socialist” agenda. And it worked: The committees collected more than $14 million in donations — from all over the country, and from donors who gave as little as $10 to elect Ted Cruz as a Republican senator from Texas or to put Mitt Romney in the White House.

Yet an examination of the PACs’ expenditures shows they spent only a small percentage of the money they raised on work directly aimed at getting candidates elected — paid ads, say, or contributions to other political committees. Mainly, they paid consultants. And the biggest chunk of that consultant money went to Russo, Marsh, and Associates, and people connected to the firm.

Of the $9.3 million spent by Our Country Deserves Better, more than $3.8 million went to Russo, Marsh, and Associates, employees or others connected to the firm. Of the $3.9 million spent by the Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama, $2.4 million went to the firm and its associates. The pro-military Move America Forward Freedom PAC spent almost $143,000. Of that, $92,000 went to the firm and people connected to it.

Even odious Pat Caddell thinks the consultants running most tea party groups are “racketeers…” I wonder if he includes in that analysis, the Koch brothers, who essentially are the founding fathers of the so-called “tea party…”

A new academic study confirms that front groups with longstanding ties to the tobacco industry and the billionaire Koch brothers planned the formation of the Tea Party movement more than a decade before it exploded onto the U.S. political scene.

Far from a genuine grassroots uprising, this astroturf effort was curated by wealthy industrialists years in advance. Many of the anti-science operatives who defended cigarettes are currently deploying their tobacco-inspired playbook internationally to evade accountability for the fossil fuel industry’s role in driving climate disruption.

The study, funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institute of Health, traces the roots of the Tea Party’s anti-tax movement back to the early 1980s when tobacco companies began to invest in third party groups to fight excise taxes on cigarettes, as well as health studies finding a link between cancer and secondhand cigarette smoke.

Published in the peer-reviewed academic journal, Tobacco Control, the study titled, ‘To quarterback behind the scenes, third party efforts’: the tobacco industry and the Tea Party, is not just an historical account of activities in a bygone era. As senior author, Stanton Glantz, a University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) professor of medicine, writes:

“Nonprofit organizations associated with the Tea Party have longstanding ties to tobacco companies, and continue to advocate on behalf of the tobacco industry’s anti-tax, anti-regulation agenda.”

The two main organizations identified in the UCSF Quarterback study are Americans for Prosperity and Freedomworks. Both groups are now “supporting the tobacco companies’ political agenda by mobilizing local Tea Party opposition to tobacco taxes and smoke-free laws.”

Sometimes, the politicians, including retired congressman Dick Armey, make a LOT of money being “tea party” leaders…

One thing tea party groups are not? They’re not “social welfare organizations...”

Social welfare organizations have a couple of neat advantages. They’re tax-exempt — which means, in effect, that your tax dollars subsidize them. And thanks to a 1958 court case, they don’t have to disclose their donors.

But they’re not meant to be political. A 2003 IRS document says that “organizations that promote social welfare should primarily promote the common good and general welfare of the people of the community as a whole.” It goes on to give pages and pages of examples. “A corporation organized for the purpose of rehabilitating and placing unemployed persons over a stated age,” for instance. Or “a corporation formed to provide a school district with a stadium.” “A memorial association organized to study and develop methods of achieving simplicity and dignity in funeral and memorial services,” qualifies, as does “an organization that conducts an annual festival centered around regional customs and traditions.”

Nowhere does the IRS mention “an organization formed by top political operatives for the clear and obvious purpose of reelecting or defeating the president.” But that’s what 501(c)4s have become. According to data collected by OpenSecrets.org, 501(c)4s spent $92 million in the 2010 election. They spent $254 million in the 2012 election. That’s a lot of social welfare going to the good people who live in swing states and competitive districts.

The 501(c)4s aren’t superPACs. But many superPACs also have a 501(c)4. The reason? The 501(c)4s keep donors anonymous. “The only reason to have two of these is if you wanted to have one that allows people and entities to avoid disclosure,” explains Rick Hasen, an election-law expert at the University of California at Irvine.

The culprit here is partly the Citizens United and SpeechNow decisions which lifted the contribution limits on wealthy individuals, corporations, and unions. But it’s also the IRS’s reticence to regulate the murky world of 501(c)4s — a reticence partly attributable to the organization’s fear of blow-ups just like this one.

Karl Rove wasn’t the first to try to use the 501(c)4 to solicit anonymous political donations. But he was the first big player to do it. And the expectation was that he’d had a clever idea that the IRS would quickly reject. “A lot of people thought Rove would get smacked back by the IRS,” says Hasen. “It didn’t happen. And then 501(c)4s exploded.”

And you know what? Even some TEA PARTIERS have figured out that the easy access to 501(c)4 status is being abused by political consultants, who have been springing up literally hundreds of supposed “tea party” groups around the country:

The New Hampshire Tea Party Coalition says that the Internal Revenue Service shouldn’t be targeting conservative groups that seek tax-exempt status but that groups falsely laying claim to the tea party mantle have invited it upon themselves.

“While we decry the practice of using the IRS to target anyone, we have not been subject to this scrutiny because we as the original movement do not collect/distribute or deal with money,” Jane Aitken of the NHTPC said in an email blast. “Many of the groups in question are GOP PACs founded by GOP consultants calling themselves ‘tea parties.’”

In a related blog post titled “Legitimate Tea Party Groups Have Nothing to Fear From the IRS,” the NHTPC took direct aim at the Tea Party Patriots, Tea Party Express, TheTeaparty.net and Tea Party Nation, saying that those groups “had little or nothing to do with the formation of the legislative tea party movement in 2007.”

“When you donate to them, you may as well be donating to the very GOP candidates that have turned their backs on you,” the NHTPC blog post said. “At the very least, the money is going straight to GOP lobbyists, consultants, and a full slate of employees.”

That’s why the IRS office in charge of the designation was concerned about fraud. Were they right to use an algorithm to target people with “tea party” in their name? No. But did they have a legitimate reason to wonder whether the sudden upsurge in “tea party” 501(c)4s seemed suspicious, so maybe they should make sure there was no fraud going on? Yes.

Here’s the clip from Wednesday’s Politics Nation, in which I appeared with Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton and the Rev.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

And by the way …

The reason Mike Huckabee and company keep bringing up Watergate? It’s because if they can swing it, they think they can use Benghazi to impeach President Obama.

Related: Here’s what we learned from the hearing.

My sentiments are echoed by The Week’s Marc Ambinder.

And Mother Jones gets you up to date with all the latest right wing Benghazi conspiracy theories right here.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Part two after the jump …

In part two, we discussed gay rights, and Jason Collins, after David Gregory interviewed NFL player and LGBT rights activist Brendan Ayenbadejo (who was also a 2013 Grio’s 100 nominee!)

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Photo from Z Magazine

They aren’t going to secede …

A clip from this week’s column:

There have been so many essays written dissecting the state of conservatism, the notion that it is in decline has become cliché. But decline doesn’t mean disappearance.

The political place where most conservatives live, the Republican Party, is overrun with the deeply unpopular Tea Party, whose obsession with slashing government programs has locked the country in an austerity clench, which only the well-to-do airline traveler is apparently allowed to escape, thanks to the various footmen and coachmen to the ruling class who inhabit the United States Congress.

Not so, the kid in Head Start, or the senior who relies on Meals on Wheels, or the chronically unemployed dad struggling to feed his kids without unemployment assistance or job prospects. They will suffer the sequester’s full wrath.

The expansion of Medicare under the Affordable Care Act is being blocked by a slew of Republican governors, mostly in the poorest states, in the American South, which means they will continue to lead the nation in such un-First-World-like vestiges as child poverty, while states like North Carolina are following Florida down the path of humiliation through drug testing for people forced to rely on public assistance.

When Republican-controlled state legislatures aren’t passing draconian laws punishing the poor, or attempting to force women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, even in the case of rape, they’re attacking voting rights — the better to prevent the targets of legislative cruelty from exacting revenge in the next election.

Read more at the Miami Herald.

President Obama reiterated in his press conference today that the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay is a terrible idea, counterproductive to U.S. national security, and should be closed. He also said that he will continue to pursue doing so. That prompted the now familiar chorus of liberal Obama critics to denounce the president for “failing to keep his promise to close Gitmo.” As if it’s that simple.

Two days after his inauguration, President Barack Obama signed three executive orders, the first of which called for the closure within one year of the George W. Bush-created prison at Guantanamo Bay. Five months later, on May 20th, Congress choked off that possibility, by doing what Congress does: they passed a law.

H.R. 2346, introduced as Senate Amendment 1136 by Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, had the following purpose:

To limit the release of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, pending a report on the prisoner population at the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.

It passed by a vote of 92 to 3, with four Senators not voting: Democrats Ted Kennedy, Robert Byrd, Jay Rockefeller and Republican Orrin Hatch. Every other Democrat in the Senate voted for it, including liberal stalwarts like Bernie Sanders, Sherrod Brown, and Russ Feingold. In fact, the only Democrats who DIDN’T vote to keep Gitmo open were Dick Durbin, President Obama’s fellow Illinoian, Patrick Leahy of Vermont and good old Roland Burris, the much-derided fill-in Senator, also from Illinois. Looks like the president’s home state stood with him. Too bad the following Democrats did not stand with the president on Gitmo:

Akaka (D-HI)
Baucus (D-MT)
Bayh (D-IN)
Begich (D-AK)
Bennet (D-CO)
Bingaman (D-NM)
Boxer (D-CA)
Brown (D-OH)
Cantwell (D-WA)
Cardin (D-MD)
Carper (D-DE)
Casey (D-PA)
Conrad (D-ND)
Dodd (D-CT)
Dorgan (D-ND)
Feingold (D-WI)
Feinstein (D-CA)
Gillibrand (D-NY)
Hagan (D-NC)
Harkin (D-IA)
Inouye (D-HI)
Johnson (D-SD)
Kaufman (D-DE)
Kerry (D-MA)
Klobuchar (D-MN)
Kohl (D-WI)
Landrieu (D-LA)
Lautenberg (D-NJ)
Levin (D-MI)
Lieberman (ID-CT)
Lincoln (D-AR)
McCaskill (D-MO)
Menendez (D-NJ)
Merkley (D-OR)
Mikulski (D-MD)
Murray (D-WA)
Nelson (D-FL)
Nelson (D-NE)
Pryor (D-AR)
Reed (D-RI)
Reid (D-NV)
Sanders (I-VT)
Schumer (D-NY)
Shaheen (D-NH)
Specter (D-PA)
Stabenow (D-MI)
Tester (D-MT)
Udall (D-CO)
Udall (D-NM)
Warner (D-VA)
Webb (D-VA)
Whitehouse (D-RI)
Wyden (D-OR)

That same day, the Senate voted to attach an amendment to H.R. 2346, which mainly regulated credit card fees, that read as follows:

SA 1132. Mr. INHOFE (for himself, Mr. BARRASSO, Mr. BROWNBACK, Mr. DEMINT, Mr. JOHANNS, Mr. ROBERTS, Mr. THUNE, Mr. VITTER, Mr. SESSIONS, Mr. COBURN, Mrs. HUTCHISON, Mr. BENNETT, Mr. HATCH, and Mr. ENZI) submitted an amendment intended to be proposed by him to the bill H.R. 2346, making supplemental appropriations for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2009, and for other purposes; which was ordered to lie on the table; as follows:

At the appropriate place, insert the following:

Sec. __. None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available to any department or agency of the United States Government by this Act or any other Act may be obligated or expended for any of the following purposes:

(1) To transfer any detainee of the United States housed at Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to any facility in the United States or its territories.

(2) To construct, improve, modify, or otherwise enhance any facility in the United States or its territories for the purpose of housing any detainee described in paragraph (1).

(3) To house or otherwise incarcerate any detainee described in paragraph (1) in the United States or its territories.

And just to make sure it was clear that Congress meant that no part of the government could take action to bring Guantanamo detainees ashore, Shelby, Imhofe, Inouye, Brownback, Enzi and Roberts added this, which was good through September 30, 2009:

Strike section 202 and insert the following:

Sec. 202. (a)(1) None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act or any prior Act may be used to transfer, release, or incarcerate any individual who was detained as of May 19, 2009, at Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to or within the United States.

(2) In this subsection, the term “United States” means the several States and the District of Columbia.

(b) The amount appropriated or otherwise made available by title II for the Department of Justice for general administration under the heading “SALARIES AND EXPENSES” is hereby reduced by $30,000,000.

(c) The amount appropriated or otherwise made available by title III under the heading “Operation and Maintenance, Defense-Wide” under paragraph (3) is hereby reduced by $50,000,000.

In other words, sorry Eric Holder. Your hands are tied, too.

And in case that wasn’t clear enough, Richard Shelby added yet another amendment:

On page 7, line 25 after the “.” insert the following: “SEC. 203 None of the funds appropriated in this or any other Act shall be used to carry out any of the Department of Justice responsibilities required by Executive Orders 13491, 13492 and 13493.”

What are those executive orders? Well … 13491 orders detainees at Guantanamo Bay to be treated according to the Geneva Conventions and assures that the U.S. abides by international law. 13492 orders Gitmo closed. And E.O. 13493 creates a task force headed by Eric Holder to deal with the disposition of Gitmo detainees. The cumulative effect of these three executive orders would have been to close Gitmo and move the detainees elsewhere, either by trying them, deporting them, or incarcerating them somewhere — possibly in the U.S. None of that happened, because of that Senate vote … which by the way was 94 to 0.

Which Democrats voted for Senate Amendment 1140? ALL OF THEM — including the vaunted liberals — with the exception of Teddy Kennedy, Robert Byrd, and Jay Rockefellar, none of whom voted that day.

Here is what Durbin had to say on the floor of the Senate about Mitch McConnell’s amendment, which was supported almost unanimously by Democrats — liberal and blue dog alike:

AMENDMENT NO. 1136

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, one of the amendments which is being discussed and has been filed by the minority leader, Senator McConnell of Kentucky, relates to detainees at Guantanamo. I am hoping we will have an opportunity to debate this amendment because I think it is an important amendment, and I hope colleagues will pay close attention to it. It is not an amendment which is casual or inconsequential. It is an amendment which could have a very negative impact on our treatment of detainees who are guilty of crimes or involved in terrorist activities.

It is interesting that Senator McConnell has brought this amendment before the body to be considered. It appears that when President Bush–the previous President–announced that he was closing Guantanamo, we didn’t have this rush to the microphones on the Republican side of the aisle and objecting. In fact, I don’t recall any objection from their side of the aisle when President Bush made that recommendation.

It is also interesting that during the years the Guantanamo Detention Facility has been open the requests that are being made now of this President were not made of the previous President. All the suggestions that perhaps there would be release of detainees from Guantanamo who may cause harm in some part of the world, those suggestions weren’t made under the previous President.

Literally hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo have been released by President Bush in the previous administration. It was found that many of them were either brought in with no charges that could be proved or once investigation of the evidence was commenced, they learned there was nothing that could be established. They were released and returned to countries of origin and other places around the world–hundreds of them in that case. I don’t recall a single Republican Senator, or any Senator for that matter, coming to the floor and objecting to the release of those hundreds of detainees from Guantanamo by President Bush. It happened. They did not object.

But now there is a new President and a new approach by the Republican side of the Senate. Senator McConnell has come forward with a proposal that calls on the President–not the Attorney General but the President–to provide detailed information about every detainee at Guantanamo–information which has never been requested by previous Senators and the previous administration.

I will make an exception to what I just said. At one point, when the Bush administration was asked for the names of the detainees and their countries of origin, the Bush administration objected and said it could compromise national security to release their

[Page: S5682]names. That was the only request made. It was denied.
Now come the Republicans, with the new Obama administration, with a brandnew outlook, and they want to know everything about the detainees. It is a long amendment. It goes on for five pages and a lot of detail here about the detainees at Guantanamo. Basic information–name and country of origin, and it goes on for quite a while. Most of it, I think, may be salutary and wouldn’t have a negative impact, but there is one paragraph in particular which I think is dangerous. It is a request for information in the McConnell amendment of the President of the United States, and let me read what the request is. It is a request for “a current summary of the evidence, intelligence, and information used to justify the detention of each detainee listed under paragraph (1) at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay.”

Paragraph (1) refers to all the detainees in custody at Guantanamo. So what Senator McConnell is asking for is a summary of the evidence, intelligence, and information justifying detention. This could compromise a prosecution of a detainee. It could put us in a position where someone who truly is dangerous cannot be prosecuted because of this request for information by Senator McConnell.

Senator McConnell wants, I guess, 535 Members of Congress to have a chance to read through the evidence, intelligence, and information about each detainee. Well, some of that may be classified; some may not. Even the information that is classified may leak, with 535 Members of Congress and other staff people. Do we want to run the risk of jeopardizing the prosecution of someone who is a danger to the United States to satisfy the curiosity of a Senator? I don’t think so.

Secondly, once this has been presented, if Senator McConnell has his way, then there is a very real possibility that should someone–a known terrorist–be brought to the United States, or any other place for trial under the laws of the United States, they could, in fact, ask–as they do in ordinary criminal cases–for the presentation of all the evidence the State has against them, which would include this document, which would include not only the evidence, intelligence, and information, but quite possibly the work product of the prosecutors who are holding this detainee.

We could not only compromise his prosecution, we could end up with a “not guilty” of someone who is dangerous to the United States simply to satisfy the curiosity of a Senator who files this amendment. I think that goes too far. I can’t believe that it is in the best interests of the safety of this country for us to allow this McConnell amendment to pass and to require the President to provide to Senator McConnell a current summary of the evidence, intelligence, and information used to justify the detention of each detainee.

Why? Why in the world would we want to compromise any attempt at prosecution? We don’t want to do that. Men and women–career prosecutors–are currently reviewing each of these cases to determine whether we can go forward with prosecution. The record of the previous administration is not very good when it comes to prosecuting these detainees. President Obama has said he wants to put that behind us and to deal with these people on an honest basis.

I have listened to the statements that have been made on the floor by the Republican Senators who have come forward with amendments. Many of them clearly want to keep Guantanamo open forever. They talk about a $200 million state-of-the-art facility in glowing terms. Well, I have been there, and I have seen it. I have seen the men and women in uniform who toil there each day under tough climate conditions. It gets pretty hot down there. I know they are working hard for their country. But I think they know, and we know, that continuing Guantanamo is going to continue to deteriorate the reputation of the United States around the world–not because of what our soldiers and sailors and military have done there, but simply because it has become a symbol that is being used by terrorists around the world to recruit enemies against the United States.

That is why President Bush called for the closure of Guantanamo, and that is why President Obama has done the same thing. Yet the Republican platform now seems to be “Guantanamo forever.” They have built this platform on fear–fear that somehow this administration would be so negligent that it would release terrorists into the United States, into the communities and neighborhoods of this country. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not this President, or any President I can recall of either political party, would ever find themselves in a position to jeopardize the safety of this country by releasing detainees who would be dangerous to the United States.

But this fear mongering is what has been the basis for their position on the other side of the aisle when it comes to the security of the United States.

Those who are arguing that we cannot safely hold a terrorist in the prisons of America–that is the argument; don’t let a detainee from Guantanamo ever be considered for a jail or prison of the United States–have overlooked the obvious. Currently, we have 208 inmates in the Bureau of Prison facilities of the United States who are sentenced to international terrorism–208 already there; 66 U.S. citizens, 142 non-U.S. citizens. In addition to that, 139

inmates in our U.S. Bureau of Prisons have been sentenced for domestic terrorism; 137 U.S. citizens and 2 non-U.S. citizens. Do the math. That is 347 people who have been convicted of terrorism, international and domestic, currently being held in the prisons of the United States.

Do I feel less safe in Illinois–in Springfield or Chicago–because of that? No, because I know they are being held by professionals in facilities that have a record of safely holding these individuals.

The other side suggests if we put one of these Guantanamo detainees in a U.S. prison, they will be on the street in a heartbeat. I can’t imagine that. That is not going to happen. The President wouldn’t let it happen. Our Bureau of Prisons wouldn’t let that happen either.

Then there is this other aspect. If we decided at some point to prosecute a Guantanamo detainee in the courts of the United States for a crime, some of the language that has been brought to us by the Republicans would make that impossible. You know why. Well, one amendment by the Senator from Georgia, Mr. Chambliss, would not allow the Attorney General to bring that person from Guantanamo Naval Station into the continental United States. The amendment prohibits that. We couldn’t even bring them in to try them for a crime, couldn’t even bring them in to hold them accountable in a court of law for terrorism.

Another amendment says we can’t hold these prisoners in any U.S. prison facility. How do we try a person in the United States and not at least, when they are not in trial, hold them in some prison facility? That is just common sense. The person is dangerous. They are, of course, detained in a secure facility during the course of the trial. Some of the Republican amendments would make that impossible.

I don’t understand what they are headed to. I think they want to keep this Guantanamo facility, as we have known it, open forever, without resolution of the people who are there. That is fundamentally unfair. I have said on the floor of the Senate before, and it is worth repeating, that there are people being held at Guantanamo for whom there are no charges. I know one person in particular who is being represented by a pro bono lawyer in Chicago. This man has been held for 7 years at Guantanamo. Originally, he was from Gaza in the Middle East. There was a report that he was dangerous. With that report, he was arrested, taken to Guantanamo, and held. After 6 years, he was notified there were no charges against him; he would be free to go if he could figure out where to go. And that has been the problem. He has been waiting for a year for permission to return to Gaza. He is now 26 years old. From the age of 19 to 26 he has been sitting in Guantanamo. Guantanamo forever? For him, it must feel like forever.

It is about time that we mete out justice. For those being held unfairly, they should be released. For those where there are no charges, we should acknowledge that and return them as quickly and safely as possible. For those who are a danger to the United States, we should continue to detain

[Page: S5683]them so they never pose a hazard to our country. For those who can be tried, let’s try them before our courts of law.
President Obama is going through that arduous, specific process now on each one of these detainees. While his administration is working to clean up this mess that he inherited from the previous administration, the Republicans in the Senate are doing everything they can to block his way and make it impossible for him to resolve the situation at Guantanamo.

I would say the McConnell amendment, page 3, paragraph (2), is a dangerous amendment. It is an amendment that could compromise the ability of the United States of America to prosecute those who could be a danger to our country. Why would we possibly do that?

I urge my colleagues, if I am not given the authority under the rules of the Senate to strike that paragraph, to oppose this amendment.

They didn’t.

Gitmo, is indeed a disgrace — a “no man’s land” as the president called it today, and which Vince Warren rightly described this way last January, on the ten-year anniversary of the opening of America’s Gulag in Cuba:

Wednesday marks 10 years since the first 20 detainees arrived at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Since then, 779 men have been imprisoned there for years without charge, trial or an opportunity to challenge their detention. They have included boys as young as 12 and men as old as 89.

Many of them had fled persecution in their home countries, only to end up in the wrong place at the wrong time and, ultimately, in Guantánamo. These men have been torn from their families, missed marriages and births, never met nieces and nephews, and lost parents and other family members. Eight have lost their own lives.

From its beginning, Guantánamo was built upon injustice and lies. Guantánamo Bay was chosen as the location for the prison precisely because the Bush administration believed the base was beyond the reach of civilian courts. We were told the men imprisoned there were the “worst of the worst,” as if this somehow justified suspending the rule of law, as if the only way to be safe from terrorism was to abandon human rights and violate civil liberties. As it turned out, when then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made this claim, he already knew what the rest of us learned later: In fact, many of the almost 800 men sent to Guantánamo in 2002 and the years since were innocent, caught while fleeing the chaos and violence of war that erupted when U.S. forces entered Afghanistan.

Once at Guantánamo, most of the men were subjected to torture: solitary confinement, sensory and sleep deprivation, force feeding, confinement to cells for more than 20 hours a day, and physical assault. Because strip searches and body scans were required every time they left their cells, even before attorney meetings and recreation time, many prisoners refused to leave their cells for any reason. Items such as toothpaste, toothbrushes, deodorant, soap and blankets were “privileges” and taken away at will. They were denied the right to practice their religion, had virtually no human contact, and some often did not see the sun for days.

This human rights tragedy is perhaps best revealed by the words of the detainees themselves.

“Tell [my wife] to remarry,” said one prisoner. “She should consider me dead.”

“I look alive,” said another, “but actually I’m dead.”

And yet another: “I am in my tomb.”

Still, Warren is among those who consider Gitmo’s lingering presence to be entirely the fault of the administration. He wrote:

This nightmare continues today. Despite promises to close Guantánamo and reverse the illegal policies of the Bush administration, President Obama has attempted to legitimize them. He has signed an executive order formalizing indefinite detentions at Guantánamo, resumed illegitimate military commissions, and refused to hold U.S. officials accountable for torture.

More than half the men still detained at Guantánamo — 89 of the 171 — have been cleared for transfer or release, yet no one has been transferred since January 2011, the longest period without a transfer in the prison camp’s 10-year history. Obama has refused even to release the names of the 89 detainees cleared for release or transfer. What’s more, Guantánamo has set a precedent that has contributed to the dismantling of civil liberties. In December, Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act, which makes indefinite military detention without charge or trial, including that of American citizens, a permanent feature of the American legal system.

Good of Warren to at least mention Congress… I mean after all, they do exist.

Foreign Affairs’ Carol Rosenberg had, I think, a more accurate description of what’s going on, in a column she wrote, also last January:

The last two prisoners to leave the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay were dead. On February 1, Awal Gul, a 48-year-old Afghan, collapsed in the shower and died of an apparent heart attack after working out on an exercise machine. Then, at dawn one morning in May, Haji Nassim, a 37-year-old man also from Afghanistan, was found hanging from bed linen in a prison camp recreation yard.

In both cases, the Pentagon conducted swift autopsies and the U.S. military sent the bodies back to Afghanistan for traditional Muslim burials. These voyages were something the Pentagon had not planned for either man: Each was an “indefinite detainee,” categorized by the Obama administration’s 2009 Guantánamo Review Task Force as someone against whom the United States had no evidence to convict of a war crime but had concluded was too dangerous to let go. Today, this category of detainees makes up 46 of the last 171 captives held at Guantánamo. The only guaranteed route out of Guantánamo these days for a detainee, it seems, is in a body bag.

The responsibility lies not so much with the White House but with Congress, which has thwarted President Barack Obama’s plans to close the detention center, which the Bush administration opened on Jan. 11, 2002, with 20 captives.

Congress has used its spending oversight authority both to forbid the White House from financing trials of Guantánamo captives on U.S. soil and to block the acquisition of a state prison in Illinois to hold captives currently held in Cuba who would not be put on trial — a sort of Guantánamo North.

The latest defense bill adopted by Congress moved to mandate military detention for most future al Qaida cases. The White House withdrew a veto threat on the eve of passage, and then Obama signed it into law with a “signing statement” that suggested he could lawfully ignore it.

On paper, at least, the Obama administration would be set to release almost half the current captives at Guantánamo. The 2009 Task Force Review concluded that about 80 of the 171 detainees now held at Guantánamo could be let go if their home country was stable enough to help resettle them or if a foreign country could safely give them a new start.

But Congress has made it nearly impossible to transfer captives anywhere. Legislation passed since Obama took office has created a series of roadblocks that mean that only a federal court order or a national security waiver issued by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta could trump Congress and permit the release of a detainee to another country.

Neither is likely: U.S. District Court judges are not ruling in favor of captives in the dozens of unlawful detention suits winding their way from Cuba to the federal court in Washington. And on the occasions when those judges have ruled for detainees, the U.S. Court of Appeals has consistently overruled them in an ever-widening definition of who can be held as an affiliate of al Qaida or the Taliban.

Meanwhile, Defense Department General Counsel Jeh Johnson, the Pentagon’s top lawyer, believes that Congress crafted the transfer waivers a year ago in such a way that Panetta (and Robert Gates before him) would be ill-advised to sign them. (In essence, the Secretary of Defense is supposed to guarantee that the detainee would never in the future engage in violence against any American citizen or U.S. interest.)

In a strange twist of history, Congress, through its control of government funds, is now imposing curbs on the very executive powers that the Bush administration invoked to establish the camps at Guantánamo in the first place. Much of its intransigence is driven by the politics of fear: What if, for example, a captive is acquitted in a civilian trial because the judge bars evidence obtained by the military without benefit of counsel? When will another freed Guantánamo detainee attack a U.S. target or interest, such as when Abdullah al Ajami, who was transferred to Kuwait in 2005, blew himself up in a truck bomb attack in Iraq in 2008?

And this, from the New York Times’ Max Fisher last week:

For the Obama administration, it’s a maze with no obvious exits: it doesn’t want to keep these prisoners locked up in Gitmo, which is politically and diplomatically costly, not to mention antithetical to Obama’s stated desire to close the prison, but Congress has forbidden the prisoners from being transferred to U.S. soil. Though the administration had searched for foreign countries to which the detainees could be released, it appears to have since given up, having closed the office responsible for finding those countries.

All of this means that a number of Guantanamo’s detainees are stuck in the facility even though the United States believes they should be released. Perhaps understandably, the detainees are not happy about this. Increasingly aware that the world has largely given up on them, they are starting to make noise.

The past three months have been hard ones at Guantanamo. A hunger strike that began in February now includes 93 of the camp’s 166 detainees, fighting has broken out in the normally sedate Camp Six between inmates and guards, and tensions are reportedly worsening at the facility.

So who are the 86 detainees who have been cleared for transfer out of Guantanamo, and why are they still there? When the Obama administration came into office and took ownership of the camp, it announced its intention to close it. The administration had four ways to deal with the detainees: put them through civilian trials, put them through military tribunals, send them to a foreign country’s prison system or, for a lucky few dozen, release them. The United States has since released 31 detainees to their home countries and another 40 to countries that were not their homelands, either because their home country would not accept them or because the United States believed the home country might subject them to torture or other abuses.

These remaining 86 detainees are the ones who, the United States believes, should be released to either their home or another country, but haven’t been because of diplomatic and political hurdles. There are two theories as to why an individual detainee cleared for release might not get it. The first theory is that no country will accept him. It’s not implausible; as an example of how tough it can be to find safe homes for the detainees, some Chinese Muslim dissidents held at Gitmo had to released to, of all places, Bermuda. But the second theory that’s increasingly mentioned by critics: some administration officials might fear that a released detainee could later participate in terrorism, for which the administration might well be blamed.

Could Obama do more about this? I don’t know.  Adam Serwer of Mother Jones has written about the hunger strike that brought the facility at Guantanamo Bay back into the spotlight via today’s press briefing, and he notes that Sen. Diane Feinstein has suggested that transferring prisoners out of the U.S. is the answer. Serwer writes:

President Barack Obama’s administration maintains it is doing everything it can to close the facility. But in her letter, Feinstein called on the administration to renew its efforts to transfer the 86 Gitmo detainees who have been cleared for release. Could Obama quell the uprising by resuming transfers out of the camp?

Without a resumption of transfers, the detainees who remain in Gitmo—even those who the George W. Bush and Obama administrations agreed are no longer threats—are likely to die there. More detainees have died in detention than been successfully tried in military commissions, and no detainees have been transferred from the camp since September 2012. Daniel Fried, the special envoy whose job it was to persuade countries to take Gitmo detainees, was reassigned in January. Many of the remaining detainees are Yemeni. Given the ongoing turmoil in their home country and the presence of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Obama administration sees sending them back as a security risk—and has yet to lift a self-imposed ban on transfers to Yemen it adopted three years ago.

Maybe President Obama should direct his administration, maybe even at the level of secretary of state, to push harder to find foreign governments willing to take the prisoners currently at Gitmo, though there would be no guarantee that the receiving country would free them rather than just throwing them into another jail. And if they did free them, what happens then? Serwer continues:

Congress has done everything it can short of making transfers illegal to prevent the administration from sending Gitmo detainees elsewhere. Current law states that the secretary of defense has to certify that, among other requirements, the detainee being transferred won’t ever pose a threat in the future, which is ultimately not something the administration can control. Although the rate of former Gitmo detainees who later join terrorist groups is relatively low—and lower than it was during the Bush administration—any failure would be politically toxic, and the certification process ensures that the Obama administration would bear full responsibility. “The restrictions have made it extraordinarily difficult, and that the process is fraught with legal hurdles,” said a defense official. “Some of the things that we are asked to do simply cannot be verified.”

But “extraordinarily difficult” isn’t the same as impossible, says Daphne Eviatar, an attorney with Human Rights First. Politically, “the no-risk option is always to leave even innocent people behind bars indefinitely. But as Obama acknowledged when he first took office, that’s not an acceptable solution for the United States, and it will undermine our national security in the long run,” Eviatar says. Resuming transfers “would give detainees hope that there is a way out of Guantanamo, other than death.”

By resuming transfers, the Obama administration might be able to end the strike. But doing so would entail taking on a significant amount of political risk—and, the administration believes, national-security risk as well.

“The secretary of defense could just boldly issue the required certifications, bulling past the question of whether they were truly met,” says Robert Chesney, a law professor at the University of Texas School of Law who served on the Obama administration’s task force on detention policy. “With or without a certification requirement, of course, these days all releases carry political risk since a former detainee committing a terrorist act would almost certainly be blamed on the administration anyway.”

This is not a theoretical risk. Previously released detainees have turned up in terrorist cells, after being released by the Bush administration and deported. (The New York Times posted a thorough online debate on the issue after Obama’s “close Gitmo” executive order in 2009.)

And Fisher’s column also points out that:

A recent study by a U.S. intelligence office estimated that between 16 and 27 percent of released Gitmo detainees have participated in terrorism since leaving the facility. Imagine the reaction if, hypothetically, the Boston Marathon bombings were discovered to have been conducted by detainees whom the Obama administration had cleared from Guantanamo and you can perhaps start to understand the White House’s possible thinking.

To be clear, I’m not defending this position or arguing that it’s correct. If this is indeed part of the administration’s thinking, it raises the questions: How do you weigh that risk against the continued detention of 86 men who might otherwise go free? And isn’t there something distasteful and unsettling about imprisoning people not because they’ve done anything wrong but because they might in the future?

A recent study by a U.S. intelligence office estimated that between 16 and 27 percent of released Gitmo detainees have participated in terrorism since leaving the facility. Imagine the reaction if, hypothetically, the Boston Marathon bombings were discovered to have been conducted by detainees whom the Obama administration had cleared from Guantanamo and you can perhaps start to understand the White House’s possible thinking.

To be clear, I’m not defending this position or arguing that it’s correct. If this is indeed part of the administration’s thinking, it raises the questions: How do you weigh that risk against the continued detention of 86 men who might otherwise go free? And isn’t there something distasteful and unsettling about imprisoning people not because they’ve done anything wrong but because they might in the future?

I assume Obama’s critics on the left will argue that he should direct the DOD to take the chance, and issue those certifications, political risk be damned. Maybe he should. But that doesn’t completely solve the problem of where these prisoners are supposed to go.

That’s because the one thing that is clear, whether Obama’s detractors want to believe it or not, is that Obama cannot close Gitmo without Congress, and he can’t close Gitmo without sending the prisoners SOMEWHERE — if not on American soil (which Congress is not ever going to allow) then to a foreign country, or to their home countries, assuming they will take them.

Bottom line, it’s not as simple as firing off an executive order, as some on the left have insisted. In fact, it’s not even as simple as firing off THREE of them.

Clearly, the administration should do something, in the name of humanity and our national honor. But damned if I know what.

August Busch IV

Cheers to you, sir.

I guess the disgust with the defeat of even modest gun reform in the Senate, where a background checks bill went down to defeat on Wednesday, has spread beyond the Twittersphere (and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and Newtown, and Gabby Giffords)… Adolphus “August” Busch, scion of the famous beer family, and a longtime supporter of the NRA, has quit the organization over its extremist position on background checks.

He released an epic resignation letter to St. Louis TV station KDSK, writing:

“…One only has to ask why the NRA reversed its original position on background checks. Was it not the NRA position to support background checks when Mr. LaPierre himself stated in 1999 that NRA saw checks as ‘reasonable’?”

“…I fail to see how the NRA can disregard the overwhelming will of its members who see background checks as reasonable,” Busch writes.

And he added:

I am simply unable to comprehend how assault weapons and large capacity magazines have a role in your vision,” he said. “The NRA I see today has undermined the values upon which it was established. Your current strategic focus clearly places priority on the needs of gun and ammunition manufacturers while disregarding the opinions of your 4 million individual members.”

“One only has to look at the makeup of the 75-member board of directors, dominated by manufacturing interests, to confirm my point. The NRA appears to have evolved into the lobby for gun and ammunition manufacturers rather than gun owners.”

… before directing the organization to “immediately” remove his name from its membership roles.

The letter was addressed to RA President David Keene.

So will gun extremists from the hinterlands stop drinking Anheuser-Busch beers? Will gun safety advocates start? If so, Bud may have just bumped up its appeal to 90 percent of the U.S. population. So cheers to you, August. A nice, cold Bud Light is suddenly sounding like an awesome idea.

You can read the full letter here.

Despite the real anger, disgust, really, with those 45 Senators who voted against gun safety legislation on Wednesday (contact info for them is here), the real fallout could come at re-election time, as both the president and Gabby Giffords have said. So here’s a handy-dandy guide to the U.S. Senators who made a difference, for better or worse, on gun safety / reform, and when they’re up for re-election. Note, OFA and Mike Bloomberg I’m certain already have this list…

First, the good guys:

Here are the four Republicans who crossed the aisle to support background checks and anti-trafficking legislation, and their re-election schedules:

McCain (R-AZ) – 2016
Kirk (R-IL) – 2016
Toomey (R-PA) – 2016
Collins (R-ME) – 2014

Here are the Democrats who probably took the biggest electoral risk by voting for background checks, because they will probably be heavily targeted by the NRA:

Mary Landrieu (D-LA) – 2014
Mark Warner (D-VA) – 2014
Mark Udall (D-CO) – 2014
Chris Coons (D-DE) – 2014
Jean Shaheen (D-NH) – 2014
Kay Hagan (D-NC) – 2014
Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) – 2014
Tim Johnson (D-SD) – 2014
Joe Manchin (D-WV) – (less risky because he’s not up until 2018)
(Tom Udall is also up in New Mexico in 2014 but he won handily in 2008)

Here are some Democrats who voted for background checks whose seats are up or open in the next cycle, so there’s an open primary:

Carl Levin (D-MI) – Retiring in 2014
Al Franken (D-MN) – Up for re-election in 2014
Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) – Retiring in 2014
Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) – Retiring in 2014

And here are the 45 NRA Senators who voted against background checks, and for easing the path to getting guns for domestic violence offenders, rapists, terrorists, the criminally insane, and of course, mass murderers, along with their re-election schedules:

Alabama: Sessions – 2014 ; Shelby – 2016
Alaska: Begich (D) – 2014 ; Murkowski – 2016
Arizona: Flake – 2018
Arkansas: Boozman – 2016 ; Pryor (D) – 2014
Florida: Rubio – 2016
Georgia: Chambliss – Retiring 2014 ; Isakson – 2016
Idaho: Crapo – 2016 ; Risch – 2014
Indiana: Coats – 2016
Iowa: Grassley – 2016
Kansas: Moran – 2016 ; Roberts – 2014
Kentucky: McConnell – 2014 ; Paul – 2016 (probably running for president)
Louisiana: Vitter – 2016
Mississippi: Cochran – 2014 ; Wicker – 2018
Missouri: Blunt – 2016
Montana: Baucus – 2014
Nebraska: Fischer – 2018 ; Johanns – 2014
Nevada: Heller 2018 ; Reid (procedural vote against bills to be able to reintroduce. Up in 2016)
New Hampshire: Ayotte – 2016
North Carolina: Burr – 2016
North Dakota: Heitkamp – 2018 ; Hoeven – 2016
Ohio: Portman – 2016
Oklahoma: Coburn – 2016 ; Inhofe – 2014
South Carolina: Graham – 2016 ; Scott – special election for final years of Jim DeMint’s term in 2014
South Dakota: Thune – 2016
Tennessee: Alexander – 2014 ; Corker – 2018
Texas: Cornyn – 2014 ; Cruz – 2016
Utah: Hatch – 2018 ; Lee – 2016
Wisconsin: Johnson – 2016
Wyoming: Barrasso – 2018 ; Enzi – 2014