E-mails released by the White House on Wednesday revealed a fierce internal jostling over the government’s official talking points in the aftermath of last September’s attack in Benghazi, Libya, not only between the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, but at the highest levels of the C.I.A.
The 100 pages of e-mails showed a disagreement between David H. Petraeus, then the director of the C.I.A., and his deputy, Michael J. Morell, over how much to disclose in the talking points, which were used by Susan E. Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, in television appearances days after the attack.
Mr. Morell, administration officials said, deleted a reference in the draft version of the talking points to C.I.A. warnings of extremist threats in Libya, which State Department officials objected to because they feared it would reflect badly on them.
Mr. Morell, officials said, acted on his own and not in response to pressure from the State Department. But when the final draft of the talking points was sent to Mr. Petraeus, he dismissed them, saying “Frankly, I’d just as soon not use this,” adding that the heavily scrubbed account would not satisfy the House Democrat who had requested it.
“This is certainly not what Vice Chairman Ruppersberger was hoping to get,” Mr. Petraeus wrote, referring to Representative C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, which had asked Mr. Petraeus for talking points to use with reporters in discussing the attack on Benghazi.
The White House released the e-mails to reporters after Republicans seized on snippets of the correspondence that became public on Friday to suggest that President Obama’s national security staff had been complicit in trying to alter the talking points for political reasons.
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