Still No Evidence of Benghazi Cover-Up Now that the White House has released 100-pages worth of emails between the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency over how to craft post-Benghazi talking points, we know three things. First, this White House has no clue how to handle a public relations crisis; it should have released those emails ages ago. Second, the more we learn, the clearer it is that there was no cover-up. Third, the Republicans in Congress don't care about the truth of the matter. They're going to keep attacking President Obama (to cause him pain right now), and Hillary Clinton's State Department (to cause her pain if she runs in 2016). On Wednesday, pretty much every dispassionate news organization reported that the newly released emails do not contain evidence of a scandal. President Obama's national security team did not try to alter the talking points to shield Mr. Obama's re-election chances. As The Times put it, "While the e-mails portrayed White House officials as being sensitive to the concerns of the State Department, they suggest that Mr. Obama's aides mostly mediated a bureaucratic tug of war between the State Department and the C.I.A. over how much to disclose - all under heavy time constraints because of the demands from Capitol Hill." Yet Republicans are still claiming that they can see the smoking gun before them. Rep. Peter King, who represents part of Long Island but dwells to the right of South Carolina on most issues, said the emails indicated that the State Department had strong-armed the Central Intelligence Agency into removing references to Al Qaeda, as well as to warnings prior to the attack. Actually, as The Times reported this morning, the emails show that the deputy director of the C.I.A., Michael Morell, "deleted a reference in the draft version of the talking points to C.I.A. warnings of extremist threats in Libya." The State Department objected to that reference because officials thought it would make them look bad, but there is no record of the C.I.A. pushing back. There was no coercion or force, and no indication that the C.I.A. objected to the early, now much disputed claim that the killings were revenge for an anti-Islam Internet video. The White House has long said that Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who discussed the anti-Islam video on Sunday talk shows directly after the attack, was just reflecting the administration consensus at that moment. The e-mails, according to The Washington Post story, "appear to support that contention." Last Friday, Republicans of the Congressional and talking-head varieties could barely contain their glee over an ABC report that Benjamin Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser, had emphasized the need to protect the State Department's interests. That report was wrong. Mr. Rhodes actually said, "We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant entities, especially the [F.B.I.] investigation." Perhaps the most iffy email in the batch was from Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokesman. She said that lawmakers could "abuse" the initial talking points to "beat the State Department for not paying attention to agency warnings." But given Congressional Republicans behavior over the last 4 ½ years, Ms. Nuland's fear of "abuse" seems, frankly, warranted. Just look at their outlandish claims of an impeachment-level cover up. "If you link Watergate and Iran-Contra together and multiply it times maybe 10 or so, you're going to get in the zone where Benghazi is," Rep. Steve King of Iowa said. The other Mr. King demanded that Mrs. Clinton testify again before Congress. She'd be crazy to do it.