Critics have always been right that Ambassador Susan Rice’s talking points were wrong; rather than the attack being caused by a spontaneous protest, as she claimed on several Sunday morning talk shows after the attack, it was a terrorist plot. But the fundamental question was whether the administration knew it was a terror attack and intentionally lied when it blamed the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens on a deadly protest instead.

The e-mails Karl reveals today do not make this case. While references to terrorism were removed at the behest of the State Department, the CIA’s original draft of the talking points stated that the attack was “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.” In fact, all 12 drafts did.

It’s clear now that some people in the administration, including those on the ground, believed it was a terror attack from the get-go, but the CIA’s job is to synthesize disparate and often conflicting intelligence and make its best guess about the truth. So even if there was conflicting intelligence, the White House was correct in saying they were merely following the intelligence community’s lead, as they have maintained all along, by blaming the attack on a protest.

Karl’s report hardly lets the administration off the hook. Rather, it shows definitively that the State Department asked the CIA to remove a reference to a previous warning the intelligence agency had given about danger in Benghazi. In an email to White House and intelligence officials, State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland warned that a reference to the CIA’s warnings “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 on the CIA’s warnings — which protected the CIA at the expense of the State Department — was removed.