It’s not just that the White House Situation Room received these emails. The military or the CIA deployed a drone to monitor the battle from above, and the evidence strongly suggests that Obama himself and probably the vice president and some of his top intel lieutenants were watching that feed. Eli Lake reported that the drone monitored at least the last hour of the battle.
So Obama was in the Situation Room, with those emails on his screen, and that video feed on the monitor. The ambassador was missing. This was the heaviest night of Obama’s presidency since the mission that killed Osama bin Laden, but with the added twist of the missing Americans and the huge known known — we had no military on the ground or on the way to help them.
And Obama went to bed to get some shut-eye. Then the next day, he learned that Stevens and three others had been killed. He may have seen one or more of the defenders die. But that next day he blamed a movie for what he had seen the night before.
And then he skipped his intelligence briefing, again, and went to Vegas.
