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The more we find out about the editing of the Benghazi talking points, the more the evidence points in one direction: this was a CIA fiasco from the start. As we all know by now, the Benghazi mission was primarily a CIA operation, and they were the ones responsible for security there. But when it came time to write up talking points for public consumption after the September 11 attacks, they immediately started trying to shift blame. Here is David Brooks writing about the role of State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland:

On Friday evening of Sept. 14, the updated talking points were e-mailed to the relevant officials in various departments, including Nuland....[She] noted that the talking points left the impression that the C.I.A. had issued all sorts of warnings before the attack.

Remember, this was at a moment when the State Department was taking heat for what was mostly a C.I.A. operation, while doing verbal gymnastics to hide the C.I.A.’s role. Intentionally or not, the C.I.A. seemed to be repaying the favor by trying to shift blame to the State Department for ignoring intelligence.

Marcy Wheeler had a more pungent assessment a few days ago:

In other words, the story CIA — which had fucked up in big ways — wanted to tell was that it had warned State and State had done nothing in response....The truthful story would have been (in part) that CIA had botched the militia scene in Benghazi, and that had gotten the Ambassador killed.

Today Jake Tapper tells us that previous reports about the role of Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes have also been mistaken. Rhodes didn't say anything to suggest that the White House was concerned with protecting the State Department's reputation. All he said was this: "We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation." The next day, when everyone got together to vet the talking points, they were stripped down to their final mushy state.

Greg Sargent has more here. This was, pretty clearly, a turf war, and the evidence increasingly suggests it was a war started by the CIA. The State Department has already largely owned up to its own failures in the ARB report released last year. So far, though, the CIA hasn't.

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When Lois Lerner, a top IRS official, revealed last Friday that agency staffers had singled out conservative nonprofit groups for extra scrutiny over their potential political activities, she blamed low-level, "frontline" staffers in the agency's Cincinnati office, a hub of activity that handles tens of thousands of applications for tax-exempt status. The IRS later said no high-level officials were aware of these controversial actions.

As it turns out, the current acting IRS commissioner knew that staffers were flagging applications from certain conservative groups a year before Congress and the public found out about it. And members of Congress are steaming mad that the IRS was aware of the questionable practices of some of its staffers and didn't speak up about it. Several Republicans claim that Congress was misled by the IRS and its top brass about these actions.

The IRS said that current acting commissioner Steven Miller learned on May 3, 2012, that staffers had been picking out conservative groups for greater scrutiny than is typical. (Miller was deputy commissioner at the time.)

Yet Republican lawmakers say Miller neglected to tell Congress about the systematic singling out of conservative groups in subsequent interactions. Miller wrote two letters to Congress after his May 2012 briefing about how the IRS reviews applications for tax-exempt status, but did not mention the scrutiny of tea party groups. On July 25, 2012, Miller testified before the House ways and means oversight subcommittee on the subject of "organizational and compliance issues related to public charities." During questioning, Miller was asked about tea party groups being harassed, but not about tea partiers specifically. He did not mention having been briefed on the IRS' actions.

"It is almost inconceivable to imagine that top officials at the IRS knew conservative groups were being targeted but chose to willfully mislead the Committee's investigation into this practice," Rep. Dave Camp, chair of the ways and means committee, said in a statement.

An IRS spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Miller wrote in an op-ed for USA Today on Tuesday that the IRS' singling out of conservative groups showed "a lack of sensitivity to the implications of some of the decisions that were made." He added that sifting through applications for tax-exempt status was "factually complex, and it's challenging to separate out political issues from those involving education or social welfare." He did not say why he didn't tell Congress about the tea party scrutiny when he learned of it in May 2012.

Other lawmakers say they corresponded with the IRS on the tea party issue and can't understand why the agency didn't share all of what it knew. "I wrote to the IRS three times last year after hearing concerns that conservative groups were being targeted," Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), said in a statement Monday. "Yet it didn't occur to anyone at the IRS to let us know that this targeting was in fact happening? Knowing what we know now, the IRS was at best being far from forthcoming, or at worst, being deliberately dishonest with Congress. These are the facts and the questions we need answered."

They could be answered soon. On Friday, the House ways and means committee will hold a hearing on the IRS' tea party controversy. Other House and Senate committees have pledged to investigate the matter, too.

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"White House Under Siege" is too juicy a narrative to pass up, especially during a slow news period, so that's what we're getting right now. But there are scandals and then there are "scandals." The three that are currently erupting are all quite different. Let's categorize them:

Benghazi. The truth is that this is no more of a scandal than it's ever been. Right now Republicans are doing their best to keep this carnival act going, but President Obama was pretty much right yesterday when he said there's no there there. That remains true even if Jay Carney was a little less than candid last November about the editing process of the infamous talking points. This whole thing is basically a fever dream invention of the right, and the public doesn't seem any more interested in it today than it ever has been.

AP phone records. This is a policy scandal, perhaps, but not an abuse of power or example of corruption. As near as I can tell, the Justice Department followed the law scrupulously here, obtaining a warrant for the records and then informing AP of the warrant afterwards. Lots of people, including me, happen to think the law that allows this is a bad one, but that's an argument about the PATRIOT Act and its followups. From a political point of view, Republicans are going to have a hard time making much hay with this because (a) most of them support the law that allows DOJ to do this, and (b) the American public doesn't think very highly of the press and probably isn't very outraged that they can have their phone records collected just like anyone else.

IRS targeting of tea party groups. This one is a genuine scandal, and it's one that plays right into Republican hands. It's also one that will resonate with the public. Politically, the question is whether the president can get out ahead of it. If he's found to have had no hand in the original targeting, and is perceived as being sufficiently zealous in cracking down on it, it might not hurt him much. We'll see.

There's one wild card in all this: the media. They finally got personally annoyed over Benghazi when the spotlight turned to things that Jay Carney had told them personally, and the AP warrant also directly affects them. If this episode feeds into further media disenchantment with Obama, that could affect his press coverage going forward. In the end, that could end up being the worst fallout of all from this stuff.

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On Monday, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) published an op-ed on Fox News detailing his recent travels in the Rio Grande Valley, where he met an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador and visited a cemetery that houses the remains of unidentified migrants who died traversing the county's scorching canyons. "As a policymaker, I have a responsibility to find real solutions to these issues that are all-too-familiar to Texans," he writes. "Anything less only perpetuates this grotesque human tragedy playing out every day on American soil." So far so good. He also released this video, which documents his trip to the cemetery with a close-up on the details (or lack thereof) on the unmarked graves:

At this point you might think that Cornyn is taking a lead role in combating the surge in migrant deaths in South Texas. But that's where things get weird.

Cornyn's video points to the increasing number of migrant deaths in Brooks County as evidence that the border isn't really secure. That's really the opposite of what's happening. Rising migrant death totals aren't a symptom of a porous border; they're a symptom of a border that's increasingly locked-down, and a testament to more effective enforcement policies in traditional migrant corridors—a point that's made in the Washington Post story Cornyn cited in the video. The idea that tougher border security makes border crossings more dangerous is well-established (this 2009 report from the American Civil Liberties Union is instructive, as is this from the American Public Health Association). Contra Cornyn's assertion in the video, Brooks County is what a secure border looks like. That's why Coalición Derechos Humanos Arizona, which works with migrants in the Sonora desert, doesn't support the enforcement-heavy bill currently being considered in the Senate.

Cornyn did vote for a successful amendment to the Senate legislation to mandate better data collection of human trafficking, inspired by this specific case in Houston. But he's pushing for a harsher security policy that would exacerbate the problems Brooks County already faces—citing, among other things, the presence of men "wearing some form of turban" crossing into South Texas. (Cornyn has introduced his own legislation focusing exclusively on border security, which he'd like to see as a prerequisite for any kind of immigration reform.) During the committee markup, Cornyn broached the subject of Brooks County's rising toll, but only to push for reimbursement for the county. On Thursday, he voted for a proposal from Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) that would modify the Senate immigration reform bill to "strike the section that requires the Secretary of Homeland Security to issue policies governing the use of force by Department of Homeland Security personnel."

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