The attack on our U.S. consulate in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, the murder of our ambassador and three other Americans, and the White House political cover story which followed, took a turn for the truth this week.

But first, recall that in May of last year, Mark Alexander’s investigative column on Benghazi noted, “State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland warned that the original CIA talking points ‘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?’ We believe that Nuland and Ben Rhodes, who is Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting, were the key conspirators in the talking point alterations, though the Rhodes alterations were certainly signed off by someone much further up the White House chain of command. If sufficient evidence is ever uncovered to implicate Rhodes and Nuland, they will likely become Obama’s ‘cutouts,’ who will be encouraged to ‘fall on their swords’ in order to provide Obama plausible deniability.”

As it turns out, Alexander’s assessment was fully vindicated. Judicial Watch announced Tuesday that, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request filed in October 2012, they have finally obtained a “newly declassified email showing then-White House Deputy Strategic Communications Adviser Ben Rhodes and other Obama administration public relations officials attempting to orchestrate a campaign to ‘reinforce’ President Obama and to portray the Benghazi consulate terrorist attack as being ‘rooted in an Internet video, and not a failure of policy.’”

The email was sent prior to then-UN Ambassador Susan Rice’s infamous appearance on a Sunday morning talk show in which she insisted the attack was caused by outrage over a YouTube video. Rhodes sought to remind people that “President Obama provides leadership that is steady and statesmanlike,” an especially important spin for his re-election campaign.

The White House documents also include an email sent the day of the attack from Payton Knopf, former Deputy Spokesman at U.S. Mission to the United Nations, to Susan Rice. Knopf told Rice of events at an earlier press briefing: “Responding to a question about whether it was an organized terror attack, [State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland] said that she couldn’t speak to the identity of the perpetrators but that it was clearly a complex attack.” Clearly, that’s contrary to Rhodes’ message, yet Rice continued for days to insist that the attack occurred “spontaneously” as a reaction to a “hateful video.”

Recall recent testimony from former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell, who heavily edited the administration’s talking points in the early days after the attack. He insisted that “none of our actions were the result of political influence,” but, as these other pieces of the puzzle reveal, that wasn’t true. Politics had everything to do with it. The administration willfully deceived the public to serve a political narrative of al-Qaida’s demise that was essential to Obama’s campaign. “It is no surprise,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, “that we had to go to federal court to pry [these emails] loose from the Obama State Department.”

To sum it up, who can forget Hillary Clinton’s exasperated question during Senate testimony: “What difference, at this point, does it make?”