The Susan Rice ‘by the book’ email was obviously a calculated narrative. 

Andy McCarthy illustrated the absurdity of the email two years ago far better than I ever could. 

On her way out the White House door and out of her job as national-security adviser, Susan Rice writes an email-to-self. Except it’s not really an email-to-self. It is quite consciously an email for the record.

Her term having ended 15 minutes before, Rice was technically back in private life, where private people have private email accounts — even notepads if they want to scratch out a reminder the old-fashioned way. Yet, for at least a few more minutes, Rice still had access to her government email account. She could still generate an official record. That’s what she wanted her brief email to be: the dispositive memorialization of a meeting she was worried about — a meeting that had happened over two weeks earlier, at which, of course, President Obama insisted that everything be done “by the book.”

Now we know that’s exactly what it was, for the record, because Rice’s people have admitted that the email was written at the behest of the White House Counsel. This wasn’t just Rice playing CYA, this was the Obama White House.

Team Obama claims that there was nothing out of the ordinary about anything that was going on. Yet it went to the trouble of having Rice write this email at the last minute to manufacture a legal narrative.

Why do that if nothing wrong has been taking place?

The answer is obvious and has always been. You don’t create something as artificial as that email unless you want to manufacture a narrative that covers up what did happen. The narratives that the email creates, like Obama’s insistence on the ‘By the Book’ approach, tells us that what was being covered up was the opposite of the email’s narrative.