… the CIA has largely escaped unscathed. “They’ve gotten a pass on a lot of this,” a former Obama administration official says. Perhaps that’s the real scandal.

GOP scandal-chasers have been obsessed with the Obama administration’s talking points about the attack on US facilities in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead, and the White House on Wednesday tried to put the pseudo-scandal to rest by releasing a batch of interagency emails related to the talking points.

These emails thoroughly undercut the conservative charge that the White House massaged the talking points to whitewash the attack and protect President Obama’s reelection prospects. One email from a CIA official noted that the White House “cleared quickly” the talking points drafted by the CIA but the State Department had concerns. Poof—there goes the conspiracy theory that Obama’s aides excised references to terrorism and an Al Qaeda-linked group for campaign-related reasons. But questions about the Benghazi episode remain, particularly this one: Has the CIA avoided scrutiny for its central role in this affair?

Last week, the Washington Post‘s Glenn Kessler noted that the revised talking points indicated that Obama administration officials in various agencies were inhibited by a key fact as they were grappling with what could be said publicly about the attacks in Benghazi: The assault had targeted a CIA annex in addition to a temporary State Department mission. That made the job tough for the drafters of the talking points. As Kessler wrote,

from the State Department perspective, this was an attack on a CIA operation, perhaps by the very people the CIA was battling, and the ambassador [Chris Stevens] tragically was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But, for obvious reasons, the administration could not publicly admit that Benghazi was mostly a secret CIA effort.

Kessler emphasized an obvious point: The initial talking points drafted by the CIA implied that “State screwed up, even though internally, it was known that this was a CIA operation.” Naturally, at the time, Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokeswoman, objected to this. So here was a bureaucratic tussle—not White House skullduggery. Yet the CIA’s attempt to duck blame may be the more important story than what UN Ambassador Susan Rice was handed in preparation for her Sunday talk show appearance.