Republican lawmakers on Thursday compared President Barack Obama's White House to the secretive Nixon administration, denouncing its response to the 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.
On Wednesday a conservative group published a White House email it had obtained after a legal challenge and which critics say shows an attempt to put a political spin on the deadly assault.
In the email, Obama's deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes tells Susan Rice — then the U.S. envoy to the United Nations — to blame the attack on local anger in Benghazi over an anti-Muslim video on the Internet.
It has since become clear the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the mission — which cost the lives of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens — was planned by armed militants.
In the email, obtained by Judicial Watch and dated Sept. 14, 2012, Rhodes laid out talking points and goals for Rice in her planned appearances on several major U.S. talk shows the next day.
She was asked "to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, not a broader failure of policy."
White House spokesman Jay Carney said Wednesday after the Rhodes email was first made public that it referred to protests in the Arab world as a whole, and not specifically to the Benghazi attack.
But the attack and Rice's media appearances took place at the height of Obama's successful re-election campaign — a campaign in which he made great play of having put al-Qaida on the back foot.
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- May 2, 2014 1:47 am
