President Barack Obama angrily batted away questions on Monday about his Administration’s response to the Benghazi attack, calling the recent furor over edited talking points a “sideshow.”
Less than a week after emotional testimony in the House of Representatives brought the conservative obsession with Benghazi into the mainstream, Obama tried to contain the damage by framing the GOP focus on the attack as politically driven. “We dishonor [the victims] when we turn things like this into a political circus,” Obama said during a peevish joint press conference at the White House with British Prime Minister David Cameron.
A week after the U.S. deputy chief of mission in Libya questioned the Administration’s official account of efforts to help the victims of the Sept. 11, 2012 assault, Obama tried to use his frustration to deflect new revelations that State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland edited intelligence-community talking points in the days after the attack to downplay potential security failures. “Suddenly, three days ago, this gets spun up as if there’s something new to the story,” the President added, saying the talking points reflected what he was being told by intelligence officials. “There’s no ‘there’ there.”
“The whole issue of talking points, frankly, throughout this process has been a sideshow,” Obama said, noting that the Administration called it an act of terrorism almost from the start. “Who executes some sort of cover-up or effort to tamp things down for three days? So the whole thing defies logic.”
In November, White House press secretary Jay Carney said only a small, semantic change had been made to the talking points. With his Administration’s credibility under assault, Obama spent 918 words arguing that the allegations were not to be believed, and accused Republicans of playing politics. “They’ve used it for fundraising,” he said.
Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2013/05/13/angry-obama-tries-to-put-benghazi-back-on-the-fringe/#ixzz2TJJ2cMIz
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