Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has been leading a smear campaign in an attempt to discredit U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice after reports emerged that President Obama is considering nominating her as the next Secretary of State. McCain and his allies, who include namely Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), have charged that Rice’s Sept. 16 presentation of what the Obama administration knew at the time about the terror attacks in Benghazi, Libya, which has since turned out to be inaccurate, disqualifies her to be the nation’s top diplomat.

But facts have emerged that show not only that Rice was simply relaying the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment and but also that, contrary to these Republicans’ claims, Rice’s presentation was in no way a political effort to downplay al-Qaeda’s involvement in the Benghazi attacks.

Now that their campaign has been fully discredited, McCain, Graham and Ayotte are notably silent about Susan Rice and Benghazi. Graham appeared on Fox News Dec. 3 and neither he, nor host Greta Van Susteren, mentioned Benghazi or Rice. And McCain was on the same program last night — Susan Rice never came up during the interview, and McCain only mentioned Benghazi or Libya in the context of whether the U.S. should intervene militarily in Syria.

With this lull in the anti-Susan Rice campaign, ThinkProgress has updated its timeline of the entire Benghazi affair, which documents the immediate aftermath and the Romney campaign’s politicization of the events all the way through to today. Read the updated timeline here.

A Republican senator on Wednesday praised U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice during an interview on CNN, saying Rice is a “very smart, very intelligent woman” and that she shouldn’t be held responsible for the misleading information she presented on the Benghazi terror attacks during her Sept. 16 Sunday show appearances.

Republicans led by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) had led an all out assault on Rice over the past several weeks, suggesting that she deliberately misled the American people when she said the attack in Benghazi that killed four Americans was sparked by a demonstration against an anti-Islam video (Rice said yesterday that there was no demonstration). Because of the dust-up, McCain called Rice “not very bright” and a group of House Republicans called her “incompetent.”

But Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA) doesn’t believe that to be the case. While Isakson told CNN’s Soledad O’Brien this morning that the administration needs to answer questions about what happened in Benghazi, he added, referring to Rice, “what you don’t want to do is shoot the messenger.” Rice “is a very smart, very intelligent woman. I know this Ms. Rice, I think she’s done a good job as Ambassador to the U.N.,” Isakson said:

ISAKSON: Well if she is then she come before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. We’ll get the answers to questions and quite frankly, if we don’t get some resolution for the questions regarding Benghazi and the death of Chris Stevens, then I doubt very seriously that she would be confirmed but if we get the truth – what you don’t want to do Soledad is shoot the messenger. She read what she was told to read on those days and those five interviews on that Sunday right after Benghazi. …

She’s become the focal point because she was put on the tip of the spear by the administration. She is a very smart, very intelligent woman. I know this Ms. Rice, I think she’s done a good job as Ambassador to the U.N.

Watch the clip:

Indeed, on Sept. 16, Rice presented information given to her by the intelligence community, talking points that were approved by the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA and she consistently made it clear that what she was presenting were only initial conclusions and could still change. While some of those talking points turned out to be inaccurate, there is no evidence she intentionally gave false information. “Neither I nor anyone else in the administration intended to mislead the American people at any stage in the process,” she said.

Isakson isn’t the first Republican senator to stray from McCain’s attack lines on Susan Rice. Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) pushed back against McCain’s call for a Watergate-style committee to investigate the Benghazi incident.

And McCain’s top Senate ally Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) agreed with Chambliss and yesterday had differed with the Arizona Republican after conducting separate private meetings with Rice. While McCain and his allies said the meeting left them more “disturbed” about Rice and Benghazi, Lieberman offered a more favorable opinion. “I felt that she was telling me the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” he said.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) on Tuesday blasted three key Republicans who are attacking U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice over the Obama administration’s handling of the Benghazi incident. After facts trickled out about the Benghazi attacks trickled out in prior weeks that undermined their attacks on Rice, the senators, John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), seemed to back away from going after Rice.

But after their private meeting with the U.N. Ambassador, McCain, Graham and Ayotte came out swinging, claiming that Rice should have either disregarded talking points the intelligence community gave her for her Sept. 16 Sunday show appearances, or not said anything at all about the attacks given that some of the information given her turned out to be inaccurate.

Reid, in a statement released yesterday evening, shot back:

“The personal attacks against Ambassador Rice by certain Republican senators have been outrageous and utterly unmoored from facts and reality. I am shocked that senators would continue these attacks even when the evidence – including disclosures from the intelligence community about the information she presented – have made it clear that the allegations against Ambassador Rice are baseless, and that she has done absolutely nothing wrong.

“Ambassador Rice’s service as United States Ambassador to the United Nations has been impeccable. She has answered all questions raised in relation to the Benghazi attacks completely and repeatedly. The Senate committees of jurisdiction are in the midst of examining the events leading up to the Benghazi attacks, and I agree with those – including the ranking Republican members of both the Intelligence and Homeland Security committees – who have said we should let the committees do their work. There should be no place for such blatant partisanship in oversight of our nation’s intelligence community.

“The election is over. It is time to drop these partisan political games, and focus our attention on the real challenges facing us as a nation.”

Reid warned McCain earlier this month to quit politicizing the Benghazi attacks after Arizona Republican called for a Watergate-style special committee to investigate the administration’s response. “There is no evidence that any crime was committed,” Reid said.

McCain, his Republican allies and Fox News have been pushing baseless conspiracy theories on the Benghazi attacks, primarily that Rice and other Obama administration officials were involved in a “cover up.” Senior intelligence official debunked McCain’s latest charge — that the White House had changed Rice’s Benghazi talking points for political purposes — and it seemed like he would back off. But now McCain is back at it and even some of his best friends in the Senate refuse to sign on.

Emerging from talks with U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, Senate Republicans have a new line of attack on Libya: if it was unclear what happened in Benghazi, why say anything at all in the aftermath?

The newest salvo comes from Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) after a very short-lived detente with the Obama administration on the response to the Sept. 11 assault in Libya.

The three met with Rice behind closed doors on Capitol Hill today and emerged with a new attack campaign, declaring that they only had “more questions” about what the administration knew and when.

“The American people got bad information on Sept. 16,” Graham said during a press conference today, referring to Rice’s Sept. 16 appearances on the Sunday talk shows. “And the question is ‘Should they have been giving information at all?’ If you can give nothing but bad information, isn’t it better to give no information?”

Rather than acknowledging that the intelligence community had vetted and aided in the drafting of Rice’s unclassified talking points that day, the senators in the post-meeting press conference instead chose to fault Rice for not only failing to be more critical of the assessment she was given but for not potentially revealing classified information:

AYOTTE: What troubles me also, the changes made to the unclassified talking points were misleading. But just to be clear, when you have a position where you’re Ambassador to the United Nations, you go well beyond unclassified talking points in your daily preparation and responsibilities for that job. And that’s troubling to me as well, why she wouldn’t have asked “I’m the person that doesn’t know about this, I’m going on every single show?” But in addition, it’s not just the talking points that were unclassified, but clearly it was part of her responsibility as Ambassador to the United Nations to review much more than that.

Ayotte’s determination echoes a growing belief among the right-wing that Rice should have “known better” than to take the talking points provided by the intelligence community at face value or that she should have divulged material that was classified at the time to the American people.

But this brand-new determination that Rice should have strayed from the talking points given to her on Sept. 16 has already spread among the GOP. Senate Minority Whip John Kyl (R-AZ) called Rice a “puppet” of the administration in an interview with National Review Online:

“Is she such a puppet that she had no questions about the information she was given?” Kyl asks, in an interview at Newseum, where he is participating in the Foreign Policy Initiative’s annual forum. “What she said was deceptive, misleading, and wrong.”

However, during the five interviews she gave on Sept. 16, Rice consistently made clear that what was being presented were only initial conclusions and could still change. While the facts continue to exonerate Rice and the Obama administration on this issue, in the face of continual shouting by conservatives that a conspiracy of some sort took place surrounding Benghazi, the majority of Americans believe that’s not the case.

A new CNN poll has found that a majority of Americans do not think the Obama administration intentionally misled the public in explaining what happened in the immediate aftermath of the terror attacks on U.S. assets in Benghazi, Libya in September.

Republicans, led by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), and Fox News have been engaged in an all out attack campaign against U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice and other Obama administration officials to try to convince Americans that the White House was trying to execute a Watergate-style cover up of the U.S. response to the Benghazi attacks. But the CNN poll has found that it failed:

On Libya, 54% of the country is dissatisfied with the administration’s response to the Benghazi attack, with only four in ten saying they’re satisfied with the way the White House handled the matter.

“But that dissatisfaction is not because Americans see a cover-up,” said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “Only 40% believe that the inaccurate statements that administration officials initially made about the Benghazi attack were an attempt to deliberately mislead the public. Fifty-four percent think those inaccurate statements reflected what the White House believed to be true at the time.”

News of the CNN poll comes as Rice will meet today with McCain and two other Republican senators who have been most vocal in attacking the U.N. ambassador on Libya, Lindsey Graham (SC) and Kelly Ayotte (NH).

McCain vowed to block Rice’s potential nomination as the next Secretary of State but has since backed away from that pledge after facts emerged to undermine his claim that Rice and Obama administration officials lied about Benghazi. McCain said on Sunday that he would give Rice the “benefit” of explaining her position. But the Washington Post reports that Ayotte is still holding out . “I would hold the [Rice] nomination until I got sufficient answers,” Ayotte said.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Egyptian Prime Minister Mohamed Kamel Amr today announced a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, ending eight days of violence that resulted in nearly 150 dead and more wounded. President Obama dispatched Clinton to the region yesterday and the nation’s top diplomat traveled to Jerusalem and Cairo today to help facilitate the deal.

But in a statement on the Gaza ceasefire today, Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) — one day after intelligence officials debunked their attacks on the Obama administration over Benghazi — didn’t have any kind words for the president and his team. In fact, the new “Three Amigos” attacked Obama, saying there needs to be “smarter American leadership” in the Middle East.

Yet the three Republicans did have praise for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi:

We commend Prime Minister Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders for the role they played in reaching today’s ceasefire. We also are encouraged by the responsible leadership role played by the President of Egypt and his government. President Morsi deserves credit for successfully bringing an end to the violence and preventing further loss of life on both sides. These actions are befitting the commitment to peace and security that Egypt has traditionally upheld as a leader of the Arab world.

Indeed, Netanyahu, Morsi and others involved ending the hostilities deserve credit — but so does the Obama administration. And given their embarrassing campaign to bring down the Obama administration on Libya, it’s not entirely shocking that McCain and his allies don’t see it that way.

Intelligence officials told CNN that the intelligence community, not the White House, changed the now infamous Benghazi talking points given to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice before her appearance on several morning news shows in September. CNN quoted both the spokesperson for the Director of National Intelligence and an anonymous official “familiar with the drafting of the talking points.” The DNI spokesperson said that the only “substantive changes” came from the intelligence community and not the White House.

Former CIA Director David Petraeus told lawmakers in a closed door hearing last week that the CIA’s original assessment on the Sept. 11 Benghazi attack was that it was carried out by al Qaeda affiliated groups. But he reportedly said that analysis was later taken out after an interagency review in favor of a more general assessment that “extremists” carried out the attack to broaden the scope and not tip off terrorists to U.S. knowledge on the matter. And despite the fact that Petraeus said the CIA approved the change, Republicans, led by Republican senators John McCain (AZ), Lindsey Graham (SC) and Kelly Ayotte (NH), have accused the White House of stripping the language for political reasons.

But Shawn Turner, the spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence, told CNN that it wasn’t the White House’s decision:

“The intelligence community made substantive, analytical changes before the talking points were sent to government agency partners for their feedback. There were no substantive changes made to the talking points after they left the intelligence community.”

Another anonymous intelligence official echoed Turner, saying that the changes were made based on legitimate intelligence and for legal purposes:

“First, the information about individuals linked to al Qaeda was derived from classified sources. Second, when links were so tenuous – as they still are – it makes sense to be cautious before pointing fingers so you don’t set off a chain of circular and self-reinforcing assumptions. Third, it is important to be careful not to prejudice a criminal investigation in its early stages.”

Indeed, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) told the New York Times last week that in his closed door briefing, Petraeus “was adamant there was no politicization of the process, no White House interference or political agenda.”

The fight over the talking points will most likely continue; it has even become a campaign cause for Republican senators like Lindsey Graham. Others like John McCain have vowed to do “everything” to block the potential nomination of Susan Rice for Secretary of State. But Democrats in Congress and media commentators are beginning to wonder why Republicans are picking a substance-free fight with Rice, a woman and an African-American, after the drubbing they took in last month’s elections among those demographics.

Today on Fox News Sunday, Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) said they did not think the U.S. Senate should create a special committee to investigate the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya on Sept. 11. Chambliss and Lieberman said the Senate currently has the capacity to investigate the matter and that a new committee is not needed.

Republican senators John McCain (AZ), Lindsey Graham (SC) and Kelly Ayotte (NH) this week called for a Watergate-style special “select committee” to investigate the attack, claiming that the Obama administration, particularly U.N. Ambasss misled the public about the attack resulting from protests against an anti-Islam video.

But Chambliss and Lieberman, both close friends of McCain and Graham (Lieberman, Graham and McCain are often referred to as “The Three Amigos“), rejected the proposal. “I respectfully separate from my two amigos on this one,” Lieberman said:

WALLACE: Do you think that we need … do we need a special committee or can your standing committees do it?

CHAMBLISS: Well first of all these two guys are two of my best friends and two of Joe’s best friends. We travel a lot together to some very dangerous places but the committees within the United States Senate are very capable of investigating this in the right way and this is one time I have a slight disagreement with my good friends.

LIEBERMAN: Yeah I respectfully separate from my two amigos on this one and I agree with Saxby. This was a tragedy but it doesn’t rise to the level of 9/11/01. Our committees can handle this and come up with answers.

Earlier in the segment, Lieberman undermined the central case McCain, Graham and Ayotte made in arguing for the special committee, namely the suggestion that Rice willfully inaccurately described the events of the Libya attack. “As I look at what we now know the intelligence community was saying that week and I look at Ambassador Rice’s statements on television on the following Sunday morning, I don’t find anything inconsistent between those two,” he said. Watch the clips:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) on Friday rejected McCain’s request for a special committee on Libya in a strongly worded letter. “I refuse to allow the Senate to be used as a venue for baseless partisan attacks,” Reid wrote.