Darrell Issa (Credit: Bloomberg)

A GOP Congressman yet again made the false claim that President Obama “lied for a month” about the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on a diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) has, from his perch atop the House Oversight Committee for months, been the House of Representatives’ lead investigator on Benghazi, which roared back into the headlines this week. Speaking to host David Gregory on NBC’s Meet the Press, Issa once again made the claim that the Obama administration lied for a month about whether the assault was a terrorist attack or not, engaging in a massive cover-up.

Issa claimed that the administration leaned heavily on the CIA to change its draft of the now infamous set of unclassified talking points on what happened in Benghazi to better fit a political narrative and hiding the true nature of the attack from the American people:

ISSA: The fact is, we want the facts, we’re entitled to the facts. The American people were effectively lied to for a period of about a month. That’s important to get right. And –

GREGORY: I just want to be clear here what you believe the lie was.

ISSA: This was a terrorist attack from the get-go. The attack succeeded extremely quickly, because in no small part because the consulate or the diplomatic facility in Benghazi was not given the support it needed or quite frankly the decision to leave which might have been just as good. Either way, they were in fact covering up an easy attack that succeeded that was from the get-go about a terrorist attack. It was never about a video.

Counter to Issa’s claim, however, the evidence shows that while the administration acted cautiously in what it put forward, it ultimately told the public just what it knew to be fact about the attack. President Obama himself referred to the assault in Libya as an “act of terror” at least twice within 48 hours.

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice delivered the final draft of the talking points on Sept. 16, 2012, appearing on all five Sunday news shows. Rice gave what was at the time the administrations’ best knowledge about what caused the attacks, saying that it was the result of a demonstration that mutated into a coordinated attack. Those appearances lead to her being the target of a Republican smear campaign in the weeks and months ahead.

From the CIA’s original draft of the talking points, however, the intelligence community believed that what occurred in Benghazi was “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.” The Cairo protests were, in fact, spurred on by an anti-Islamic video as Rice ultimately wound up referencing in her appearances. In another draft, before the document was provided to the rest of the government for input, the word “attack” became “demonstrations,” showing that the very claim that Republicans have accused the White House of lying about came from the CIA itself. The view that the video had at least some part to play in the attack’s genesis has been borne out in later reporting.

What’s more, the administration acknowledged from the beginning that the official story on Benghazi would change as more information became known. “We’ll wait to see exactly what the investigation finally confirms, but that’s the best information we have at present,” Rice said at the time. And rather than “scrubbing” the points of references to Al Qaeda to benefit Obama, then-CIA Director David Petraeus reportedly himself asked for the mentions to be removed to avoid “tipping off the groups” involved.

None of this has stopped Republicans from taking what was inherently a turf war between the CIA and State Department and attempting to turn it into a scandal that will bring down the Obama administration.

During an appearance on Meet The Press Sunday, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) repeated his call for profiling Muslims in the name of public safety, stating that although most Muslims are “outstanding people,” the threat of terrorism still stems from “the Muslim community.” Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), America’s first Muslim congressman, quickly shot down that line of thinking, arguing that blanket profiling doesn’t serve the needs of law enforcement and actually undermines effective investigations by unnecessarily straining public resources.

Ellison detailed the shortcomings of King’s approach, stressing that individual behavior and actionable evidence should form the basis of terrorism investigations. He also compared King’s strategy to the similarly misguided policies that the American government adopted towards Japanese Americans during World War II.

Watch it:

King also asked why law enforcement hadn’t made interrogations of the Boston bombers’ mosque a higher priority, prompting host David Gregory to ask what, exactly, investigators could have asked before the bombings had occurred. King responded by repeating that such interrogations had not occurred due to “political correctness” concerning the treatment of Muslims in America.

King’s calls for profiling against Muslims is certainly nothing new. The New York congressman has been using the Boston bombings as justification for increasing surveillance of American Muslim communities, and he previously led a series of infamous congressional hearings into the potential radicalization of Muslims in America. The NYPD’s enhanced surveillance of Muslim communities, made public by an Associated Press investigative series in 2012, found that the department’s actions had “a severe chilling effect on speech, religious activity, and community life” while failing to yield a single piece of actionable intelligence.

This morning on Meet The Press, David Gregory twice asserted that, in May, President Obama declared that “al Qaeda has been defeated.” Gregory used that claim to advance a theory that Obama was simply not concerned enough about al Qaeda in advance of the attack on the American embassy in Libya. Here’s the transcript:

GREGORY: The President has said as recently as May of this year that al Qaeda has not had a chance to rebuild, that al Qaeda has been defeated. There is an election on, as we’ve been talking about, and the President’s challenger said plain and simple, the President failed to level with the American people and call this a terrorist attack, because you had to be concerned about another terrorist attack from al Qaeda in the Middle East after the President said that al Qaeda had been defeated. 

Watch it:

That is not, however, what Obama said in May. Gregory was apparently referring to an address that Obama delivered from Afghanistan in May on the one year anniversary of Osama Bin Laden’s death. Here is what Obama said:

And one year ago, from a base here in Afghanistan, our troops launched the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. The goal that I set — to defeat al Qaeda and deny it a chance to rebuild — is now within our reach.

Still, there will be difficult days ahead. The enormous sacrifices of our men and women are not over.

So, the truth is that Obama did not say al Qaeda had already been defeated and specifically acknowledged that there were “difficult days” and “enormous sacrifices” yet to come.