WASHINGTON, DC — In an interview with ThinkProgress today, former Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge criticized the charge, made by Mitt Romney, that President Obama “sympathizes” with those who attacked and killed four Americans in Libya.

Romney said in a press release last night that “It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.” (When the U.S. Embassy in Cairo first addressed the situation, no attacks had yet occurred. The first comment from the embassy on the issue was to condemn religious incitement.)

ThinkProgress spoke with Ridge, who served under President George W. Bush from 2003 to 2005 and endorsed Romney earlier this year, on Capitol Hill today to get his reaction. He was unwilling to criticize Romney directly — “I don’t want to get in the he said, she said” — but rebuffed his charge that Obama’s sentiments were with those who carried out the attacks. “I don’t think President Obama sympathizes with those who attacked us,” Ridge said. “I don’t think any American does.”

KEYES: Do you think that President Obama sympathizes with those who attacked us and attacked the embassies?

RIDGE: No, I don’t think President Obama sympathizes with those who attacked us. I don’t think any American does. I’m not going to question the strength of his words.

Watch it:

Romney is finding few defenders for his charge, even among fellow Republicans. Buzzfeed spoke with a senior Republican foreign policy hand who said that Romney was “just trying to score a cheap news cycle hit” and now it’s become an “utter disaster.” Top Republicans in Congress are also refusing to echo their presidential candidate’s in press releases.

Greg Noth contributed to this post.

This week on Fox News, anchors Bill O’Reilly and John Stossel discussed former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean’s advocacy for the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), an exiled Iranian opposition group designated as a “foreign terror organization” by the State Department. The leadership of the group is based in Paris, while more than 3,000 former fighters linger in Camp Ashraf — a base set up outside Baghdad in the 1980s when the group allied with Saddam Hussein against Iran — where they face violent harassment by the Iraqi authorities.

O’Reilly and Stossel went through some background about the group and Dean’s history of paid speeches advocating for their removal from the terror rolls and U.S. recognition of the group’s leader, Maryam Rajavi, as the president of Iran.

Their history is shoddy. For example, Stossel blames the group’s U.S. designation solely on acts committed in the 1970s, which he says were carried out by a “nasty fringe” and occurred “30, 40 years ago.” But the MEK only renounced violence in 2001 and fighters were separated from their tanks in Camp Ashraf only in 2003. The U.S. government actually directly accuses the MEK of carrying out terrorist acts as recently as the late 1990s.

But the really staggering ignorance on the part of Stossel is his misunderstanding of the statutes that criminalize material support for groups designated as terrorists. Stossel compares Dean’s paid speeches advocating for the MEK to speeches on behalf of medical industry groups and Stossel’s own paid speeches. O’Reilly, to his credit, pushes back:

O’REILLY: He’s lobbying, and he’s getting paid by this group, Dean, to…

STOSSEL: We don’t know that he’s lobbying for them. He’s made speeches for them, but so has Rudy Giuliani.

O’REILLY: Come on. Why would these guys do that unless they were getting paid?

STOSSEL: Because they say, “Oh, we have Howard Dean speaking here in Belgium. Come over and meet Howard Dean.”

O’REILLY: That’s right. And Dean wouldn’t do that unless they were greasing him.

STOSSEL: Right. They’re greasing him.

O’REILLY: Yes, so he’s getting money from these people.

STOSSEL: So? I make speeches for money.

O’REILLY: Yes.

STOSSEL: If he checked them out and he believes…

O’REILLY: You do the chamber of commerce in Toledo. Not the Muhajadeen.

STOSSEL: If I believed in their cause, as he says he does.

O’REILLY: Oh, yes, he believes in their cause. Socialized medicine people? That’s what he believes in.

STOSSEL: He’s also taken money to change the patent rules for pharmaceutical companies. I don’t blame him for doing that.

O’REILLY: Dean is a lobbyist now, that’s what he does. And he gets paid by MSNBC.

Watch the whole exchange:

Stossel’s defense closely mirrors that of Rudy Giuliani, Tom Ridge, and Fran Townsend (a paid CNN contributor), who argued after they were accused of material support for terrorism that they didn’t consider the MEK to be a terror group.

That Dean was paid by the group — or more accurately, American supporters of the group (if that’s indeed the case) — is less important than whether or not he made what is considered speech that was “coordinated” with the group. Having spoken to actual MEK rallies in Europe alongside Rajavi, that is a difficult defense for Dean and other paid or unpaid advocates to make. (This is not to say one shouldn’t be able to speak in favor of delisting the MEK, or that they do not deserve today to be delisted, but simply that until they are delisted, the laws on the matter are clear.)

But one does not simply get to choose which laws they follow and which designations they recognize. In a nation where the rule of law matters, it needs to be applied equally to all violators, irrespective of what they or others feel about it. That’s why the false comparison between the MEK and the Toledo Chamber of Commerce is so staggering.

In an article on Fox News’ website, former Bush administration officials Michael Mukasey and Tom Ridge and former FBI director Louis Freeh claim that in his apparent rush to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq, President Obama is abandoning the Iranian exile group the Mujahedeen-e Khalq’s (MEK):

[I]n a panicked haste to exit from Iraq, the Obama White House is abandoning the 3,400 members of the MEK – including young men, women and children – who are living in exile in a camp near Baghdad and intends to leave them to the indelicate mercy of Iraq’s new Shia prime minister, the Mullahs’ good friend Nouri al-Maliki.

There’s so much wrong with this brief clip of their piece that it’s difficult to know where to start.

To begin with, Obama is hardly in a “panicked haste to exit from Iraq.” As news reports have indicated over the past months, the Obama administration has been pressuring the Iraqis to strike a deal to allow U.S. troops to stay past the end of 2011, a deadline imposed by a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) struck by George W. Bush in 2008 despite warnings that the deal could constrict the next president’s policies.

Indeed, Freeh, Mukasey and Ridge acknowledged this fact five paragraph’s later in the same article:

The Obama administration is, of course, eager to complete a formal agreement with Prime Minister Maliki concerning the status of American troops remaining in Iraq after 2011.

Attacking Obama for wanting to rush out of Iraq seems just as disingenuous as the authors’ charge that the administration “intends to leave [the MEK adherents in Ashraf] to the indelicate mercy of…the Mullahs’ good friend Nouri al-Maliki.” The notion that Iraqis — who have officially wanted the MEK off their soil since 2008 — need to be pressured by the Iranians into harsh actions against Ashraf is absurd. As CAP analyst Matt Duss recently noted, the MEK, which is designated as a terror group by the U.S., is “despised…by many Iraqis for having aided Saddam [Hussein] in his crackdowns on Iraqi Shiites and Kurds.” Earlier this year, Duss explained:

The MEK also fought alongside Hussein’s forces after the 1991 Gulf War to put down the Shia uprising in Iraq’s south and the Kurdish uprising in the north. They were driven by MEK leader Maryam Rajavi’s infamous command to “Take the Kurds under your tanks, and save your bullets for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.”

The New York Times also recently noted that the Obama administration — far from abandoning the MEK members in Iraq — has been engaged in active diplomacy to get them out of harm’s way, eventually hoping to relocate them to a third country outside Iran (where they’re also likely to face persecution) or Iraq. However, the diplomacy, reported the Times, has thus far hit a dead end because “the residents are refusing to leave, and no countries have come forward to welcome them.”

That the three conservative officials-turned-pundits would make disingenuous attacks on Obama is no surprise. Their skewed perspective absolving the MEK of its role in blocking solutions to its predicament might also be easy enough to explain, though: Freeh, Mukasey and Ridge are among a coterie of top former U.S. officials who have been paid by groups that support the MEK, advocate for removing them from the U.S. terror list, and in some cases urge U.S. support and recognition as an Iranian government in exile despite the lack of any meaningful MEK political constituency within Iran.

Today, current Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Janet Napolitano, along with former DHS Secretaries Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff, participated in a panel discussion moderated by NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell to celebrate the eighth anniversary of DHS. During the conversation, Ridge made the case that those who are blocking immigration reform simply “need to get over it” and come up with a solution:

I do hope that some time in the future we do end up looking at our immigration policy generally. It’s great to talk about defense we do, enforcement we do. At the end of the day, the demographics in the United States suggests that we will need additional labor going back and forth across the border in a lawful way. [...]

At some point in time I just hope that Congress accepts the responsibility and I can say this because I was there for twelve years and voted for “amnesty” under Ronald Reagan. At some you’ve got to say to yourself, ‘We’re not sending 12 million people home. Let’s get over it…So let’s just figure out a way to legitimize their status, create a new system, and I think that will add more to border security than any number of fences we can put across the border.

Watch it:

Ridge also told Americans not to be “arrogant” and just assume that everyone who emigrates to the U.S. wants to become an American citizen. “A lot of them would just love to come up here, work lawfully, and go home,” stated Ridge. While that may be true for a significant portion of the undocumented population, many undocumented immigrants have built families and established roots in the country.

Ridge’s successor, Michael Chertoff, echoed Ridge’s sentiments, saying that “we’re going to have to come up with a solution that takes into account not only the need for enforcement, but to deal with the immigration system overall comprehensively.” Chertoff also noted that “most people who come across the border are not coming to do harm to the U.S., they’re coming across the border for jobs that either Americans don’t want to work or the wage isn’t attractive.”

Ridge also lamented that “sometimes there has been hyperbole associated with the language and a general feeling that if you’re a Muslim you’ve been condemned.” He warned politicians to be “careful about the language we use to describe the jihadists and extremists.”