President Obama in a press conference on Monday shot back at Republicans trying to create a scandal out of his administration’s handling of the Benghazi terror attacks last September.
The Benghazi issue resurfaced in recent weeks after Fox News and House Republicans tried and failed to turn up new evidence of some kind of administration “cover-up” of its response to the attacks. And an ABC News report on Friday fanned the flames, purportedly uncovering damning evidence of the White House and State Department’s role in editing talking points on the attacks.
None of these efforts have resulted in any new information and when Obama was asked about it today, he appeared agitated, saying the issue has already been investigated and Benghazi has turned in to a “political circus.” The President also noted what a terrible job his administration is doing if it was trying to cover anything up on Benghazi:
OBAMA: If this was some effort on our part to try to downplay what had happened or tamp it down — that would be a pretty odd thing that three days later, we end up putting out all the information that in fact has now served as the basis for everybody recognizing that this was a terrorist attack and that it may have included elements that were planned by extremists inside of Libya.
Who executes some sort of cover-up or effort to tamp things down, for three days? So the whole thing defies logic and the fact that this keeps on getting churned out, frankly has a lot to do with political motivations. We’ve had folks who have challenged Hillary Clinton’s integrity, Susan Rice’s integrity, Mike Mullen and Tom Pickering’s integrity. It’s a given that mine gets challenged by these same folks. they’ve used it for fundraising and frankly, you know, if anybody out there wants to actually focus on how we make sure something like this does not happen again? I am happy to get their advice and information and council.
Watch the entire response in the clip below:
Pickering, a former U.S. ambassador and co-chair of the independent review board on Benghazi, also criticized those claiming the administration is engaged in a cover-up. “I think the notion of a quote, cover up, has all the elements of Pulitzer Prize fiction attached to it,” he said last week.