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Subscribe to RSSUN ambassador Susan Rice, widely considered the President's top choice to replace Hillary Clinton, was grilled by the Senate Tuesday. She acknowledged she had been wrong to say Benghazi was a copycat attack and continued to blame the CIA for providing her with that information. NBC's Andrea Mitchell reports.
UPDATED 12:35 p.m. ET -- Republican senators emerged from their meeting Tuesday with United Nations envoy Susan Rice saying they were more disturbed than before the meeting about the misleading explanation she gave after the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, when Rice said in TV interviews that the violence was due to an anti-Islamic video that was circulated on YouTube.
Rice, a potential nominee to replace Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, met with Republican Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Kelly Ayotte. The three senators have been among the harshest critics of the administration's handling of Benghazi and all spoke with reporters following Tuesday's meeting.
“It is clear that the information she gave the American people was incorrect when she said that it was a spontaneous demonstration triggered by a hateful video. It was not, and there was compelling evidence at the time that that was certainly not the case,” said McCain.
In the Sept. 11 assault on the consulate, Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, Glen Doherty, Tyrone Woods and Sean Smith, were killed.
Graham said, “Bottom line: I’m more disturbed now than I was before that the 16th (of) September explanation of how four Americans died in Benghazi, Libya by Ambassador Rice I think does not do justice to the reality at the time and in hindsight clearly was completely wrong.”
Graham suggested that Rice should have simply not made any statement on the Sept. 16 Sunday TV talk shows. “If you don’t know what happened, just say you don’t know what happened,” Graham said. “If you can do nothing but give bad information, isn’t it better to give no information at all?”
Bebeto Matthews / AP
United States Ambassador Susan Rice speaks during a meeting on Syria in the United Nations Security Council on Thursday, Aug. 30, 2012.
He added, “Before anybody can make an intelligent decision about promoting someone involved in Benghazi, we need to do a lot more (investigating). To this date we don’t have the FBI interviews of the survivor one or two days after the attack. ”
He invoked the example of President Bush’s nominee to be UN ambassador, John Bolton, who was blocked by Senate Democrats and a few Republicans in 2005 and 2006, implying that if Rice were nominated to the secretary of state Republicans would likewise block her confirmation.
Ayotte, too, said she was “more troubled” after meeting with Rice and Acting CIA Director Mike Morrell than she was before the meeting.
She questioned why Rice would have relied on unclassified CIA talking points in her TV interviews on Sept. 16.
“When you’re ambassador to the United Nations you go well beyond unclassified talking points in your daily preparation responsibilities for that job and that’s troubling to me as well,” Ayotte said.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice recaps the causes and effects of recent violence against Americans in the Middle East.
In a statement released Tuesday afternoon, Rice said that she and Morrell had explained to the senators in the meeting Tuesday that "the talking points provided by the intelligence community, and the initial assessment upon which they were based, were incorrect in a key respect: there was no protest or demonstration in Benghazi. While, we certainly wish that we had had perfect information just days after the terrorist attack, as is often the case, the intelligence assessment has evolved. We stressed that neither I nor anyone else in the Administration intended to mislead the American people at any stage in this process, and the Administration updated Congress and the American people as our assessments evolved."
Last week Graham sent Obama a letter saying, “We have now learned that the talking points provided to Ambassador Susan Rice on or around September 15 describing the assault on our consulate in Benghazi were disconnected from the actual intelligence. According to numerous sources, including CIA Director David Petraeus and the CIA station chief on the ground in Libya, the perpetrators of the attack were identified to be al Qaeda-linked militia almost immediately.”
Graham told Obama that by the time Rice spoke on five Sunday TV talk shows on Sept. 16, “the classified intelligence clearly refuted the scenario she described.”
He asked Obama to explain why Rice was chosen to explain the attack to the American people. “Why wasn’t someone with firsthand knowledge of the attack on our Consulate, or firsthand knowledge of the administration’s response during the critical hours our consulate was under attack, selected for this opportunity?”
Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who is in line to become the senior Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the new Congress that convenes in January, said Tuesday he sees Rice as a party loyalist.
"When I hear Susan (Rice) talk, she sounds to me like she'd be a great head of the Democratic National Committee,” Corker told reporters at the Capitol. “There's nobody who's more staff supportive of everything the administration does. That concerns me in a Secretary of State. You want a Secretary of State who obviously works with the administration but also shows the ability to be independent, and I'm not sure I see that second part.”
The Senate has not voted to reject a nominee for a Cabinet position since 1989 when it voted down President George H.W. Bush’s nomination of John Tower to be secretary of Defense. Unlike that case, the Senate is now controlled by the president’s own party.
NBC News’s Frank Thorp contributed to this report.
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McCain- retire. You are starting to disgrace yourself and tarnish your (sorta) distinguished career.
Stop playing politics. The explanation was credible. If you have any beef, its with the intelligence community which gave her the talking points, but I dont see any beef other than politics. When are these a-holes going to learn their lessons- in a couple of more elections?
SURE your an independent.
Would you have a problem if it was 1 of your family members that got killed.
McCain is just and old Fool !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And the Republicans wonder why they lost the election, Duh. Maybe if they quit acting like a bunch of angry school kids and grow up things might change. It's turned into the party of hate!
Yes we HATE LIARS.
Is it this hard to figure out folks? Stop the witch hunt, the GOP and its supporters are looking like fools in this. Everything you need to know is in this quote:
“When you’re ambassador to the United Nations you go well beyond unclassified talking points in your daily preparation responsibilities for that job and that’s troubling to me as well,” Ayotte said."
First- Had she gone beyond the CIA talking points and revealed classified information, she would now be getting slammed by these same people for doing so. They'd be claiming she breached national security protocols and put our intelligence operatives at risk.
Second- She used what the CIA gave her as usable. See above. There were obviously security concerns here. The CIA was worried about something. Probably worried about protecting vital information sources in the area and possible agents as well.
The GOP's hands are not exactly clean here either! In fact many Republicans voted against additional funding for security for our embassies in the Middle East.
Lets not forget as well that there were protests and demonstrations that day throughout the region. It seems the we Americans are having a hard time dealing with the concept of two things happening at once, and that a terrorist group used one of those things as a cover for a planned operation.
This is much ado about nothing. This intelligence failure pales in comparison to the one that left 3000 Americans dead on 9/11/01. This is and was a tragedy. Yes, there were intelligence failures, and secrets abound...as in any case involving CIA involvement and the intelligence community in general. But lets stop with the nonsense of trying to blame people who don't deserve it. 4 Americans are dead...and the people responsible are the vile terrorists that perpetrated this attack.
That's it.
End of story.
Stop being partisan sheep!
If Team Obama had been in charge on 9/11- the original- wonder if they would have called it "faulty construction techniques" and blamed the air traffic controllers?????? Seems this is their technique....
obama would have blamed it on someone else...anyone else....big bird...ernie...anyone......obama sucks...
How about these senators get back to work on helping create jobs and reduce the deficit? I love politics but I'm so sick of politics. Start doing what is right for this country and stop having witch hunts.
I think everyone can admit that the Benghazi aftermath was poorly handled. Cover-up? No. Fumbled? On the Obama 10 yard line!
If she were a republican, the press would have tared and feathered her, and forced her to resign. When is BozObama going to run out of get out of jail free cards.
What about the nearly 3,000 dead just 11 short years ago? Whose head should roll on that one? What about the more than 5K troops whose lives have been lost over WMDs we knew were not there??? Mistakes are made all the time. Why didn't McCain go after his own party after 9/11?? Because he loves a good WAR!!!!!!!
Why don't McCain and Graham go to the Cayman islands with all the Republicans, they all look so miserable.
They can spout all their negative remarks.
It's time for the American people to get to work without all their created sidelines to get off topic.
We need more positive ideas for American people.
Let the republicans gather together with their negative lifestyle.
would someone please tell them they lost the election, because of this type of behavior. why don't they learn the people do not want to waste time on this stupidity. please show you care about the country first, not politics as usual
Don't know why this seems so hard to grasp for some people. The whitehouse narrative was that Al Quaeda, and terrorrism in general was on the run. See democrat convention talking points, "Osama is dead and GM is alive" for more details. Clearly, if they had acknowledged Benghazi was terrorist driven, it upsets the narrative, and becomes a story in the weeks leading up to the election. Thus, the "spontaneous demonstration over a video" BS story was put out. Simple, typical, politics as usual. Susan Rice was paraded on the Sunday talk shows nearly a week after the event to spread this LIE, because she is a loyal party hack. The question should have been, why wasn't Hillary making the rounds as Sec of State instead of the UN Ambassador?
i think hillary feels dirty being part of this effed up regime...........
She and her lying/womanizing husband are dirty!
But of course the Repugnicans don´t agree with what Rice said, their only goal is to make the Obama administration look bad, plain and simple.
Rice said what the intelligence community told her was happening. Same thing Bush and Condi Rice did on their way to a criminal war, but of course it wasn´t their fault, it was bad intelligence at the time.
Repugnicans can´t stand losing and they will make sure that Obama´s second term is as difficult as they can possibly make it.
Save the country? Not on their agenda!
Oblahblah makes the Oblahblah administration look bad.
Easy to make the Obama criminals be seen as being bad. They are!!!!
My god!!! How much more can the Republicans sink in this independents eyes??
They just seem to be on a downward spiral.
If you were truly an independent, you wouldn't appreciate being lied to.
You mean like when Karl Rove (the Republican Brain) told FOX that the President was in France doing a fund-raiser this past 4th of July when IN FACT he and the First Lady were hosting a dinner for veterans AT THE WHITE HOUSE? You mean like that kind of lie?
Or maybe the lie that Romney killed a woman with cancer.
Or maybe the lie that Oblahblah didn't suggest the sequester, when he did.
Or maybe the lie that Planned Parenthood provides mammograms.
Those kind of lies?
Iowan,
No, I mean the "we screwed-up and people died because of it so we must lie about it" kind of lie.
Like that.
This is yet another triple-teaming effort by the TEA-Republican's to degrade efforts of Obama and any of his appointees. Still pushing out-of-touch scenarios to side-track fiscal cliff issues is a small part of their agenda. John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Kelly Ayotte all have the same agenda to discredit president Obama even at their own discreditable positions.
Yeah....and Eric Holder is an outstanding AG....
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAA
Even as a D, I voted for Sen McCain; I voted for his experience, not OBama's goodness. But this behavior relating to Benghazi is too negative and unnecessarily harsh - she was determined guilty byhim before she could defend herself. Sen M is proving to be very inconsistent in his judgment and treatment of people who have been involved in similar quandries; but he is much more of an attack dog for Rice. There was a time he was more willing to be a man who supported human rights and respected others who might oppose him, but not this time, he is much more partisan and hateful. I am sorry to see that.
Soldiers usually don't like it when their president leaves them high and dry...
Yeah, and I didn't see Bush or Romney in Vietnam - one was drunk and AWOL and the other was on a Mormon "honeymoon" in France learning about Dressage and doing "missionary" postion, I mean work.
I din't see Clinton in Vietnam either. He was evading the draft in England while leading anti-war protests, and starting his career as a sexual predator.
Soldiers usually don't like it when their president leaves them high and dry...
Sort of like when Bush lied about the WMD's in Iraq and sacrificed 4,000 American lives for it.
Since when .. in ANY ongoing investigation ... at ANY level (city, state, etc.) do you give away information freely in the first few days. You keep the salient points back - until the investigation proceeds. We are not ever going to be 100 percent free from terrorist attacks, or attempts, and I don't believe if one happens, that it is someone's "fault." We are all sorry that diplomats died and I truly believe we will get those who did it. (Can't argue with Obama's record on going after the bad guys.) Why is this such a big deal ... I fully expect that in the aftermath of any attack, we are not going to get every single detail of who they think did it. To do so IS being irresponsible.
But, you do not have to lie about it.
And they DID lie!
Maybe they didn't feel obligated to keep you appraised of the situation on a minute by minute basis. What's your security clearance, and can you find Libya on a map? Watching FOX 24/7 does not make you an expert on national security. Obviously this needs to be investigated, but not by Joe the Plubber sitting in his LazyBoy sippin a Bud.
Funny, the same problems and 'observations' that these illustrious Senator have attacked Amb. Rice with are the very same things I say about the Senate in general. Like not knowing what your talking about, but expounding on the subject anyways; like saying one thing, and denying you said it and that if you did say it, it was taken out of context.
And I recongize Sens. McClain and Ayotte, but I didn't know Chaz Bono was a senator!
If Republicans can't be a team player, let them all sit on the bench.
Is that why the Democratic run Senate has refused to vote on over 36 jobs bills? Because they are such team players and all???
don't know where you pulled that factoid from, but I do know that the Repugs were unanimous in NOT voting for a jobs bill for vets - even the ones who helped author the bill!
Could it possibly be all the crap the GOP tries to piggy back on those jobs bills. Do you even know what I'm talking about? That has been their tactic for years. Find a bill that has to be passed and then get your unpopular bills attached to it. I swear you need to understand how government works before ranting on one party.
You mean the 36 'jobs bills', every one with regulatory, environmental, and safety reduction riders that are obviously unacceptable? Those 'job bills'?
bhart,
Yep. That is your excuse for the Democrat obstructionist Senate.
How about the TWO budgets passed by the GOP House and ignored in the Senate. How many did the Dems pass? Even when they had both chambers of Congress?
Smoke and mirrors. See, look at us we are so very concerned about our foreign affairs. Pay no attention to the bitter old man who lost to President Obama. Ms. Rice is not fit to be Secretary of State. Yet, Ms. Conde Rice was lying through her teeth regarding Iraq is remembered positively as Secretary of State. What are they not discussing? Tax hikes for the wealthy, taking away tax loopholes, penalizing those corporations who outsource their jobs instead of tax breaks! Jobs, Jobs, Jobs is what they need to discuss. Oh, and by the way....keep politics and your religious beliefs Out of my Uterus!!
Nothing has changed at the federal level: WH has Obama and the Dems still obstruct in the Senate. GOP House can still stop more Obama foolishness this round.
Why did not the Dems take back the House? All seats were up for the taking. Hmmm?
At the state level, however, most governors are GOP (30) and most state legislatures are GOP dominated.
Uh oh! Seems we are still a center-right nation.
GREAT!!!!!
Why did not the Dems take back the House? All seats were up for the taking. Hmmm?
They didn't have too. They have both the White House and the Senate.
When a thing like this breaks you cannot just say nothing. Neither can you afford to get it wrong in a way that compounds the damage, as Mitt Romney did. So you start off with the information you have from the pros you have engaged in the matter, and you try not to get too far out on a limb. Was her statement accurate, based upon the actual knowledge of those who were engaged? No. Was it accurate to the bestof her knowledge? Yes. Did her statement insult or inflame any of the people whose support we needed at the time? No. Shoud the information that al quaida was involved have been redacted before the information was delivered to her? Probably not. Was there any intent do deceive members of Congress? No.
There are, indeed questions. There is indeed an investigation. But to suggest somehow that Ms. Rice's unintentional misstatement is the equivalent of General Colin Powell's statement to the United Nations that the United States had evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, when none existed, the deception by Powell's handlers being for the purpose of garnering international support for a preemptive war on Iraq, is utter foolishness.
Unintentional? NOW it was unintentional? Five times?
Even a liberal such as yourself cannot be THIS stupid!
mccain and the two others have issues that go beyond politics. The republican party should tread carefully at making this a "watergate moment" during an investigation in a volitile country and sensitive interests of the us are at stake the American public does not need to know the particulars. The military has been responsible for a great deal of misjudgements in that region overreaching or some wrong move could have produced a bigger headache for our interests. The CIA and President acted prudently in this incident until facts can be verified which was the case.
Nothing has changed at the federal level: WH has Obama and the Dems still obstruct in the Senate. GOP House can still stop more Obama foolishness this round.
Why did not the Dems take back the House? All seats were up for the taking. Hmmm?
At the state level, however, most governors are GOP (30) and most state legislatures are GOP dominated.
Uh oh! Seems we are still a center-right nation.
GREAT!!!!!
In this instance, the CIA told the truth and the administration lied about it.
OOPS!!!
His questions are valid - especially if he's part of the confirmation hearings process but this public political grandstanding is quite unnecessary given that he's not making his argument relevant to the over all issue.
Yes, we want to know what happen in Libya and yes we should get a nonpartisan inquiry about the actual events that took place. A witch hunt will not solve the problem nor will it prevent potential future events.
The entire thing seems to have been a CIA operation. The CIA responded immediately to the attack on what now appears to be a CIA operation. If this was a rogue operation and the President and Intelligence Committees weren't informed, there would be hell to pay. Heads would roll. I think one already has.
McCain hasn't a clue about foreign affairs, he is a bitter old man who gets caught lying repeatedly and then tries to back up so he can tell a few more. Graham is so light in the loafers that the only thing he did in the middle east, was to buy carpets supposedly on a fact checking mission to Iraq. Both of these old fools are good at one thing and one thing only, wasting tax payer money and time. Kick em to the curb cause the sale date has expired on both of these 'men' (I use the term loosely)! When you hear them speak on the Sunday shows they sound like a couple of shrews with high pitched voices griping like fishwives about absolutely nothing. Is this something anyone gives a crap about it except these three talking heads? Grow some balls and shut up.