President Obama broke his steely exterior and shed a tear during a heated moment of a press conference where he was questioned about the alleged cover up over the attacks on the American consulate in Benghazi.
The President denied Republican criticism that his White House was trying to cover up information about the deadly assault in Benghazi, Libya last year, as undeterred GOP lawmakers pressed ahead with their investigation.
Obama told reporters at a White House news conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron that the GOP focus on the talking points was a ‘sideshow.’
‘There's no there there,’ he said.
Shedding a tear: A single tear was seen rolling down the President's face during the Monday press conference when he stood alongside British Prime Minister David Cameron
Low point: The President was responding to a question about the administration's alleged 'cover up' about the cause of the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi
Responding to questions about the talking points used by U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice days after the attack, Obama insisted that the assessment of the cause of the September 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission matched the information he was receiving in his daily briefings.
Emails disclosed Friday showed that State Department and other senior administration officials pushed for references to prior warnings and al Qaeda be deleted from the talking points in the days before Rice's appearance on the Sunday talk shows, and one suggested that Congress could use those issues as ammunition against the State Department.
Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed in the two nighttime attacks.
Obama pointed out that he described the assault as an act of terror the day after and a few days after Rice's appearance an administration official said extremists inside Libya carried out the attack.
‘Who executes some kind of cover up for three days?’ Obama said.
On the offensive: Obama said that the Republican investigations were politically biased
Thinking it over: Obama let Cameron discuss the joint US-UK effort to combat terrorism
Republicans argue that the administration was trying to mislead Congress and the American people about the attack and its terrorist roots in the weeks prior to the 2012 November presidential election.
The Benghazi, Libya, controversy has been simmering for months but flared up last week after internal emails were made public showing the administration trying to shape 'talking points' to explain how four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were killed in an attack there.
Obama rejected claims of a cover-up on information about the attacks and said the assertions were made with political motivations aimed at him and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a potential 2016 presidential candidate.
United front: Obama and Cameron spoke about their joint effort to gain support from Russia in the fight against Syrian leader Bashar al Assad
Special relationship: Cameron and Obama continued to show that the United States and the United Kingdom still have a very close connection 'The whole issue of this - of talking points, frankly, throughout this process has been a sideshow,' he said. Mrs Clinton appeared before two congressional committees investigating the Benghazi attacks.
She took responsibility for the department's missteps and failures leading up to the assault, but said that requests for more security at the diplomatic mission in Benghazi didn't reach her desk.
Pickering and Mullen's blistering report found that 'systematic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels' of the State Department meant that security was 'inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place.'
0 comments:
Post a Comment