White House advisor Dan Pfeiffer says Republicans and critics owe Susan Rice an apology after seeing the Benghazi emails
White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer on Sunday said Republicans “owe” U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice “an apology” for saying she misled the country in the wake of the Benghazi attack.
“Frankly, I think that many of the Republicans who had been talking about this, now that they’ve seen the emails, owe Ambassador Rice an apology for the things they’ve said about her in the wake of the attack,” Pfeiffer said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Susan Rice
Image/U.S. State Dept.
“Apology for what?” ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked.
“For accusing her of misleading the country, for saying that she didn’t – that somehow she was involved in some sort of political whitewash of what happened there,” Pfieffer replied. “What she said was what the intelligence community believed at the time. And when we got further information, we told the American people what that was. That’s how people know what happened here.”
Susan Rice endured a lot of scrutiny as she attributed the Benghazi attack on a YouTube anti-Islam video after the State Department had edited out the references to the terrorist attack, details which have now surfaced. Rice even withdrew from the Secretary of State nomination process.
The final version of the report used by Ambassador Rice on the Sunday shows, the CIA’s first drafts said the attack appeared to have been “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo” but the CIA version went on to say, “That being said, we do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qa’ida participated in the attack.” The draft went on to specifically name the al Qaeda-affiliated group named Ansar al-Sharia.
