Susan Rice is reportedly on Joe Biden’s shortlist to be his running mate, and because of this, she’s clearly trying to get ahead of negative stories that are bound to come up should she be selected. The most significant story is the role she played as chief propagandist for the Obama administration after the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S consulate in Benghazi.
That attack happened weeks before the presidential election. Naturally, the administration was worried the attack would undermine the reelection campaign narrative that Obama was winning the war on terror, so they devised a false narrative that the attack was actually a spontaneous protest against an obscure YouTube video that went horribly wrong. Then-UN Ambassador Susan Rice was the one who led the media blitz in the aftermath of the attack pushing this bogus narrative.
In an interview with The Atlantic’s Edward-Isaac Dovere, she addressed this liability head on.
Dovere: The Sunday-show appearances around the Benghazi attack have become so much of your public identity. Your mother actually warned you not to do it, and thought Hillary Clinton should have instead. In the end, that became an issue getting in your way to be Obama’s secretary of state, and continues to be an issue Republicans attack you over now.
Rice: She said, “Why you?” And I said, “The White House asked me to do it.” And she’s like, “Well, where’s Hillary?” And I said that she’d been asked, but declined. And I presumed—I hadn’t had this conversation with her—that she had had an extraordinarily draining week, having lost four Americans in an American overseas facility, and all the pain and trauma that that entails for the people of the State Department, for the families, for everybody. But I agreed, as a team player. And her instinct was, “I smell a rat. You shouldn’t do it.” And I said, “Mom, don’t be ridiculous. I’ve done this many times before.” She was absolutely right.
You got that? Susan Rice is trying to deflect responsibility for lying to the American people multiple times after the 2012 Benghazi attacks by saying she didn’t want to do it in the first place, and only agreed to because she was being a team player. She was being set up to take the fall!
And that’s not to say she accepted responsibility for lying to the American people on orders from her superiors. “[W]hen you have a tragedy, a crisis of the sort we had in Benghazi and the terrorist attack, particularly in the height of a presidential campaign, a hot electoral season—it’s going to be politicized and the opposition is going to be looking to shoot the messenger as much as shoot at the message,” Rice claimed.
See, not only is she not accepting responsibility for actions, she basically refused to admit she lied, that the problem, of course, was Republicans, for politicizing the situation before an election. Because obviously her lies were immaterial.
For Susan Rice, being a team player worked out. As a reward for lying to the American people to save Obama’s reelection, she was promoted to national security adviser during his second term. Her willingness to be the fall guy might help make her Biden’s running mate.
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Matt Margolis is the author of the new book Airborne: How The Liberal Media Weaponized The Coronavirus Against Donald Trump, and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis