Susan Rice, who served as US National Security Advisor from 2013 to 2017 during the Obama administration, is coming back to the White House where Biden will appoint her as the Director of Domestic Policy.
Susan Rice, who served as US National Security Advisor from 2013 to 2017 during the Obama administration, is coming back to the White House where Biden will appoint her as the Director of Domestic Policy.
Susan Rice coming back to the White House as @JoeBiden Director of Domestic Policy
— John Roberts (@johnrobertsFox)
Rice, who pitched herself in August as qualified to be either Secretary of State of Secretary of Defense in a Biden administration, was in the running to become Secretary of State under Obama in 2012, but she removed herself from consideration. That was due to the incredibly poor handling by the Obama administration of the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya.
Four American soldiers were killed in an attack on Sept. 11, 2012 outside of the American embassy in Benghazi, and the administration said that it was spontaneous, as the result of anger over a viral video that was insulting to Islam.
Questions were then raised as to whether the Beghazi attack was truly spontaneous as Rice said, or something that intelligence could have been aware of and able to prevent. Additional concerns were that the State Department was slow to respond.
Obama, however, has been pushing for Rice to have a prominent place in Biden's cabinet, and in many ways, given Biden's staffing choices, the incoming administration appears to be a continuation of the Obama White House. The swamp that Trump and his supporters were attempting to drain is seeping back into the beltway.
It was Rice as UN Ambassador who, "In the aftermath of the attacks on Benghazi, Libya, which killed four people... appeared on TV in place of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to recite 'talking points' from a CIA memo. She said the attacks were spontaneous and the result of an anti-Muslim video made by an American. This theory was later debunked." After that gaff, it was not likely that she would have succeeded Clinton in the role of Secretary of State.
Speaking about the Benghazi attacks on Face the Nation in 2012, Rice said that the attacks were spontaneous. She said that there would be an FBI investigation, but that "based on the best information we have to date, what our assessment is as of the present, is in fact, what began, spontaneously in Benghazi, as a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo where... there was a violent protest outside our embassy sparked by this hateful video.
"But soon after that spontaneous protest began outside of our consulate in Benghazi, we believe that it looks like extremist elements, individuals, joined in that effort with heavy weapons of the sort that are readily now available in Libya... and it spun into something much more violent."
Rice said that "We do not have information at present that leads us to conclude this this was premeditated or preplanned."
In a Congressional hearing intended to get an understanding of what happened in Benghazi, and what the administration believed was the cause of the attack, Ambassador Kennedy was asked to account for his own understanding of the incident as he expressed on the Sept. 12, the day after the attack. At that time, he reportedly told congressional aids that he believed it to have been a coordinated and planned attack on US servicemen.
Kennedy said that due to "the nature of it and the lethality of it, it was a complex attack." But he backed Rice's assessment of it before Congress, even though it contradicted his own. He was asked how he could defend Rice, given that they had the same information and drew the opposite conclusions.
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