Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus faulted CNN’s Candy Crowley for aiding President Obama in telling a lie about his immediate characterization of the terrorist attack in Libya.
“Point blank: The president lied to the American people,” Priebus said when discussing Obama’s comments on whether he blamed terrorists for the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. “I think the moderator might have helped that along.”
When Romney argued that Obama blamed the attack on an anti-Islam video, Obama said that he called it an act of terror in the Rose Garden on September 12. Romney disputed that, but Crowley intervened to say that Obama was remembering his Rose Garden speech correctly.
“No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation,” Obama said towards the end of that September 12 speech.
To Romney’s point, though, Obama opened that speech with an obvious allusion to the video that ostensibly led to the attack. “We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others,” he said. “But there is absolutely no justification to this type of senseless violence.”
And, as Romney noted, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice blamed the attack on the video several days later.
“What sparked the violence was a very hateful video on the Internet,” Rice said on Fox News Sunday. “It was a reaction to a video that had nothing to do with the United States.”
