Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said she spoke on the Sunday news shows following the terror attack on Benghazi because then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “didn’t want to.”

“I’ve spent many a Sunday doing the Sunday shows,” she told “The Daily Show” host John Stewart on Thursday. “In this case, Secretary Clinton, who had been asked originally to do it, felt that she didn’t want to, couldn’t do it that week, having been through quite a pretty intense week with the loss of our colleagues in Benghazi, the violence against our embassies all over the Arab and Muslim world, and then also that Friday having to join President Obama in greeting the families of our fallen colleagues and bringing their bodies back.”

Pressed about confusion over the talking points she was given on September 16, which blamed the attack on an allegedly anti-Muslim YouTube video, Rice said the notes she was given was the best information the intelligence staff had then.

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“I shared the best information that our intelligence community had at the time, and they provided the talking points that I used,” she said. “They were wrong in one  respect, we learned subsequently. And that is, there wasn’t in fact a protest.  But in every other respect, they have more or less held up over time.”

Rice said the attack has been politicized by people focusing more on where her talking points came from than on what could be done better in similar situations in the future.

“If you had one thing to say to those who believe there is a secret under this and are pushing for it and holding things up,” Stewart pressed, “what would you say to them?”

“They’re dead wrong,” Rice said. “They’re dead wrong, and they are in fact doing a disservice to those we lost.”