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Rice: No Regrets on Benghazi Sunday Show Appearances

February 23, 2014

National Security Adviser Susan Rice said she had no regrets about her Sunday show appearances in September 2012, where she falsely claimed numerous times that the Benghazi terrorist attack was the result of an anti-Islam video.

Then the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Rice appeared on all five major talk shows and repeated the talking point that the attack on the U.S. embassy in Libya was a "spontaneous" response to the video. This was later disproven as al Qaeda's role in planning the attack became clear, and critics pointed to the Obama administration for misleading Americans in order to push the campaign narrative of having "al Qaeda on the run."

The talking points were heavily edited by senior administration officials to obscure a truth they knew almost immediately about Benghazi: that it was an orchestrated terrorist attack.

Yet when Rice was asked by Meet the Press host David Gregory Sunday if she had regrets, she replied, "David, no."

"That information turned out in some respects not to be 100 percent correct, but the notion that somehow I or anybody else in the administration misled the American people is patently false, and I think that that's been amply demonstrated," Rice said.

Full exchange:

DAVID GREGORY: When you were last here, Ambassador Rice, it was an eventful morning on a story of Benghazi and the horrible attack on our compound there. We haven't seen you in a while. As you look back at your involvement in all of that, do you have any regrets?

SUSAN RICE: David, no. Because what I said to you that morning and what I did every day since was to share the best information that we had at the time. The information I provided, which I explained to you, was what we had at the moment. It could change. I commented that this was based on what we knew on that morning was provided to me and my colleagues and indeed to Congress by the intelligence community, and that's been well validated in many different ways since. And that information turned out in some respects not to be 100 percent correct, but the notion that somehow I or anybody else in the administration misled the American people is patently false, and I think that that's been amply demonstrated.