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Issa: Politics Played a Part in Falsifying Benghazi Statements

More details about the Benghazi terrorist attack and subsequent Obama administration response will be made public today, Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) said on "America Live" Monday.

"It makes a difference in who's responsible for these men's deaths, and ultimately whether or not we covered it up for political reasons, or as the president is asserting, for classified reasons, which is becoming more and more doubtful," he said.

Mark Thompson, deputy coordinator for operations at the State Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau, will reportedly testify that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a top aide tried to cut counterterrorism units out of the loop in the days after the attack on the U.S. consulate, and Clinton's motivation for doing so has come under scrutiny.

"If, as the president said in the Rose Garden, it was an act of terror, then of course the counterterrorism unit that exists for just that reason in the State Department should have been there at every moment," Issa said. "But if you wanted it to seem like it wasn't terrorism, keeping them out of the room allows you to play with this false truth that somehow it was a video and the same as the protests in Egypt, which of course from the get-go everyone knew just wasn't true."

Host Bill Hemmer asked if Issa thought the motivation for any cover-up, given that the attack occurred in the midst of a grinding presidential campaign, was purely political.

"I think there's no other real plausible question but that politics played a part in falsifying these statements during and after the attack in Benghazi, and that's the real question is, can we get the politics out?" Issa said. "Can we make the men and women of the State Department safer, and can we be honest about the real threat of extremism around the world and even in our own backyard?"