** FILE** Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (Associated Press) more >But Republicans have charged that she went beyond the talking points to help bolster the Obama presidential campaign’s case that al Qaeda was decimated.
“If you don’t know what happened, just say you don’t know what happened,” Mr. Graham said Tuesday. “You can say, ‘I don’t want to give bad information.’”
“It was unjustified to give the scenario as presented by Ambassador Rice and President Obama three weeks before an election,” Mr. Graham added.
Tuesday’s meeting was the first of several Mrs. Rice has requested with key Republican senators.
On Wednesday, she is slated to meet with Sen. Susan M. Collins of Maine and Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, who is in line to be the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which would hold confirmation hearings for secretary of state nominees.
On Tuesday, Mr. Corker said he had concerns about Mrs. Rice’s independence.
“I think she is very likable, I really do, but you know, she always reminds me of someone who has had every drop of Kool-Aid,” he said.
He stressed that he was keeping an open mind ahead of Wednesday’s meeting.
“I am going to give her a fair hearing, and it could be that she’s an incredibly independent person that I never knew,” he added.
Who changed what?
Democrats leapt Tuesday to Mrs. Rice’s defense.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada called the “personal attacks” against the ambassador “outrageous and utterly unmoored from facts and reality.”
He declared himself “shocked that senators would continue these attacks even when the evidence — including disclosures from the intelligence community about the information she presented — have made it clear that the allegations … are baseless, and that she has done absolutely nothing wrong.”
At the White House, spokesman Jay Carney said there were “no unanswered questions about Ambassador Rice’s appearance on Sunday shows and the talking points that she used for those appearances that were provided by the intelligence community.
“Those questions have been answered,” Mr. Carney said.
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Shaun Waterman is an award-winning reporter for The Washington Times, covering foreign affairs, defense and cybersecurity. He was a senior editor and correspondent for United Press International for nearly a decade, and has covered the Department of Homeland Security since 2003. His reporting on the Sept. 11 Commission and the tortuous process by which some of its recommendations finally became ...
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