Fox misrepresented recent remarks by Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein to suggest that she is undermining Democrats' attempts to rebut charges that U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice is unfit to be Secretary of State. In fact, Feinstein has strongly defended Rice, saying that the attack on Rice “has to stop.”  

The attacks on Rice stem from her appearance on Sunday morning political shows on September 16 to describe what the administration had learned about the attacks on a diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya. Since then, Fox and congressional Republicans have sought to scandalize Susan Rice's appearance in those interviews and use them as ammunition in a campaign to prevent her from being nominated as secretary of state. But David Petraeus, who was CIA director at the time of the Benghazi attack, has reportedly testified that Rice's comments were based on unclassified talking points provided by the intelligence community that Petraeus himself approved.

Rice's opponents have disingenuously seized on the fact that language in the talking points Rice used originally pointed to Al Qaeda affiliates as the perpetrators of the attack, but the language was changed to refer more generally to “extremists.”

During the November 20 edition of Fox & Friends First, correspondent Doug McKelway reported on the attacks on Rice and claimed: “The fallout from the scandal is now dimming Ambassador Rice's prospect for the job of secretary of state.” McKelway then reported that House Republicans had sent a letter opposing Rice and added: “Congressional Democrats' defense of the White House in this matter is partly being weakened also by the powerful chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, a Democrat, who has vowed to find out who specifically took the Al Qaeda language out of the CIA talking points.”

Feinstein said she would hold hearings on the Benghazi talking points during a November 18 Meet the Press appearance. But during the same appearance, Feinstein strongly defended Rice, saying she had reviewed all of Rice's comments on the Sunday shows and did not understand why Rice “was being pilloried” for her comments:

FEINSTEIN: What has concerned me about this is really the politicization of a public statement that was put out by the entire intelligence committee, which Susan Rice on the 16th, who was asked to go before the people and use that statement, did. I have read every one of the five interviews she did that day. She was within the context of that statement. And for this, she has been pilloried for two months. I don't understand it. It has to stop. If it continues, it's going to set up once again a partisan divide in these -- the House and the Senate, which Congressman Rogers and I have tried to overcome and have overcome with some success with respect to the intelligence committees.

Fox previously cherry picked comments made by Feinstein's during her recent Meet the Press appearance, to make it seem as though she was going to investigate whether the White House had nefariously edited intelligence community talking points regarding the attack on the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi.