Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace pushed a theory that the Obama administration is covering up what really happened during the attack on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
During a September 23 Fox News Sunday interview of Obama campaign adviser Robert Gibbs, Wallace asserted that the Obama administration had released “bad information” about the Libya attack and pointed to a September 14 statement by White House press secretary Jay Carney that “we have no information to suggest that it was a pre-planned attack. The unrest we've seen around the region has been in reaction to a video that Muslims -- many Muslims find offensive.”
Wallace then said: “Specific question, because this is looking at the bottom line: Did the Obama administration play down what happened in Libya, what happened in Cairo because it would make Obama foreign policy look better?”
Wallace joins fellow Fox hosts Sean Hannity and Greta Van Susteren in suggesting or outright claiming that the Obama administration was deliberately lying about what happened in Libya. Hannity accused the administration of “protecting the perpetrators of terror, the murderers of Americans,” while Van Susteren asked, “Why does the Obama administration keep changing its tune? Incompetence, or cover-up, or something else?”
In responding to Wallace, Gibbs pointed out that the clip Wallace played of Carney was made on September 14. Gibbs added: “It's now September the 23rd. We learn more information every single day about what happened. Nobody wants to get to the bottom of this more than we do.”
Indeed, both the U.S. and Libyan governments are conducting investigations into the Benghazi attack, and administration officials have said that are trying to learn all the facts in media interviews, press briefings, and congressional testimony.
In discussing the investigation, administration officials have consistently said the same three statements about the Benghazi attack: 1) the attack in Libya was under investigation; 2) that protests in the region had been sparked by an anti-Muslim video; and 3) that the administration had no evidence to “indicate that any of this unrest was pre-planned.”