Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said on Sunday that it’s fair to question whether the White House suppressed reports detailing the deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya because the information was politically inconvenient.
“Here’s what’s troubling: what’s most troubling about this is that one of the narratives the Obama campaign has laid out is that bin Laden is dead, they've bragged about that forever, and that al-Qaida is in retreat,” Rubio said on CBS’s Face the Nation. “And you start to wonder, did they basically say ‘do not allow any story to emerge that counters that narrative?’ Is that why for two weeks they told us that the Libyan incident in Benghazi was a popular uprising and not a terrorist attack, because it ran counter to their campaign narrative? I hope that that’s not true. But that’s what you start to wonder about.”
It was clear in the days after the attack, he added, that the violence that killed four Americans wasn't the result of a spontaneous attack from an unruly mob.
Obama administration officials have said their statements evolved as they learned more about the nature of the attack in the following days and weeks and that they presented information publicly as it was learned.
President Obama and Mitt Romney will meet for their third debate on Monday, which will focus on foreign policy. In their debate last week, the two clashed over Libya and the administration’s characterization of the attack.
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