Charles Krauthammer: Benghazi Attack Threatened Obama Administration's Narrative That Al Qaeda Had Been Decimated

Tonight’s top story on The O’Reilly Factor was on the meeting between three Republican senators and Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, over the Libya attack investigation. Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Kelly Ayotte met with Amb Rice in hopes of finding out why she blamed an anti-Islamic video for the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi.

The meeting apparently did not go as planned, because the issue of why terrorism was ignored in the weeks after the attack wasn't fully explained by Amb. Rice. Bill O’Reilly reacted on his show, saying that he thinks the Obama administration didn’t want to admit to terrorism because it would challenge their narrative that Al Qaeda had been decimated. He thinks Amb. Rice was being a “good soldier”

by touting the video story on the Sunday talk shows.

• New Video: Senators Are “Significantly Troubled” Following Meeting With Amb. Susan Rice
• Sen. Kelly Ayotte “More Troubled” After Meeting With Amb. Susan Rice on Benghazi Attack
• McCain on Meeting With Susan Rice: She Had Access to Intelligence on Benghazi That ‘Clearly Contradicted’ Her Statements About the Video

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer agreed with O’Reilly. He asserted that the assassination of Ambassador Chris Stevens contradicted the Obama administration’s only foreign policy achievement: killing Usama bin Laden. There may not have been a deliberate conspiracy from day one, said Krauthammer, “But as this story unfolded, they saw a way to make this non-political.”

In the days after the attack, the mainstream media was focused on criticizing Mitt Romney for statements he made about what happened in Egypt and Libya. Krauthammer theorized, “It would have been very logical for someone in the White House to say ‘look, the media is high on the trail of Mitt Romney, they’re not interested in the real story. […] We can get away with this.’”

“If you’re going to talk about high levels of the administration being in on this false story, you’ve got to go right to the top where the president says ‘don’t pick on the damsel in distress, pick on me.’ Okay, we’ll pick on the president. He was at the center of this,” Krauthammer charged.