For Zelensky Fan Girl Susan Rice, Lying Comes Naturally

First Benghazi, Then Unmasking, Then "By the Book," and Now Zelensky?

“You clowns are up to the same old tired crap,” former Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice tweeted a day after the fiery February 28 Oval Office exchange about Ukraine’s future. “When your guy screws up and royally embarrasses himself and the U.S., you try to change the subject and lie about a favorite target to distract and deflect.”

As a documented liar of the highest order, Rice should have known better than to accuse someone else of lying. She was responding directly to a tweet by Federalist editor Mollie Hemingway asserting that Rice and other Obama loyalists “may have been personally advising Zelensky to do this meeting in the way he did.”

Although we now know that Democrats were, in fact, advising Zelensky to defy Trump, Rice assured us that she was not one of them. “For the record,” she protested. “I have never met Zelensky and never spoken to him. Ever. Or advised him or anybody around him.”

“Thank you for your response,” countered Hemingway. “Where would we place this denial, compared to your oft-repeated lie that the Benghazi debacle was due to a YouTube video, and your lie that you ‘knew nothing’ about the unmasking of Trump officials before being forced to admit you did it widely?”

Rice was one of many Obama officials to lie flagrantly about the September 11, 2012, attack on the American consulate in Benghazi. The dissembling began while the consulate was in flames and the attack still under way. Needing to draw attention away from the administration’s duplicitous meddling in Libyan affairs, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton released a memo on the night of September 11 blaming the attack on some “inflammatory material posted on the Internet.”

That “material” was a short, amateurish movie, Innocence of Muslims, produced by an Egyptian-American named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. Investigative reporter Ken Timmerman, who has done the best work on this subject, explained in convincing detail that the video had nothing to do with the pre-planned assault on the Benghazi compound. “There were never any demonstrations in front of either U.S. diplomatic facility in Libya,” wrote Timmerman. “That was just a full-throated lie.”

The Obama camp rejected the truth even after it became obvious. The memoir by Obama foreign policy adviser Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is, reads like a 450-page exercise in denial. Rhodes could not bring himself to admit that the White House sold the world a conspicuously false story on Benghazi. Or as Hillary Clinton famously said, “At this point, what does it matter?”

In his retelling, Rhodes merely passed along to then National Security Adviser Rice the talking points prepared by the intelligence community for her to present on the various news programs on the Sunday after the Tuesday attack. On Sunday, September 16, 2012, Rice dutifully played her role in the charade.

“Our current best assessment, based on the information that we have at present, is that, in fact, what this began as, it was a spontaneous − not a premeditated − response to what had transpired in Cairo,” Rice told Jake Tapper on ABC’s This Week. She repeated the same obvious lie on four other shows that morning.

Understandably, Republicans in Congress and the conservative media objected to such a flagrant falsehood. Their “vitriol” shocked Rhodes. He seemed astonished that anyone would resent being lied to on so critical an issue and dismissed Benghazi as a “bogus scandal.” During the Obama years, all scandals were bogus.

Knowing his base, Obama went looking for a reliably clueless audience to hear his take on Benghazi and found one at the David Letterman Show. “Here’s what happened,” Obama told his wide-eyed host a week after the assault. “You had a video that was released by somebody who lives here, sort of a shadowy character who − who made an extremely offensive video directed at Mohammed and Islam.”

Letterman reeled back in disbelief. “Making fun of the Prophet Mohammed!” he said solemnly. “Making fun of the Prophet Mohammed,” confirmed Obama. Nakoula had good cause to attack Islam. In 2011, the year Nakoula made the film, there were at least ten attacks on his fellow Coptic Christians in Egypt, several of them lethal, one resulting in the death of twenty-four Copts.

Obama pulled his description of the filmmaker straight from the pages of the New York Times. Just one day after the attack in Benghazi, a crew of ten reporters did a hit piece on Nakoula, “a shadowy gas station owner with a record of criminal arrests and bankruptcy.” Obama apparently liked the word “shadowy.”

The fact that Nakoula and his family had received serious death threats did not deter the Times from doxing him. The reporters tracked Nakoula to his Southern California home and staked it out. With the media cheering, the Feds took Nakoula into custody on September 15 and held him in secret without charge or without access to an attorney, “an extrajudicial prisoner in the United States of America,” wrote Timmerman. That a filmmaker would spend a year in federal custody on trumped up charges for producing a perfectly legal satire inspired not a single major media journalist to cry foul.

Susan Rice, of course, kept her silence. She is and always has been a team player. On March 22, 2017, when Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, revealed that Rice had been involved in the unmasking of Trump advisers during the transition period, she denied everything. “I know nothing about this,” Rice told PBS’s Judy Woodruff. “I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that count today.”

Two weeks later, an indignant Rice conceded that, yes, she had requested the unmasking of numerous officials, but huffed, "The allegation is that somehow the Obama administration officials utilized intelligence for political purposes, That's absolutely false."

In fact, Rice was deeply involved in the greatest abuse of intelligence for political purposes in anyone’s memory. “I'll remind you,” tweeted Mollie Hemingway, “that Susan Rice was in the small Jan. 5, 2017 meeting in the WH with other key Russia collusion hoax perpetrators.” Here, Rice and her fellow conspirators set in motion the coup to unseat President-elect Donald Trump.

They went public the next day, January 6, 2017, when they released the declassified version of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA). Commissioned a month earlier by Obama, the ICA was the cabal’s way of welcoming the president-elect to Washington.

Titled “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections,” the report concluded that Putin “ordered” an influence campaign, the goal of which was “to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.” The corollary of this, of course, was that “Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”

On Inauguration Day, 2017, Rice sent to “self” a peculiar email about the January 5 meeting. It read: “President Obama began the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities ‘by the book.’”

Rice continued as though her words would have historical weight: “The President stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book.”

There was no book to describe the media-enabled attempt to unseat the president on the outrageous charge that he conspired with Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 election. In October 2020, the conspirators—51 strong now—charged Putin with conspiring to steal the 2020 election. Although Rice was not one of the 51, she promptly retweeted a Jen Psaki post which claimed, "Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”

The 2020 lap story was a lie. The 2016 collusion accusation was a lie, but these were lies told often enough and convincingly enough to fuel America’s three-year encouragement of the carnage in the Ukraine. For Rice and her un-indicted co-conspirators, apparently three years isn’t enough.