During a joint press conference with the British Prime Minister David Cameron this morning, President Obama went off on his political opponents and the press for the controversy over his administration's Benghazi talking points, calling the entire ordeal a "political circus" and "sideshow" with "no there there.""The whole issue of talking point, frankly, throughout this process, has been a sideshow. We have been very clear about throughout that immediately after this event happened we were not clear who exactly had carried it out, how it had occurred, what the motivations were. It happened at the same time as we had seen attacks on U.S. embassies in Cairo as a consequence of this film and nobody understood exactly what was taking place during the course of those first few days. And the e-mails that you allude to were provided by us to congressional committees. They reviewed them several months ago, concluded that in fact there was nothing awful in terms of the process that we had used. And suddenly, three days ago, this gets spun up as if there is something new to the story. There is no there there."
He expressed astonishment that some among his political colleagues would consider the possibility that his administration actively tried to "downplay" the Benghazi attacks. He then accused his opponents of hyping the controversy for political gain:
"And the fact that this keeps on getting churned out, frankly, has a lot to do with political motivations. We've had folks who have challenged Hillary Clinton's integrity, Susan Rice's integrity, Mike Mullen and Tom Pickering's integrity. It is a given that mine gets challenged by these same folks. They used it for fundraising, and, frankly, you know, if anybody out there wants to actually focus on how we make sure something like this does not happen again, I am happy to get their advice and information and counsel."
The president concluded by chiding his opponents for turning the controversy into a "political circus":
"We dishonor [State Department employees] when we, you know, we turn things like this into a political circus. What happened was tragic, it was carried out by extremists inside of Libya. We are out there trying to hunt down the folks who carried this out and we're trying to make sure we fix the system so that it doesn't happen again."