Barack Obama, Benghazi | featured news

A leading Republican senator is threatening to hold up Senate confirmation of President Obama's nominees to lead the Defense Department and the CIA until the White House provides more answers about the deadly Sept. 11 attack against a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya.

The United States has some "very good leads" about who carried out the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans including the U.S. ambassador in September, President Barack Obama said in an interview broadcast on Sunday.

The top Republican leading the fight against Susan Rice as the new secretary of State softened his opposition and said Sunday he was open to hearing her explain why she declared the burning of the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was part of a protest rather than a terrorist

Debate moderator Candy Crowley interjected during Mitt Romney's remarks in Tuesday's presidential debate, saying that President Obama "did in fact" call the attack on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya an act of terror the day after the incident.

...Axelrod also said Romney is campaigning and "working hard to exploit" the deaths of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others in Libya. He cited the comments of the ambassador's father, Jan Stevens, who told Bloomberg News that "it would really be abhorrent to make this into a campaign issue," and that the matter is under investigation.

The presidential campaigns and their allies began the week with aggressive attacks on the candidates’ records ahead of the first presidential debate on Wednesday. In an opinion article published Monday in The Wall Street Journal, Mitt Romney accused President Obama of foreign policy failures, saying that the president had allowed the nation’s influence to atrophy by “stepping away” from American allies overseas.

The White House criticized Republican claims that President Obama called an ambassador's death a 'bump in the road." White House press secretary Jay Carney said Obama was referring to Middle East unrest in general, and called the GOP claim "both desperate and offensive."

... Romney has falsely accused Obama of “apologizing for America” many times before. The line has been a dependable applause-getter with conservative audiences. But we found no basis for this claim in Obama’s previous speeches and remarks. And other fact-checkers came to similar conclusions.

In the second of his two campaign appearances Wednesday, Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan sharpened his critique of President Obama's handling of the unfolding crises in Egypt and Libya.

Mitt Romney’s attempt to exploit the violent anti-U.S. demonstrations in Egypt and Libya to portray Obama as soft on America’s enemies backfired almost immediately, when it became clear the statement from the US Embassy in Cairo he had cited was issued before the demonstrations began.