Former CBS Investigative Correspondent Sharyl Attkisson claimed that CBS didn’t air an interview between President Obama and Steve Kroft to protect the president’s claim that he called the attacks on the US Consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 terrorism during an interview Saturday’s “Smerconish” on CNN.
“there was actually a hidden interview that CBS News had with the president the same day he made the rose garden speech, he spoke to Steve Kroft of ‘60 Minutes’ and Steve naturally asked his first couple of questions about the Benghazi attacks, and Steve made the observation ‘Mr. President, you avoided using the word terrorism today in your speech,’ and was asking why he did that and the president acknowledged, ‘right,’ and he explained that why he did that was he said it was too early to tell and so on” she said. And “certainly after the question was raised in the Romney debate and we were sitting on a clip that appeared to prove President Obama’s version was wrong and Romney’s version was correct, I didn’t know that tape existed. We weren’t even told of it, at least I was working on the story and was not told of it. Instead, I was directed by the New York office to use a different clip which I felt in retrospect was entirely out of context, and use it in a way that appeared to defend the president’s version rather than presenting the sound bite that would have shown that Romney was perhaps correct.”
After Smerconish countered that the president did use the word “terrorism” in a speech in the Rose Garden after he did the interview with Kroft, Attkisson responded “he used it in his Rose Garden speech I think it’s indisputable, once he segued to discussing that this was the anniversary of 9/11 and no acts of terror should go unpunished…so he said it but it didn’t appear to be, you could read it different ways, but in direct reference to Benghazi, it didn’t really become important until I think it was raised in the debate and I want to point out that ‘60 Minutes’ from what I viewed the evidence I viewed, sent that transcript and the information over to the ‘CBS Evening News’ so they had it. It’s not as though ‘60 minutes’ were sitting on the clip, it’s in my opinion from what I know, the people on the ‘CBS Evening News’ that had possession of the clip and not only didn’t use it, but directed us to use a different clip from the same interview out of context.”
(h/t Mediaite)
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