Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) on Wednesday rejected charges that House Republicans used racially charged "code words" when urging President Obama not to nominate Susan Rice for secretary of State.
Burgess was one of 97 House Republicans to sign a letter to Obama that accused Rice of "having either willfully or incompetently misled the American public" about the attack against U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya. They said Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations, “caused irreparable damage to her credibility both at home and around world.”
Rep. James Clyburn (S.C.), a member of the Democratic leadership in the House, on Tuesday accused Republicans of using racial "code words" in the letter to make the case against Rice, who is black.
"That's absolutely false and I don't know where … Rep. Clyburn gets his information, but I will just tell you, he's factually incorrect," Burgess said.
Rice, who has been floated as a possible replacement for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, suggested on numerous Sunday talk shows that the attack in Libya was a spontaneous response to a video. The administration later said that terrorism might have played a role.
Burgess questioned why the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations was tapped to speak on behalf of the administration following the assault.
"I've got to tell you, that Sunday when the, I don't know, four or five interviews occurred, you just knew something wasn't right as you were watching that. First off, is why was our ambassador to the United Nations the one talking about this in the first place? Did we not have anyone available from the State Department or from the administration itself? So, it was a little unsettling to have the ambassador herself out there on the shows," Burgess said on CNN's "Starting Point."
The congressman suggested that the message put forth by Rice fit into the "narrative of the president's campaign a the time that al Qaeda was on the run."
"[T]o have put someone out there, saying al Qaeda, Ansar al-Sharia, was responsible for this, and was sponsored by al Qaeda that would have been, it wouldn't have fit with the narrative that had been really the main talking point since the Democratic convention, so in my mind that I think was, influenced it," he said.
When pressed on whether the intelligence community was in fact responsible for editing the talking points that Rice used in her interviews, Burgess said, that the "big question" is who in the administration chose Rice to speak on behalf of the White House.
Burgess also blamed the media for not being more "critical" of Rice and the administration on this issue.
"I frankly don't understand why you in the media have not been more critical of the fact that your outlets were used in a way to put forward information that you know everybody no believes was not correct and we believe it was not correct at the time it was put out there," he added.
