Carney Dings Romney, Bush to Deflect Benghazi Questions

White House press secretary Jay Carney on Friday continued to downplay the Obama administration’s role in editing official talking points following the deadly terrorist attacks in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, and in doing so took a swipe at former GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, as well as former president George W. Bush.

“This ongoing effort [to compile the talking points] began hours after the attack, when Mitt Romney put out a press release to try to take political advantage out of these deaths, out of the attack in Benghazi, in a move that was maligned even by members of his own party,” Carney said. “And from that day forward there has been this effort to politicize it.”

Carney added that the Obama administration’s trasparency on the Benghazi attacks and their aftermath has been “extraordinary” and “especially unusual with regard to our predessesor.”

ABC News’ Jon Karl reported Friday that State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland expressed concern about initial CIA drafts of the Benghazi talking points, which indicated that the attacks were carried out by terrorists, and were preceded by a series of security warnings from the intelligence community. Nuland wrote in an e-mail that she was concerned such information “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that . . .?”