Hillary Clinton said she “wasn’t involved” with the talking points that U.N. ambassador Susan Rice used for her appearances on the Sunday morning talk shows.
“I wasn’t involved in the talking points process,” Clinton said. “As I understand it, as I have been told, it was a typical inter-agency process where staff, including from the State Department all participated, [to] try to come up with whatever was going to be made publicly available and it was an intelligence product and it is my understanding the intelligence community is working with appropriate committees to kind of explain the whole process.”
Clinton also emphasized the uncertainty at the time.
“Maybe it was an abundance of caution, maybe it was trying to make sure we didn’t step on anybody’s toes while we were gathering information. maybe it’s because the IC was still looking at all of their sources, and having different thread coming in, but, you know, as the ARB said, even today the motivations, the actions before they went on to the compound, all of that is still not nailed down,” Clinton said.
“So I think we were trying very hard to provide information,” Clinton continued. “Maybe one of the lessons learned here is, you know, just withhold, don’t say what you don’t know for sure until it’s finally decided. but that is not part of who we are as Americans and as public officials. We get out there we say, here is what we think happened, it’s subject to change. And so I think we all wished that nobody had ever in anyway raised doubt, but certainly Ambassador Rice and all the other administration officials were speaking off of what had been determined were the most acceptable talking points.”