Florida Congressman Allen West accused President Barack Obama on Monday of being complicit in intentionally trying to link the attacks in Benghazi to the anti-Islam film Innocence of Muslims out of fear that his foreign policy would be regarded as a “failure.”
A Tea Party favorite because of his fiery conservative rhetoric, West later added that there has “without a doubt” been a cover-up by the White House.
“When you look at the fact,” he said on Fox and Friends, “five or six days afterward, you had [United Nations Ambassador] Susan Rice going on all of these talk shows, Sunday talk shows, with the same line: ‘It’s the video; it’s spontaneous,’ ” West said.
“First of all, why is the American ambassador talking about embassies and consulates? Because that’s not her line of expertise. And for her to talk about coordinated attacks, you know, she is not a member of the Department of Defense. It should have been a State Department person, Hillary Clinton, or it should have been Leon Panetta.”
Rice was ultimately chosen to talk about the attacks, he added, because she drew “the short straw.”
West said that the person responsible the White House’s handling of the fatal attacks in Libya that killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans will indeed be kicked to be held accountable on the Nov. 6 Election Day.
The show’s hosts then played a clip of West’s new political ad highlighting his opponent Patrick Murphy’s prior arrest on South Beach. West explained that it was necessary to “draw a contrast” between the two candidates, adding that GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney will do well to do the same.
West then brought up a Super PAC ad showing a cartoon version of the congressman striking a woman and wearing a gold tooth.
As you can see, he said, “I don’t have one.”
West, who spent 22 years in the Army before retiring as a Lt. Colonel, took office in January 2011, becoming Florida’s first African-American Republican Congressman since 1876.
The 51-year-old Bronze Star recipient is a veteran of Operation Desert Storm in Iraq in 1991.
