President Trump’s new pick for director of national intelligence, Rick Grenell, is “massively dishonest,” charged the former national security adviser of the Obama Administration, Susan Rice.
“The problem is not just that Rick Grenell has absolutely no preparation, no background or knowledge to be the DNI,” Rice said Friday during an appearance at the Washington, D.C., bookstore, Politics and Prose.
“The problem is that Rick Grenell is one of the most massively dishonest people I’ve ever encountered,” she continued. “I’m not using this language lightly. He is a hack and a shill, and that’s all he’s ever been. And he has been put in that job for one reason only, which is to turn the intelligence community into a tool for the President’s re-election.”
Rice herself came under attack for dishonesty while helming America’s intelligence community, repeatedly telling Americans that the Benghazi attack was spawned from an Internet video — when, it was later revealed, the administration had already known it was a well-planned terror attack.
“Based on the best information we have to date, what our assessment is as of the present is in fact what began spontaneously in Benghazi as a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo where, of course, as you know, there was a violent protest outside of our embassy—sparked by this hateful video,” Rice said September 16, 2012. “But soon after that spontaneous protest began outside of our consulate in Benghazi, we believe that it looks like extremist elements, individuals, joined in that— in that effort with heavy weapons of the sort that are, unfortunately, readily now available in Libya post-revolution. And that it spun from there into something much, much more violent.”
As the Obama Administration had been arguing in the lead up to November’s election the al Qaeda was “on the run,” Rice notably attempted to divert attention from the terror group’s role in the attack.
“We do not—we do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned. I think it's clear that there were extremist elements that joined in and escalated the violence,” Rice said. “Whether they were al Qaeda affiliates, whether they were Libyan-based extremists or al Qaeda itself I think is one of the things we'll have to determine.”