Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., said Sunday that President Obama may have known about former CIA Director David Petraeus’ affair before Election Day.
Rogers, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, appeared with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., on NBC’s Meet the Press, and claimed that Attorney General Eric Holder was aware of the FBI investigation into Petraeus’ relationship with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, before the election.
Rogers added that it was difficult for him to believe that Holder would have kept that information to himself and not alerted Obama prior to Nov. 6.
The White House has maintained that President Obama learned of the Petraeus affair the Wednesday following his re-election.
Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said there was no evidence to support Rogers’ assertion.
Petraeus, who resigned his post Nov. 9, testified Friday at a closed-door hearing that the CIA had called the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Lybia, an act of terrorism from the beginning.
Susan Rice, the Obama administration’s ambassador to the U.N., has come under fire for her characterization of the attacks as a spontaneous demonstration prompted by the movie, “Innocence of Muslims.”
“The narrative from the CIA was accurate,” Rogers said to NBC’s David Gregory. “The difference was what happened when it went outside the intelligence community. There were some policy decisions made based on the narrative that were not consistent with the intelligence we had.”
Feinstein said that there would be an investigation into who knew what, and when, regarding the security situation at the consulate and the events leading up to the attack. Other Republican legislators, most notably Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., backed up Rogers claim and insisted that Rice misled the American public in order to protect President Obama politically. “I think it’s very odd that the storylines they chose omitted Al Qaeda, which would help the president tremendously,” Graham said Sunday. President Obama defended Rice during his first press conference since the election and said that she had spoken in good faith based on the information that was available to her at the time.
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