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State Department Official Who Played Key Role in Editing Benghazi Talking Points Nominated for Assistant Secretary of State Position

by Jason Howerton

State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland listens to US Secretary of State John Kerry and Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida speak to the press prior to a meeting at the State Department in Washington on February 22, 2013. Credit: AFP/Getty Images

President Barack Obama has nominated Victoria Nuland, a State Department official who played a key role in editing the administration's Benghazi talking points, to be then next assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, the White House announced in a press release on Thursday.

It is was later discovered that the talking points used by U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice when she appeared on several Sunday shows days after the deadly Benghazi attack were loaded with faulty information.

Emails show that Nuland expressed "serious concerns" about an early draft of the talking points and passed along the State Department's request to scrub references to al-Qaeda and the CIA's warnings about the threat of such groups to U.S. diplomats in Libya from the document.

Nuland, "a career member of the Senior Foreign Service, Class of Career Minister," has served as the State Department spokesperson since 2011.

Obama's former traveling press secretary Jen Psaki has replaced Nuland as the top State Department spokesperson. She conducted her first on-camera press briefing last week, Politico reports.

State Department Official Who Played Key Role in Editing Benghazi Talking Points Nominated for Assistant Secretary of State Position
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/23/state-department-official-who-played-key-role-in-editing-benghazi-talking-points-nominated-for-assistant-secretary-of-state-position/

John Hames