Former Republican Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum told The Daily Caller that he thinks President Barack Obama “lied to the American public” about the cause of the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Libya, because linking the tragedy to a terrorist group would have contradicted his campaign narrative.
“There was a deliberate attempt to mislead the American public about what was the nature of this attack because the nature of this attack was counter to everything this president has been saying during the campaign,” Santorum told TheDC at the Chamber of Commerce in Washington Wednesday.
“The president during the campaign has said al-Qaida has been defeated, Osama bin Laden is dead, let’s move on and guess what? Al-Qaida hasn’t moved on and the president hasn’t defeated al-Qaida. This country is still at risk from attack from radical Islamic organizations which he won’t say that word.”
Santorum said Obama and “his people created another narrative so he could go on to Las Vegas and continue to campaign and hope that his friends in the national media would cover for him.”
He called this “a huge issue of trust and this president betrayed the trust of the American people.”
If the president “didn’t know” that the actual incident was linked to an al-Qaida affiliated terrorist organization, than he “should be held for incompetency,” Santorum said. (RELATED: Emails: White House told two hours after Benghazi attack that Ansar al-Sharia claimed responsibility)
“If the people around the president knew and the president didn’t, what does that tell you about who is running the country?”
Santorum said that the requests made by State Department officials for more security being denied prior to the attack “is very different than what the president did” following the tragedy. (RELATED: Former State Dept. official prior to Libya embassy attack: Taliban was ‘on the inside of the building’)
“It was a decision they made. I think in retrospect it was a very poor decision but that is very different than what the president did here. Here, the president lied to the American public. The other, the administration made a bad call. Administrations make bad calls all of the time,” Santorum said.
“But the greater issue is that it is now very clear that he administration knew what was going on and they deliberately misrepresented what was happening.”