Obama warns McCain: Go after U.N. Ambassador Rice? ‘You have a problem with me’

President Barack Obama bluntly told Sen. John McCain and other Republicans to lay off their attacks against U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice over the Benghazi assault, telling lawmakers that if they go after her “then you have a problem with me.” And Obama, speaking at his first post-election press conference, vowed that Republican opposition would not dissuade him from nominating Rice to replace departing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“I don’t think there’s any debate in this country that when you have four Americans killed that’s a problem,” he told reporters in the East Room of the White House. “And we’ve got to get to the bottom of it, and there needs to be accountability. We’ve got to bring those who carried it out to justice—they won’t get any debate from me on that.

“But when they go after the U.N. ambassador, apparently because they think she’s an easy target, then they’ve got a problem with me,” he warned.

McCain, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and other Republicans have signaled they will oppose Rice’s confirmation if Obama nominates her. Their numbers thus far seem far short of the 40 needed to block it, and some Republican senators have signaled that she should get a fair hearing.

“Let me say specifically about Susan Rice: She has done exemplary work. She has represented the United States and our interests in the United Nations with skill and professionalism and toughness and grace,” Obama said.

“And should I choose, if I think that she would be the best person to serve America in the capacity of the State Department, then I will nominate her,” he vowed. “That’s not a determination that I’ve made yet.”

Rice and Democratic Sen. John Kerry, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, are seen as the front-runners in the race to succeed Clinton.

Conservatives have assailed Rice, who is close to Obama, ever since she made the rounds of the Sunday morning talk shows and said that American intelligence believed the attack on the American compound in Benghazi, which claimed the lives of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, grew out of demonstrations against an Internet video that ridicules Islam.

“As that unfolded, it seems to have been hijacked, let us say, by some individual clusters of extremists who came with heavier weapons, weapons that, as you know, in the wake of the revolution in Libya are quite common and accessible. And it then evolved from there,” she told ABC.

White House aides have said Rice was speaking based on the best available intelligence at the time.
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