Nancy Pelosi Slams GOP 'Obsession' With Benghazi: 'Cannot Let It Soak Up All of the Congressional Attention

AP

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi on Saturday blasted the Republican "obsession" with Benghazi, accusing the GOP of exploiting the attack to avoid talking about anything else.

"The obsession that some of my Republican colleagues have in the House doesn't look like it's on the path to really finding a solution, but just to keeping an issue alive," Pelosi (D-Calif.) told MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry.

She dismissed the ABC News report about the CIA's now-discredited talking points being edited 12 times, saying it's an opportunity for critics to merely "wrangle about some wording" when it was really the "intelligence consensus" process coming together.

"It was a terrible tragedy in Benghazi...we want to find out what did happen," Pelosi said. Noting that the State Department already instituted its own investigation into the Sept. 2012 assault, she said pressing the issue becomes "subterfuge."

"It becomes an issue that is subterfuge: 'let's talk about Benghazi forever so that we don't have to talk about really what the American people want us to talk about,'" Pelosi said. "They want us to talk about jobs, they want to talk about economic security, economic growth, they want to talk about the education of their children, they want to talk about their future."

"We certainly have to give the full attention that Benghazi deserves, but we cannot let it soak up all of the congressional attention," she said. "What would be the purpose of that?"