Hillary's 'standing refusal' to appear on Sunday news shows after Benghazi

This could be a problem for former State Secretary Hillary Clinton come 2016.

Getty Images

A lengthy piece in Politico on the inner workings of the Obama administration's cabinet secretaries includes a detail about Clinton and her disdain for the Sunday news shows like NBC's "Meet the Press" and CBS's "Face the Nation."

It's a character trait that led to Clinton being almost entirely absent from the White House narrative on what happened in the attack on an American consulate in Benghazi ahead of the 2012 presidential election.

Early on, she was willing to hit the Sunday shows for Obama, but she considered it an enervating gotcha circus, so by the time the Benghazi firestorm hit on Sept. 11, 2012, she was a firm “no.” When network producers asked if Clinton would appear to discuss the killings of Ambassador Chris Stevens and other U.S. personnel, State Department officials told them the secretary was too exhausted from her recent travels. That wasn’t entirely true, three officials told me: Clinton had a “standing refusal” to do Sunday shows. “She hates them. She would rather die than do them,” one aide said at the time. “The White House knows, so they would know not to even ask her.”

In a classic Washington irony, Susan Rice turned out to be collateral damage.