President Barack Obama blasted critics' scrutiny of his administration's immediate response to the attacks on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, last year as a "political circus" that "defies logic." His remarks at a joint event with British Prime Minister David Cameron came days after the leak of government emails renewed Republican-led accusations of a State Department cover-up to disguise a terrorist attack as a spontaneous violent protest. "The whole thing defies logic," Obama said of the accusations. "The fact that this whole thing keeps getting churned out, frankly, has a lot to do with political motivations." He downplayed the charges, calling them a "political circus," and the significance of the leaked emails, which showed numerous changes to the talking points in the days just after the attacks. "There's no there there," he said, saying the talking points edits reflected officials' lack of immediate clarity about what exactly had prompted the attack.
