President Obama on Thursday nominated Victoria Nuland, a State Department official involved in the editing of the administration's talking points on Benghazi, to be the next assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs.
Nuland, a career foreign service officer who was until recently State's top spokesperson, had long been expected to be nominated the post to replace Philip Gordon, who Obama picked to serve as Middle East coordinator for the National
Nuland's nomination -- which requires Senate confirmation -- could come under scrutiny from Republicans who see her as playing a central role in shaping the talking points that U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice used when she appeared on Sunday shows several days after the attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead.
Emails show that Nuland had "serious concerns" about an early draft of the talking points, and conveyed the State Department's wishes that references to Al Qaida and the CIA’s warnings about the dangers to U.S. diplomats in Libya removed from the document.
"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual." Thomas Jefferson