Condoleezza Rice poured a bucket of cold water over conservative attacks on President Obama's handling of the Libya attacks, in an interview Wednesday night on Fox News.
The former Secretary of State told Fox News host Greta Van Susteren that Americans should allow the proper officials to carry out their investigation of the September attacks in Benghazi.
"We don't have all of the pieces," Rice said, "and I think it's easy to try and jump to conclusions about what might have happened here."
Rice emphasized the difficulty that comes in the "fog of war." In those situations, she said, "there are a lot of competing stories coming in, there's a lot of competing information coming in, and it takes a little while to know precisely what has happened."
Rice's response is a break from other Republican leaders, including Mitt Romney as well as former Bush administration officials, who have said that the Obama administration was responsible for covering up the events in Libya. Romney mistakenly declared in the second presidential debate that it took Obama 14 days to declare the attacks an act of terror. And former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani told Van Susteren that a White House cover-up was "palpable" in an interview just before Rice's.
As ThinkProgress notes,Van Susteren has also accused the White House of lying about the attacks in Libya, and many conservatives have said that the Obama administration "misled" Americans about the truth.
Watch the interview at FoxNews.com.
Photo: Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice speaks at the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla. (Photo: Getty Images/Spencer Platt)