Sununu: 'Lazy and Detached' Obama Set Stage for Ambassador's Murder

Romney campaign surrogate and former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu (R) blasted President Obama as too “lazy and detached” to sit through presidential briefings, and charged that Ambassador Chris Stevens paid the ultimate price for that laziness.

“Look, one of the key responsibilities of a president is to keep up with the intelligence data that’s coming in and what’s going on around the world. This president has skipped about 60 percent of his personal contact Presidential Daily briefings, the PDB. That document that he skims on his iPad is a summary,” Sununu said last night on Fox.

He said that the key to briefing is meeting face-to-face with experts and following up on the summary information.

“This president thinks he’s so smart, he doesn’t have to go through that! He thinks he doesn’t need to put the extra work in for going through that process. That’s why I say he’s lazy and detached. And unfortunately, Ambassador Stevens suffered the consequences of us not providing adequate security there,” Sununu said.

The former White House chief of staff under President George H.W. Bush said “an administration as a whole is responsible for what happens on its watch, unless he wants to tell us that the buck doesn’t stop there.”

“This president has, in my opinion, failed to maintain respect for the United States in that part of the world. And respect is one of the great assets you have in trying to protect your diplomats around the world,” he said.

He said that the administration’s denial of the Benghazi attack being a 9/11 terrorist attack was incompetence, lying, and cover-up.

“I think it’s all three. I think it’s incompetence. I think it is a fact that they have policies there that don’t work,” Sununu said. “I think it’s lying. He goes to the U.N. and says video, video, video, video after his own people, before he went to the U.N., had begun to acknowledge that it was a terrorist attacks. That to me is just disingenuous.”

“And frankly what is puzzling is what they could possibly have thought they would gain by going through this. I think that just reinforces the incompetent component.”