Obama nominates Victoria Nuland for assistant secretary of state

PanARMENIAN.Net - U.S. President Obama on Thursday, May 23 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, Politico reports.

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 Security Council.

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 UN 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.

Jen Psaki, who was the Obama campaign's traveling press secretary in 2012 and who's seen as a top contender to take the podium at the White House, has replaced Nuland as the top State spokesperson. After a few months of preparation, she conducted her first on-camera press briefing last week.