On his show Friday night, CNN host Anderson Cooper question why Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (CA) believed the Obama administration deliberately misled Americans about the attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.

Rohrabacher, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, alleged that President Barack Obama lied when he said the attack, which left four Americans dead, was the result of an angry mob. The congressman said Obama already knew the attack was carried out by militants linked to al-Qaeda, and not amid a protest against an anti-Islam movie.

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“What you are saying is factually not correct, though,” Cooper responded. The CNN host noted that the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s office said that it initially told the Obama administration the attack was part of a spontaneous protest against the anti-Islam movie.

But Rohrabacher denied that was true. The congressman refused to say James Clapper’s office was lying as well, but said the the director of National Intelligence was trying to give the President an “out.”

“Everybody else in this country can see a lie,” Rohrabacher told Cooper. “Everybody else can see that… You can repeat the director of National Security a dozen times. That does not negate what the people know now.”

Rohrabacher said it was more likely that Obama, UN ambassador Susan Rice and former CIA directer David Petraeus were involved in a conspiracy than that the Obama administration initially received erroneous intelligence reports.

“The President was in battle mode, in the middle of a campaign, and felt that any time of things that made it look like the threat of radical Islamic threat is still upon us would be harmful to him politically,” the congressman explained.

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Watch video, courtesy of CNN, below: