Fox got the president's annual interview from the White House during the pre-game show. Pre-game, Obama spars with O'Reilly

President Barack Obama faced questions Sunday on Obamacare, Benghazi and the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups during a pre-Super Bowl interview with Fox News host Bill O’Reilly and dismissed much of the criticism of him as ginned up by the cable news channel.

“These kinds of things keep on surfacing in part because you and your TV station will promote them,” Obama told O’Reilly during an adversarial live interview from the White House that aired during the pre-game show.


Asked whether the “biggest mistake” of his presidency is his claim that Americans who liked their health insurance plans would be able to keep that coverage, Obama nudged his interviewer. “Oh, Bill, you’ve got a long list of problems of my presidency,” he said.

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O’Reilly pressed Obama twice on why he hadn’t yet fired Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius for problems with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Obama said he wasn’t interested in changing leadership midstream as the implementation continues but, he said, “I promise you we hold everybody up and down the line accountable.”

But he isn’t dwelling on the past. “I try to focus not on the fumbles, but on the next play,” the president said, in a nod to Sunday’s big game in East Rutherford, N.J.

O’Reilly also used the interview to press Obama on the conflicting explanations of the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

“People understood at the time something very dangerous was happening,” but officials in Washington didn’t — and couldn’t — “know at the very moment why something like this happens,” the president said.

“Bill, listen, I’ve gone through this, and we have had multiple hearings on it,” Obama said.

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“What happens is you have an attack like this taking place, and you have a mix of folks who are just troublemakers, you have folks who have an ideological agenda, you have some who are affiliated with terrorist organizations, you have some who are not. But the main thing that all of us have to take away from this is our diplomats are serving in some very dangerous places. And we’ve got to make sure that not only have we implemented all the reforms that were recommended by the independent agencies but we also have to make sure that we understand our folks out there are in a hazardous, dangerous situation.”

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Instead, what’s happened is, “we end up creating a political agenda” around the attack when “Democrats and Republicans should be unified to figure out how to protect people.”

O’Reilly asked whether Obama resisted deeming Benghazi a “terror” attack because, as “detractors” say, his reelection campaign didn’t want to deal with that storyline.

“That’s what folks like you are telling them. And what I’m saying is, that is inaccurate,” Obama said. “We revealed to the American people exactly what we understood at the time. The notion that we would hide the ball for political purposes when a week later we all said in fact there was a terrorist attack taking place and the day after I said it was an act of terror, that wouldn’t be a very good cover-up.”

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The Fox host also questioned Obama about the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups, and the president insisted that the misconduct wasn’t politically motivated.

There were “some bone-headed decisions” at the IRS, Obama said, but not “mass corruption, not even a smidgeon of corruption.”

Agency employees were dealing with a law that “people think is confusing” and that “folks did not know how to implement,” he said.

Asked about 157 visits that former IRS head Douglas Shulman made to the White House, Obama said they were “routine” and a function of the fact that the IRS was involved in Obamacare and other key issues.

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“I do not recall meeting with him in any of these meetings that are pretty routine meetings,” he said. While Shulman’s total number of visits seems staggering in comparison to far lower totals in the White House visitor logs for many Cabinet members, senior officials are often cleared in through other means that don’t show up on the logs.

The president also answered a question from a viewer who wanted to know why, as he said just before Election Day in 2008, Obama hoped to “fundamentally transform” a country that had given him so much opportunity.

“I don’t think we have to fundamentally transform the nation. I think that what we have to do is make sure that here in America if you work hard, you can get ahead,” he said. Critics on the right have taken Obama’s Oct. 30, 2008, comments that “we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America” as evidence of his plans to dramatically change the country.

Obama also offered a prediction of the Super Bowl results: a 24-21 game, though he wouldn’t say whether Seattle or Denver would win.

O’Reilly closed the interview with a compliment of sorts for the president: “I know you think maybe we haven’t been fair, but I think your heart is in the right place.”

“I enjoyed it,” Obama said.