Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said today that military and intelligence personnel are not receiving permission to chase down solid leads in bringing the perpetrators of the Benghazi attack to justice.
Graham noted that CNN recently interview Ahmed Abu Khattala, head of Ansar al-Sharia, and asked him about the attack on-camera, “but nobody from the FBI, the Libyan government has ever talked to him and he’s a person of high interest, according to our government.”
“CNN found him within two hours. Apparently we can’t find him. Maybe we need to contract out to the media to go get these suspects. But this is a pathetic effort to bring people to justice,” Graham said this morning on Fox.
The senator said he’s had “special forces operatives and intelligence community personnel come up to me over the last two months and say they’ve got great leads, know where other members who planned the attacks are located in Libya and can’t get approval to go after them.”
“This is not a phony scandal. This is a pathetic effort to bring people to justice. I think if you’ve got these folks, you would find out how terrorist-centered this attack was. It was not based on a video. Maybe they’re still looking for the guy from the video and that’s why they can’t find these folks. I don’t know. But my belief is the people who killed our folks are wandering around Libya in the wide open and we aren’t doing a damn thing about it,” he said.
Graham called the administration policy of calling Benghazi a phony scandal a case of “attack the critic.”
“At the end of the day, we’re almost a year out from Benghazi, not one person has been put in jail, but CNN was able to find the leader of the organization responsible for the attack after a two-hour effort in Benghazi, no one has been brought to jail. We still don’t know if Hillary Clinton approved the consulate to be opened after it failed the security inspection. We still have no idea who changed the talking points to start this lie that it was a video — riot caused by a video,” he said.
“The basics of what happened in Benghazi are unknown and the Congress has never been able to interview one survivor. They’re writing books, they’re appearing on TV. This has to stop. This is not a scandal. This is a national security failure where four brave Americans died and we’re doing nothing to bring the people to justice, to understand how it failed.”
More: Benghazi Hearing: Special Ops Commander Said He Was Traveling, Had ‘Unreliable Communications’
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