Senator Lindsay Graham Says No Confirmation of Brennan and Hagel Without Answers on Benghazi
On CBS's Face the Nation on Sunday, Feb. 10, Senator Lindsay Graham stated that he will prevent the nomination of both John Brennan as CIA Director and Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense until answers are forthcoming on Benghazi.
In the interview, Graham demanded to know if the President ever called Libyan officials during the night of September 11, 2012, when a six-person rescue team arrived in Benghazi from Tripoli at 1:30 a.m. Libyan time and were prevented from going to the CIA annex until 5 a.m. Some of the dialogue follows.
GRAHAM: They were held up for three and a half hours at the airport, had problems with the militias releasing them and a lot of bureaucratic snafus. Here's my question — did the president ever pick up the phone and call the Libyan government and say, "let those people out of the airport. They need to get to the annex to protect our people under siege?" Did the president at any time during the eight-hour attack pick up the phone and call anybody in Libya to get help for these folks? Secretary Clinton said she was screaming on the phone at Libyan officials. There's no voice in the world like that of the president of the United States. And I do believe if he had picked up the phone and called the Libyan government, these folks could have gotten out of the airport to the annex and the last two guys may very well be alive.
And if he did call the Libyan officials and they sort of blew him off, that would affect whether or not I would give foreign aid in the future to Libya. But if he failed to call on behalf of those people under siege, and I think that's a massive failure of leadership by our commander in chief.
SCHIEFFER: Well, have you tried to find out if he did call?
GRAHAM: I've tried. We know he had a 15-minute briefing by Secretary Panetta and the chairman of the joint chiefs right after the attack happened. It was a preplanned meeting. It just happened that Benghazi came up at the meeting. I don't know what the president did that evening. I don't know if he ever called anyone. I know he never talked to the secretary of defense. I know that he never talked to the chairman of the joint chiefs. And they never talked to anybody at the White House. I know the secretary of state never talked to the secretary of defense.
This was incredibly mismanaged. And what we know now, it seems to be a very disengaged president. Again, if he had lent his voice to this cause, I think it would have made a big difference. And I'm not going to stop until we get an accounting. I've pushed back against the Bush administration when they said Iraq was just a few dead enders. We know nothing about what the president did on the night of September 11 during a time of national crisis, and the American people need to know what their commander in chief did, if anything, during this eight-hour attack.
SCHIEFFER: What can you really do about it? You can ask them what the president was doing. If they don't give you an answer what, can you do?
GRAHAM: I don't think we should allow Brennan to go forward the CIA directorship, Hagel to be confirmed for secretary of defense, until the White House gives us an accounting. Did the president ever pick up the phone and call anyone in the Libyan government to help these folks? What did the president do?
We know he talked to the Israeli prime minister from 8:00 to 9:00 on September 11 about a dust-up of a Democratic platform and the fact he didn't meet the prime minister of Israel when he came to New York to visit the UN. But that's not related to Libya.
What did he do that night? That's not unfair. The families need to know. The American people need to know.
SCHIEFFER: I'm not sure I understand. What do you plan to do if they don't give you an answer? Are you going to put a hold on these two nominations?
GRAHAM: Yes. Yes. Yes. I'm going to ask my colleagues, just like they did with John Bolton. Joe Biden said no confirmation without information. No confirmation without information.
You know, when Secretary Clinton said she had a clear-eyed assessment of the threats in Libya, that proved, after this hearing, not to be true.
The Department of Defense knew about the cable coming from our Libyan ambassador saying he couldn't defend the consulate. This was on August 15th. They knew about the deteriorating security situation. But the secretary of state didn't know any of this. So she was blind. The president was disengaged. And the Department of Defense never launched one airplane to help these folks for seven and a half hours.
This is a complete system failure. And I'm going to get to the bottom of it. I don't think it's unfair to ask these questions. Quite frankly, how could they say, after Panetta and Dempsey said they knew it was a terrorist attack that night, how could the president say for two weeks after the attack it was the result of a video?
How could Susan Rice come on to your show and say there's no evidence of a terrorist attack when our secretary of defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs said they knew that night?
I think that was a misleading narrative three weeks before our election.
SCHIEFFER: What would they have to do then to bring this to a vote?
GRAHAM: I want to know who changed the talking points. Who took the references to Al Qaida out of the talking points given to Susan Rice? We still don't know. Richard Burr and Saxby Chambliss have found e-mails discussing changing the talking points. So I think her story, after what we found out at this hearing, was incredibly misleading.
I want to know what our president did. What did he do as commander in chief? Did he ever pick up the phone and call anybody? I think this is stuff that the country needs to know. We pushed back against Bush. We asked for Rumsfeld to resign when Iraq went into shambles. This is a national security failure of monumental proportions and I'm not going to stop until we get to the bottom of it.
We're going to get to the bottom of Benghazi. The administration has been stonewalling before the election and after. They've been misleading. They've been deceptive. And they have been delaying, and they haven't been forthcoming.
In a constitutional democracy, we need to know what our commander in chief was doing at a time of great crisis, and this White House has been stonewalling the Congress. And I'm going to do everything I can to get to the bottom of this so we'll learn from our mistakes and hold this president accountable for what I think is tremendous disengagement at a time of national security crisis.
