Sen. McConnell: Obama Administration Libya Explanation ‘Disturbing’
Published at
Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call(DANVILLE, Ky.) — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Thursday blasted the Obama administration’s “disturbing” explanation for the attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya that resulted in the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens.
“We’re finally getting the right story from the professionals down at the State Department who have been saying from the very beginning that it was a terrorist attack,” said McConnell, R-Mo., on the ABC News/Yahoo News pre-vice presidential debate live stream show. “I don’t know where this notion that this thing was video-inspired came from in the first place.”
Republican lawmakers have skewered the Obama administration this week in the first Congressional hearings on the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks in Libya, suggesting that the administration altered its explanation for the attacks for political reasons.
“It leaves you with the suspicion that since the president was in the campaign going around reminding everybody that [Osama] bin Laden’s gone and we were out of Iraq and we would soon be out of Afghanistan, and implying that the war on terror was over, that the campaign just felt it was inconvenient that we had a terrorist attack that killed four Americans,” McConnell said. “As I said, inconveniently — a month before the election.”
McConnell said that State Department officials never believed that the attack in Benghazi was the result of a hijacked protest over an anti-Islamic film that was released on YouTube.
“There’s no evidence that the video was the cause of this theorist attack,” he said. “The professionals in the State Department felt that from the very beginning.”
“So, yes its quite disturbing,” he said.
Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio