Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) sat down with U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice in a closed-door meeting on Tuesday to discuss the administration’s response to the attacks in Benghazi, Libya earlier this year. Rice did not appear to soothe their concerns.
“I’m more disturbed now than I was before,” Graham told reporters following the meeting. “I think it does not do justice to the reality at the time and in hindsight clearly was completely wrong. But here’s the key, in realtime, it was a statement disconnected from reality.”
Graham added that he was disappointed with the intelligence community for providing the administration with the talking points which Rice used in the days following the attack, but ultimately faulted Rice and Obama for presenting it to the American people.
“If you don’t know what happened, just say you don’t know what happened,” Graham said. “People can push you to give explanations and you can say I don’t want to give bad information. Here’s what I can tell you — the American people got bad information on the 16th of September, they got bad information from President Obama days after, and the question is, should they have been giving the information at all? If you can do nothing but give bad information, isn’t it better to give no information at all?”
Asked whether she could support Rice as a possible replacement for Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, Sen. Ayotte added that she “had many more questions that need to be answered.”
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