According to an email obtained by ABC News’ Jake Tapper, the State Department rejected a request by the security team at the U.S. embassy in Libya for a DC-3 airplane in May:
No one has yet to argue that the DC-3 would have definitively made a difference for the four Americans killed that horrible night. The security team in question, after all, left Libya in August.
But the question – both for the State Department, which is conducting an internal investigation, and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is holding hearings next week – is whether officials in Washington, D.C., specifically at the State Department, were as aware as they should have been about the deteriorating security situation in Libya, and whether officials were doing everything they could to protect Americans in that country.