Paducah, Ky. — Senator Rand Paul criticized Hillary Clinton over her handling of the 2012 Benghazi attack again today, saying it was “inexcusable” she hadn’t read the State Department cables requesting more security.
“I asked Hillary Clinton a point-blank question: Did you read the cables from Benghazi?” Paul said during a Q7A after a speech he gave at the Rotary Club in Paducah. “And she said she was too busy, she didn’t have time to. That’s inexcusable.”
“And really, if they only rose up to someone two levels beneath her and never got to her, I think that’s precisely her culpability,” he added. “It’s your job when you’re leader of the team to know what you should hear and what you should not hear. Libya’s got to be one of the five most dangerous countries in the world . . . and you don’t read it?”
Paul also suggested the State Department’s actions in Benghazi may have been related to a “cover-up” of a “gun-running operation into Syria.”
“I continue to think that what was going on in Benghazi, what they were trying to cover up, was a gun-running operation into Syria,” Paul said. “The New York Times has reported now that the CIA for a year has been involved in sending arms to Syria, and interestingly, the person they point to in the administration to say that it was the biggest advocate of sending arms to Syria was Hillary Clinton, who told me she knew nothing about it and never heard of such a thing.”
Watch (begins at the 1:10 mark):
