Kentucky Senator and Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul argued, “if Bill Clinton had been president now, with Hillary Clinton, I think he would have let Hillary Clinton go for not doing her job” in Benghazi on Friday’s “Outnumbered” on the Fox News Channel.
Rand said, [remarks begin around 10:40] “I don’t question whether Hillary Clinton was concerned, or whether she feels bad about it. That’s not for me to question her feelings about it, but we do have to question her judgment. You know, she’s running to be president of the United States, and was her judgment good? Did she oversee a State Department that provided adequate security? Did she oversee a State Department that advised the best counsel in Libya? Was the best counsel to topple Gaddafi? I argue that there’s one thing you can know from the middle east, and that’s when we stopple secular dictators, we’ve gotten chaos and the rise of radical Islam, and I think we’re more at risk for attack from Libya than were before they toppled Gaddafi. So, I think she made an error in judgement in wanting to be there in the first place, and then she made, and compounded that error by not providing adequate security. And I’ll one other example, in Somalia, you remember in Mogadishu…in the investigation, they found out that Les Aspin had turned down adequate equipment for Mogadishu. Bill Clinton let him go. So, I think if Bill Clinton had been president now, with Hillary Clinton, I think he would have let Hillary Clinton go for not doing her job, same way he did with Les Aspin.”
Earlier Rand stated, “In the last month, before the attack Colonel Wood, who had the last remaining security force, that 60 man security force, they were saying there’s a possibility we’ll be overrun. They were sending cable after cable, Ambassador Stevens, at one point, sends a cable, we’re not talking about an email now, a cable, which is an important communication from the ambassador to Hillary Clinton, directly to her. I said did you read the cables? And she said no. So, she was busy sort of building this lineage, this flying all around world, going everywhere, and yet, this was one of the most dangerous places in the world, asking more security, and I think this is incredibly important, because I think that we need to learn from our history and when you elect a commander-in-chief, you need somebody who would actually defend our diplomatic missions, and she failed, not once but dozens of times, they ask her for more security.”
When asked whether he would put more money towards embassy security, he answered, “One of the interesting things, if you look at the money and where they were spending the money leading up to the attack in Benghazi, in that summer, Hillary Clinton approved $100,000 to send three comedians to India on the make chai, not war. Hillary Clinton spent 650,000 hours on Facebook ads, seems they didn’t have enough friends. She spent $700,000 on landscaping for the Brussels embassy, and here’s the clincher, $5 million on embassy barware and glassware, but she didn’t have enough money to appropriate. There was plenty of money for security.
He further denied that the security or State Department budgets were cut.
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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