What's even more outrageous is that absolutely no one is discussing the fact that it was the House Republicans who cut $300 million from the Obama administration's US embassy security budget not long before the embassy attack in Benghazi took place. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), who is one of the Republicans bravely leading the Benghazi charge, didn't seem too concerned about the embassy in Libya last year when he made the following statement on CNN in an interview with Soledad O'Brien.
O'BRIEN: Is it true that you voted to cut the funding for embassy security?
CHAFFETZ: Absolutely. Look, we have to make priorities and choices in this country. We have - think about this - 15,000 contractors in Iraq. We have more than 6,000 contractors, private army there for President Obama in Baghdad.
And we're talking about can we get two dozen or so people into Libya to help protect our forces? When you're in tough economic times, you have to make difficult choices how to prioritize this.
As Washington Post's Dana Milbank wrote:
For fiscal 2013, the GOP-controlled House proposed spending $1.934 billion for the State Department's Worldwide Security Protection program — well below the $2.15 billion requested by the Obama administration. House Republicans cut the administration's request for embassy security funding by $128 million in fiscal 2011 and $331 million in fiscal 2012. ...Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that Republicans' proposed cuts to her department would be "detrimental to America's national security" — a charge Republicans rejected.