A top Republican Senator slammed the recently released Benghazi report on Sunday, claiming that the GOP-led investigation which cleared the White House of any wrong-doing in its response on the night of the deadly 2012 attacks was "full of crap."
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, criticized the report as being "garbage" for not finding any members of the Obama administration guilty of lying and covering up what happened at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on September 11, Fox News reported.
"I think the report is full of crap," Graham, who has long been a vocal opponent in the Benghazi controversy, told Gloria Borger on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday. "I don't believe that the report is accurate, given the role that Mike Morell (deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time) played in misleading the Congress on two different occasions. Why didn't the report say that?"
"The House Intelligence Committee is doing a lousy job policing their own," he added about his own party panel's finding that there was no politically motivated cover-up by the White House after the attack.
For a long time, Republicans have contended that White House officials attempted to cover up a mishandling of the episode to curtail political damage ahead of President Obama's 2012 reelection bid.
But after a two-year compilation process, the committee's investigative report "dismissed any possibility that there was an intelligence failure during the attack - in which four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens, died - and found there was no delay in attempting to rescue the building's staff," according to New York Daily News.
The report, however, did state that the security at the diplomatic compound was not sufficiently protected and also described a "flawed" process where intelligence officials made contradictory statements regarding the details of the attack, including who planned it and carried it out.
Even then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, whose public statements after the attack incensed critics to claim that the administration was attempting to avoid calling the attack terrorism, was found to not have intentionally misled the public by sharing inaccurate information after the attack.
"When Susan Rice was on television after the attack, she said on three different occasions the consulate was strongly, and significantly secure," Graham said. "Nothing could be further than that from the truth, and there's nothing in the talking points about the level of security."
Additionally, the report has received wide criticism for finding very little evidence to support the questions that have surrounded the Benghazi incident and CIA's actions on the fateful night, according to CNN.
"Anybody who has followed Benghazi at all knows that the CIA deputy director did not come forward to tell Congress what role he played in changing the talking points and the only way we knew he was involved is when he told a representative at the White House," Graham added.
Meanwhile, similar conclusions where a cover-up has been ruled out have been previously made in six prior investigations by an array of congressional committees and State Department panels, NYDN reported.
But Graham vowed that he will be reviewing the report again. "I'm going to do a hard review of this."
"I'm not going to stop until someone is held accountable for allowing it to be a death trap, somebody be fired for not coming to the aid of these people for nine-and-a-half-hours. And somebody ought to be fired for lying to the American people. They were worried about the reelection, not telling the truth."
