A Democratic senator on Thursday introduced a new bill to boost security at U.S. embassies in the aftermath of an attack on a diplomatic outpost in Libya last year.

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) serves as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a role he inherited as the “scandal” over the Obama administration’s response to the attack in Benghazi, Libya was reaching one of its many peaks in January. Today on the Senate floor, Menendez castigated his colleagues who believed that the Senate had not done enough to investigate Benghazi, reminding them that there have been 11 hearings in Congress on the matter since September. “We have fully vetted this issue,” Menendez said.

The focus “should not be to score political points at the expense of the families of the four victims,” he went on to say. “It should be on doing all we can to protect our personnel serving overseas and provide the necessary oversight and legislative authority to carry out the administrative review board’s recommendations.” With that in mind, Menendez introduced the Embassy Security and Personnel Protection Act of 2013, a bill he hoped would be “able to count on the support of all of our colleagues to enact this crucial, time-sensitive legislation without delay, without obstruction, without political grandstanding.”

The bill would provide further funding to the Capital Security Cost-Sharing Program, first instituted in 1998 to boost security to “high-risk, high-threat” diplomatic posts and has since been chronically underfunded. Under the new legislation, the program would be able to build far more than the two to three facilities a year for the two dozen posts that fall into the high-risk, high-threat category. It would also provide funding for implementing a shift in the mission of Marine Corps security guards posted at U.S. embassies to protect staffers as well as classified assets. The bill would also require the State Department to provide verification to Congress of it fully putting into place its Accountability Review Board (ARB) on Benghazi’s recommendations for improvement.

Diplomatic security has been given a short-shrift in the aftermath of Benghazi. During her appearance before the Senate in January, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attempted to persuade Congress to shift $1.3 billion in funding bookmarked for warfighting in Iraq towards providing for greater diplomatic security. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) shepherded legislation through the Senate fulfilling Clinton’s request, but the bill died in the House. Since then, most of the conversation surrounding Benghazi has focused almost exclusively on the Obama administration’ss supposed cover-up, no matter how many documents are released debunking the claim.
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Staff who served in Libya with Gregory Hicks, the GOP’s primary “whistleblower” in this week’s hearing on the Benghazi terror attacks, undercut his story that State Department officials demoted him as retribution for speaking out, instead telling ThinkProgress about a man who one described as “the worst manager I’ve ever seen in the Foreign Service.”

Throughout his testimony on Wednesday, Hicks seemed certain that any critique of his leadership style while serving as deputy chief of mission in Libya was based solely around anger related to his stance on Benghazi. He also blamed his subsequent assignment after being pulled from Libya in mid-Oct. 2012 on his speaking out against the Obama administration’s response to the attacks.

However, ThinkProgress has talked to staffers based in Libya who counter Hicks’ portrayal of both his own performance and the State Department’s alleged response to him speaking out. A meeting between Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Beth Jones and Hicks took place in Tripoli prior to his removal from Libya, but not under the same circumstances Hicks sought to portray. Counter to Hicks’ story of an unwarranted reassignment, the staff was upset with Hicks’ performance since he was first assigned to Tripoli on July 31, and told Jones as much prior to her meeting with Hicks.

“[Jones] and her aide had one-on-one meetings with us to see if [Hicks] could be guided into being a better leader,” a State Department employee posted to Libya told ThinkProgress. “Literally every single one of us begged for him to be removed from post,” said the employee, who spoke to ThinkProgress on the condition of anonymity, as they were not cleared to discuss personnel issues with the press.

A second State Department employee present in Libya before and during the Benghazi attacks confirmed the meetings occurred. Assistant Secretary Jones’ meetings with the staff prior to Oct. 2 were “entirely” focused on Hicks’ performance, according to this second employee, who also believed that Hicks should be removed from his position. “The group of us who were here during the attacks, we sat here two nights ago and watched [the hearing] with our jaws dropped,” the staffer said, referring to Hicks’ claim that he was demoted out of retribution for speaking out.

“He was removed from here because he was a disaster as a manager,” the second employee went on to say, expressing the belief that Hicks’ reassignment had “nothing to do with him being a whistleblower, it had everything to do with his management capacity or lack thereof.” This statement contradicts the narrative promoted on conservative media outlets that Hicks was being forced to remain silent and being punished for speaking out.

The same employees also told ThinkProgress of several troubling incidents involving Hicks and the staff at the Tripoli Embassy both before and after the September 11, 2012 assault in Benghazi. During the aftermath of Benghazi, Hicks showed a lack of diplomatic protocol that both staffers found extremely questionable given the tense times. This includes going to a meeting with the Libyan Prime Minister Mohammed Magarief in a t-shirt, cargo pants, and baseball cap. “I’m too upset to wear a suit,” Hicks allegedly told a staffer. “I want the Libyans to know how upset I am about this attack.”

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Republicans are touting today’s House Oversight Committee hearing as a potential final nail in the coffin of the Obama administration’s continuing cover-up of what really happened the night a diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya was attacked last September. In truth, the event is sure to be a rehash of previously debunked finger-pointing and yet another round of political posturing surrounding the tragic death of four Americans.

The GOP’s star witness at today’s hearings is the former Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Libya, Gregory Hicks, who the right-wing has labeled the main Benghazi “whistle-blower.” Hicks is expected to give testimony before the panel detailing what he believes could have done above and beyond the efforts the administration expended the night of the attack, actions he claims could have saved lives:

“If we had been able to scramble a fighter or aircraft or two over Benghazi as quickly as possible after the attack commenced, I believe there would not have been a mortar attack on the annex in the morning because I believe the Libyans would have split,” Hicks told House Republican investigators.

Hicks is also expected to explain to the panel that a team of special operations forces was told not to fly from Tripoli to Benghazi prior to the second wave of the attack. According to an excerpt of Hicks’ testimony “[Col. Gibson] got a phone call from SOCAFRICA which said, ‘you can’t go now, you don’t have the authority to go now.’ And so they missed the flight … They were told not to board the flight, so they missed it.”

Republicans are latching onto Hicks’ testimony about the lack of military response during the attack as evidence of the administration’s negligence in protecting diplomats overseas and a resulting cover-up to avoid scrutiny. “We were certainly misled at every step of the way,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), one of the loudest voices on Benghazi, said on Monday to a surprisingly skeptical panel on Fox News.

The military has repeatedly said, however, that there were simply no air assets close enough to Benghazi that would have arrived in time to make a difference. Hicks himself admitted during his pre-hearing testimony that the nearest fighter jets were at Aviano Air Base in southern Italy, hours away from Libya with no tanker assets available for refueling purposes.

And while Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) during the Senate’s last hearing on the military’s response to Benghazi scolded the Pentagon for not having assets available at the Souda Bay naval base in Crete, Greece, the fact remains that even the hour and a half from the island to Benghazi would have been too late to save Ambassador J. Christopher Stephens and communications specialist Sean Smith. Both died during the first wave of the attack, less than an hour after the Pentagon was first notified.

Likewise, despite what Fox News reports have said, U.S. forces based in Europe as part of U.S. Africa Command would not have arrived until after the second wave of attacks, which took place at the CIA annex in Benghazi hours after the first, had finished.

“The United States military, as I’ve said, is not and frankly should not be a 911 service, arriving on the scene within minutes to every possible contingency around the world,” then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told the Senate Armed Services committee in February. That hasn’t stopped conservatives from railing against the lack of cavalry riding into Benghazi at the last minute, which in turn ignores the valiant efforts from the CIA’s response team that saved lives the night of the attack.
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Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) accused the Department of State of repeated threats and intimidation against witnesses to last year’s attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. But when pressed by Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace for examples, he could offer none.

Asked about a claim by a witness’s lawyer that whistle-blowers had been blocked from testifying (a claim rejected by the Department of State), Chaffetz said that “more than one” witness has indeed been “suppressed” by the Obama administration.

WALLACE: Tell me–a direct threat, a direct act of intimidation against a potential witness?

CHAFFETZ: Yes, and I think we’ll probably…

WALLACE: Tell me one… tell what’s been said.

CHAFFETZ: There are people, more than one, that have felt intimidation from the State Department.

Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA) quickly debunked his colleague: “There’ve been two attorneys involved here, the only reason they haven’t received information is that they haven’t asked for it yet… there has not been a request for documents from these attorneys to the State Department.”

The only “retaliation,” Lynch noted, was that one of the witnesses wants a reassignment and a promotion and feels he’s being retaliated against because has not yet gotten the promotion.

Watch the video:

As Media Matters has previously noted, Victoria Toensing, the Republican attorney making the initial claims has been peddling Benghazi conspiracy theories for months, including a November Fox News op/ed in which she attempted to draw a link between the attack and the resignation of former CIA director David Petraeus.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) has his doubts about the legitimacy of the State Department Accountability Review Board’s investigation into the Benghazi attacks last September — but that didn’t stop him from lavishing praise on the ARB’s findings that chastise the Obama administration.

The ARB found that an anti-Islamic video was not the main cause behind the attack on the diplomatic mission in the Libyan city, a major focus of Republican election season attacks on President Obama. On CNN on Wednesday, Chaffetz crowingly quoted the report to affirm his view that the administration was hiding something in the response to the tragedy. “Why was the American public and the world mislead for so long about a video that the [ARB] said had nothing to do with the attack itself?” he asked.

But when host Soledad O’Brien pointed out that the same report also absolved all government officials of any wrong-doing, Chaffetz suddenly discovered that he wasn’t so happy with its conclusions:

O’BRIEN: The Accountability Review Board also said this. “The board did not find that any individual U.S. government employee engaged in misconduct or willfully ignored his or her responsibilities, did not find reasonable cause to believe that an individual breached his or her duty so as to be the subject of a recommendation for a disciplinary action.” So they weighed in and said, listen, nothing was done willfully and nobody should really be disciplined.

CHAFFETZ: I thought it was interesting that the Accountability Review Board — an internal review — didn’t even interview Secretary Clinton. Why is it that the person in charge wasn’t even asked a question by this Board? And the other thing that’s deeply concerning about this review is that they took sixty days. They went in there and they found more than two dozen systemic failures. They had sixty recommendations — what in the world is going on at the State Department?

But just seconds later, Chaffetz became a supporter of the report again. “We have four dead people, and in sixty days they could figure out what Secretary Clinton and the administration couldn’t in four years,” he said. Watch the clip:

Chaffetz, one of the top Republicans on the House Government Oversight Committee, has been leading the Benghazi charge in the House for months now. His track record has not been phenomenal given his willingness to come at his pursuit from any angle so long as it results in attacking the Obama administration. At hearings on Benghazi in November, Chaffetz accidentally revealed classified information while attempting to shame administration officials for presenting cleared information. He also once proudly declared that he had voted to cut funding to State Department security functions before attacking the administration on prioritizing resources.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) said today that he voted to cut funding for U.S. embassy security amid political attacks from Republicans that the Obama administration did not do enough to secure the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya that was attacked last month.

Republicans and their allies have been trying to politicize the attack — which killed four Americans, including the U.S. Ambassador to Libya — suggesting, without evidence, the Obama administration may have ignored intelligence that the attack was imminent, didn’t properly secure the Benghazi compound and is now trying to cover it up.

But hidden beneath the GOP campaign is the fact that House Republicans voted to cut nearly $300 million from the U.S. embassy security budget. When asked if he voted to cut the funds this morning on CNN, Chaffetz said, “Absolutely“:

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.

CNN has the clip:

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank breaks it all down:

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. (Negotiations with the Democrat-controlled Senate restored about $88 million of the administration’s request.) Last year, 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.

[GOP vice presidential nominee Paul] Ryan, [Rep. Darrell] Issa and other House Republicans voted for an amendment in 2009 to cut $1.2 billion from State operations, including funds for 300 more diplomatic security positions. Under Ryan’s budget, non-defense discretionary spending, which includes State Department funding, would be slashed nearly 20 percent in 2014, which would translate to more than $400 million in additional cuts to embassy security.

“It’s also important to note,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said last week, “that the Republican appropriation in Congress gave the administration $300 million less than it asked for for the State Department, including funding for security.”