Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is still searching for the silver bullet, that one piece of testimony that will prove once and for all that the Obama administration lied during the aftermath of the Benghazi attack.

Appearing on Fox News last night, Graham made clear that he was unsatisfied with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s testimony last week, saying, “I haven’t forgotten about Benghazi. Hillary Clinton got away with murder, in my view.” Graham’s quest for the truth has now led him to current Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.

Panetta, who has not testified before Congress about the role he played during the Sept. 11 attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in the Libya city, is due to step down from his position at the Pentagon in the coming weeks. Graham now insists that Panetta would have to provide answers on what happened that night to the Armed Services Committee, on which Graham is a member. What’s more, as he told Fox News host Greta Van Sustren, Graham now intends to place a hold on Panetta’s proposed replacement, Chuck Hagel, until he gets the answers he wants:

VAN SUSTEREN: Is Secretary Panetta going to testify?

GRAHAM: Well, I’m not going to — I’m going to block Hagel from going forward until he does.

VAN SUSTEREN: So you’re going to block him.

GRAHAM: Absolutely. Why would we not want to understand what happened during the attack itself? How could our secretary — what happened for seven hours? Why were there no military assets available on September the 11th.

Watch Graham’s threat here:

This is the second threat of a hold — an informal threat to filibuster a nomination or bill — that Graham has placed upon a new member of the Obama national security team over Benghazi. Earlier this month, Graham pledged to hold up the confirmation of White House Counterterrorism Director John O. Brennan — or anyone — to be the new CIA Director until he finds out who edited the infamous unclassified “talking points” on Benghazi. Graham was also key to scuttling a potential Susan Rice nomination to be Secretary of State in relation to Libya.

Graham’s dogged pursuit of “the truth” is undercut by the fact that many of the questions he’s asking have already been answered. Panetta and other administrations officials have repeatedly stated that due to the attack coming in two waves, and the distance between Libya and Sigonella Air Base in Italy, the U.S. was unable to send military forces to respond. Likewise, the question of the editing of Susan Rice’s Sept. 16 Sunday show statements has been previously identified as the result of an interagency process, in which the CIA itself removed references to Al Qaeda.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said that he would place a hold on John Brennan’s nomination as the next CIA Director unless he gets answers about how the U.S. intelligence community generated talking points on the Benghazi terror attack last September. Yet Graham’s threat runs counter to his previous belief that election results should grant presidents leeway in appointing high-level government officials.

The South Carolina Republican is still obsessed with the infamous “talking points” delivered by U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice on Sept. 16, 2012 to explain the administration’s thinking at that time about the Benghazi attack. Appearing on Fox News on Wednesday, Graham threatened to hold up Brennan’s confirmation — or any nominee for CIA Director — in his interview with host Brett Baier:

GRAHAM: I’m not going to confirm John Brennan or anyone else until the administration shares information with the Congress about who deleted references to al Qaeda three weeks before the election. I think it was purposefully done and I want to know who did it and why before we move forward.

BAIER: So, you’re committed to holding that nomination up?

GRAHAM: Yes, and I don’t want to. But I’m not going to let this administration get away from having to be held accountable. The State Department, you’re going to hear from Hillary Clinton. But who did change the talking points? Who did take al Qaeda out? And what did the president do, Bret, during the seven hours?

Watch Graham’s full interview here:

In placing a hold — an informal threat to filibuster a nomination or bill — on Brennan, Graham is choosing to continue to tilt at windmills in the pursuit of “the truth” on Benghazi over adherence to the Constitutional process he lauded in as recently 2010. Compare his current stance to the position he held just two years ago during the confirmation of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court. At the time, Graham was a much stronger advocate for Presidential flexibility when it comes to the appointment of qualified individuals.

Read more

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday attacked former Republican senator Chuck Hagel, reportedly President Obama’s choice as the next Defense Secretary, calling him a “controversial pick” and suggesting that Hagel is out of the mainstream.

Graham’s evidence? He didn’t offer much in the way of specifics, of course. Rather, the South Carolina Republican claimed Hagel is “very antagonistic toward the state of Israel” (again, not saying how) and complained that Hagel said “you should directly negotiate with Iran” (we’re not sure why this is a bad thing. President Obama believes this as well) and that sanctions on Iran “won’t work.” Graham also cited the fact that Hagel has promoted talks with Hamas, the terrorist group that runs Gaza. Watch the interview clip:

But is Hagel “antagonistic” toward Israel? Hardly. The Nebraska Republican has a history of strong support for Israel, as this blog recently noted. “At it’s core,” Hagel wrote in his book, America, Our Next Chapter, “there will always be a special and historic bond with Israel exemplified by our continued commitment to Israel’s defense.”

But Graham is right. Hagel has supported negotiations with Iran. But so does President Obama and so do a majority of Americans. Hagel has indeed suggested that some sanctions on Iran are counterproductive but he has also supported sanctions on the Islamic Republic during his tenure in the Senate and in March, 2012, he said the U.S. should “keep ratcheting up the sanctions” and try to maintain the international coalition Obama has built against Iran. “Hagel’s positions [on Iran] may put him on the fringes of the Senate,” the Daily Beast’s Ali Gharib wrote last month, “but he’s firmly in the mainstream of expert opinion, from Israel to the Pentagon.”

And why does Graham attack Hagel for promoting talks with Hamas when Israel has negotiated with the terror group and high-level Israeli officials have said Israel should hold future talks? “People ask, why not talk with Hamas? There is nothing wrong, if you get a reply,” Israeli President Shimon Peres said last month. “We are willing to talk to Hamas, but they aren’t.” Moreover, former Israeli intelligence chief Efraim Halevy has for years advocated negotiating with Hamas.
Read more

MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell said this afternoon that Susan Rice’s withdrawal as a candidate for Secretary of State will not “help Republicans at all” because members of the party “forced out” a woman of color “before she was nominated.” For months now, Republicans, in an effort spearheaded by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), have relentlessly pursued blocking Rice’s chances for a Secretary of State nomination. Mitchell explained her perspective on MSNBC earlier today:

MITCHELL: I think that this had become sort of an impossible challenge for her to be confirmed, that she realized that, the White House realized it as well. I think they know that they are on good political solid ground, as you were just pointing out. This is not going to help Republicans at all, the fact that a woman and a woman of color has been forced out of a confirmation process even before she was nominated.

Here’s the video:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Fellow MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski similarly criticized the GOP last month for what “looks like a bunch of old white men running women out of Washington,” as Brzezinski said. “Do the Republicans really think this is going to help their brand?” Scarborough wondered, referring to the GOP’s campaign against Rice, adding:

“This is the first big fight following an election where Republicans got routed not just among African-Americans but among hispanics, among Asian-Americans. I really wonder do a bunch of old white guys…want to make their first big battle, post election, a battle going up against a younger woman of color?”

Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) said in November that the use of racial “code words” was rampant in the GOP’s attacks on Rice.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has been leading a smear campaign in an attempt to discredit U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice after reports emerged that President Obama is considering nominating her as the next Secretary of State. McCain and his allies, who include namely Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), have charged that Rice’s Sept. 16 presentation of what the Obama administration knew at the time about the terror attacks in Benghazi, Libya, which has since turned out to be inaccurate, disqualifies her to be the nation’s top diplomat.

But facts have emerged that show not only that Rice was simply relaying the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment and but also that, contrary to these Republicans’ claims, Rice’s presentation was in no way a political effort to downplay al-Qaeda’s involvement in the Benghazi attacks.

Now that their campaign has been fully discredited, McCain, Graham and Ayotte are notably silent about Susan Rice and Benghazi. Graham appeared on Fox News Dec. 3 and neither he, nor host Greta Van Susteren, mentioned Benghazi or Rice. And McCain was on the same program last night — Susan Rice never came up during the interview, and McCain only mentioned Benghazi or Libya in the context of whether the U.S. should intervene militarily in Syria.

With this lull in the anti-Susan Rice campaign, ThinkProgress has updated its timeline of the entire Benghazi affair, which documents the immediate aftermath and the Romney campaign’s politicization of the events all the way through to today. Read the updated timeline here.