Representatives from the CIA, including newly-put in Director John Brennan, didn’t slightly be aware of what to make of Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) this week once they sat down to reply to questions from the House Intelligence Committee. Each subject she raised perceived to draw blank stares and more questions from the intelligence officers, who could not consider the congresswoman was broaching quite a lot of labeled topic within the open forum.
First off, Bachmann brought up one in every of her favourite issues, the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi in September 2012. She wanted to understand about the White Home’s “armed drone strikes” in jap Libya prior to those assaults remaining year.
“Armed drone strikes in Libya?” Brennan requested in seeming disbelief. “I am unknowing of such and would defer to the White Home to handle your query.” When she pushed him on the difficulty, Brennan asserted that “the White Home doesn’t have a drone functionality, accountability” and said “I don’t recognize what it’s particularly you’re relating to.”
When she did not get the answers she was looking for, Bachmann mentioned, “smartly if we aren’t going to talk about that, we aren’t going to talk about that, however that’s a query I’d like to understand.” She moved on, asking Brennan “what is our crimson line relating to the Iranian nuclear building program?”
“That clearly is a coverage query,” Brennan replied, explaining to Bachmann why he’s not the suitable individual to respond to that question. From there, Bachmann went off on a tangent concerning the more than a few instances america and U.S. interests had been attacked over the previous couple of many years, expressing her concern that an Iranian nuclear assault could additionally come as a surprise.
But the most extraordinary moment came on the finish of Bachmann’s time when she requested about Iran’s “heavy water reactor.” The CIA men conferred amongst themselves for a few seconds prior to politely informing Bachmann that it will be better to have that discussion in a “closed session.”
It’s now not entirely clear whether or not Bachmann notion she would be capable of extract categorised knowledge survive C-SPAN from Brennan and his CIA colleagues, or if she was simply the usage of her platform on the committee to air a few of issues on the global stage which were bugging her. Both means, it was seemingly one of the vital strangest interactions between Congress and the CIA ever caught on digicam.
Watch video under, by the use of C-SPAN:
–