DARRELL ISSA
Blames Hillary Clinton.
HILLARY CLINTON
Injured, unable to testify.
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WASHINGTON — Three top State Department officials resigned under fire yesterday after a scathing report blasted “grossly inadequate security” and management “failures” before the attack on the US diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.
But senators said they still want to grill Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton about the foul-ups that allowed terrorists to kill Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans on Sept. 11.
As congressional leaders read the damning report, the Obama administration disclosed that Eric Boswell, an assistant secretary of state, and two deputy assistant secretaries of state, Charlene Lamb and Raymond Maxwell, had stepped down.
Clinton had been scheduled to provide answers at a congressional hearing on Libya today. But she canceled after fainting and sustaining a concussion last week while recovering from a stomach virus.
Republicans — and some Democrats — still want to hear from Clinton about the report by a blue-ribbon, independent panel.
“What it says is there are huge management problems at State, and she’s ultimately responsible,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) told The Post.
“I think she’s got to testify,” agreed Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas).
Sen. Dick Durbin, the Senate’s second-ranking Democrat, added, “I hope that Secretary Clinton will testify . . . Ultimately we need to present this to the American people.”
Retired Adm. Mike Mullen, co-chair of the panel, said in the report that some officials were more concerned with saving money than with security.
Mullen’s co-chair, retired Ambassador Thomas Pickering, said the personnel on the ground in Benghazi “did the best they possibly could with what they had — but what they had wasn’t enough.”
Lamb defended the security when she testified in October before Issa’s Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
“We had the correct number of assets in Benghazi at the time,” she said.
Lamb added that she rejected requests for more security, and trained “local Libyans and army men” instead to guard the mission.