The sister of the U.S. Ambassador killed during a terror attack while serving in Libya says that Congress' continued interest in the 2012 incident is "purely for political reasons."
"With the many issues in the current election, to use that incident—and to use Chris’s death as a political point—is not appropriate," Anne Stevens, whose brother was Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, told The New Yorker in an interview published Wednesday. "I do not blame [then-Secretary of State] Hillary Clinton or [then-Secretary of Defense] Leon Panetta."
"They were balancing security efforts at embassies and missions around the world," she added. "And their staffs were doing their best to provide what they could with the resources they had."
Clinton's response to the 2012 attack in Benghazi, which left Stevens and three other Americans dead, has for years been the target of criticism. That's despite several Republican-led probes largely exonerating her.
House Republicans on Tuesday released the findings of their latest investigation of the attack. The report, which took a special committee two years and $7 million to complete, also didn't blame Clinton -- but some of her rivals can't seem to let it go.
Stevens praised Clinton in response to the incident and noted that her brother had "a lot of respect" for the former Secretary of State. Read her full interview with The New Yorker here.
Her comments echo previous pleas from her family.
“It would really be abhorrent to make this into a campaign issue," Chris Stevens' father, Jan, said in 2012 in response to then-Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
"I don't think it's productive to lay blame on people," said his mother, Mary Commandy.