Last week, during a Senate hearing on the Benghazi attack, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) asked Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a deeply strange question: “[I]s the U.S. involved with any procuring of weapons, transfer of weapons, buying, selling, anyhow transferring weapons to Turkey out of Libya?”
Clinton, confused, said, “To Turkey?” Paul insisted this story has “been in news reports.” The Secretary of State said she didn’t have “any information on that” and the hearing moved on.
But it was hard not to wonder what in the world the Republican senator was talking about. Today, the kooky conspiracy website World Net Daily published a new report, explaining that Paul believes the Obama administration may be “covering up a gun-running scheme in Benghazi that fell apart when jihadists attacked the U.S. mission there.”
In an interview with WND, the senator said his “suspicion, although I don’t have any proof, is that guns were being smuggled out of Libya, through Turkey and into Syria.”
I have a few follow-up questions for Rand Paul. First, if you “don’t have any proof,” what on earth are you talking about? Second, why do you keep falling for silly conspiracy theories?
Third, why is a sitting U.S. senator talking to a fringe website like World Net Daily?
For the record, as Hayes Brown explained, Paul’s theory, which has apparently gotten some attention on Fox News and strange websites, is that the late Chris Stevens and the CIA secretly moved guns from Libya to Turkey, to be smuggled to Syria.
Why would the administration want to do this? I haven’t the foggiest idea. Is there any evidence to suggest this is even remotely true? Apparently not.
But that won’t stop Rand Paul from speculating about it anyway, during televised Senate hearings and in chats with online conspiracy theorists.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."