The White House on Friday declined to respond to Sen. John McCain’s decision to blame President Obama’s foreign policy decisions for the deadly Orlando terrorist attack, and instead said the administration won’t be “distracted by small things” when it’s trying to protect the country.
It was the same quote White House press secretary Josh Earnest used earlier in the week when asked to react to Donald Trump’s criticism that the president “doesn’t get it” and may be complicit in the Orlando attacks.
“I haven’t spoken to the president about these comments,” Earnest said about Trump’s attacks. “I can tell you when you are focused on something as big as helping the country respond to the worst mass shooting in our country’s history … and safeguarding the country … it’s important not to get distracted by things that are so small.”
McCain, who lost to Obama in the 2008 presidential contest, caused an uproar earlier Thursday when he told reporters that Obama was responsible for the Orlando shooting massacre that killed 49 innocent people. Democrats complained that McCain had crossed a line and was starting to use similar rhetoric to the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.
“Barack Obama is directly responsible for [the Orlando shooting], because when he pulled everybody out of Iraq, al Qaeda went to Syria, became ISIS, and ISIS is what it is today thanks to Barack Obama’s failures,” McCain told the Washington Post.
Later Thursday, the Arizona Republican said he had misspoken and that he didn’t mean to imply that he was “personally responsible.” Instead, McCain said he meant to refer to Obama’s “national security decisions” as responsible, not the president himself.
Adam Jentleson, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said McCain’s unhinged comments are just the latest proof that Senate Republicans are puppets of Donald Trump.”
