Sen. John McCain took aim at President Obama’s foreign policy Thursday, saying he is “directly responsible” for Orlando’s terror attack.
But he quickly backtracked his comments.
McCain, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, make the comments to a small group of reporters in a Senate hallway Thursday, responding to a question regarding the gun control debate that has returned to and taken over Congress since Sunday’s shooting massacre.
“Barack Obama is directly responsible for it, 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 said.
In a tweet immediately after his comments began to be reported Thursday afternoon, McCain attempted to clarify.
“To clarify, I was referring to Pres Obama’s national security decisions that have led to rise of #ISIL, not to the President himself,” he wrote on Twitter.
However in his comments to reporters, McCain did directly connect the president’s withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq to the rise of the Islamic State and the Orlando attack.
“He pulled everybody out of Iraq, and I predicted at the time that ISIS would go unchecked, and there would be attacks on the United States of America,” he said, per the Washington Post. “It’s a matter of record, so he is directly responsible.”
Later in a statement from his office, McCain said he “misspoke” and “did not mean to imply that the President was personally responsible.”
“I was referring to President Obama’s national security decisions, not the President himself,” McCain said in a statement.
The withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011 “led to the rise of ISIL,” McCain said. “I and others have long warned that the failure of the President’s policy to deny ISIL safe haven would allow the terrorist organization to inspire, plan, direct or conduct attacks on the United States and Europe as they have done in Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino and now Orlando.”
McCain is seeking re-election to a sixth term this year, facing a competitive Republican primary. He also lost to Obama in the 2008 presidential election.
Adam Jentleson, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., criticized McCain’s comments as “the latest proof that Senate Republicans are puppets of Donald Trump.”
Jentleson was referring to news reports that characterized Donald Trump as hinting that Obama was connected to the Orlando attack, but Trump’s actual quotes don’t appear to go that far.
Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s campaign manager, tweeted an article citing McCain’s remarks. McCain has said he will back Trump in the general election, despite public disagreements with him.
