Anne Stevens, sister of the late U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens, speaks during a ceremony at the Carnegie Institution for Science on November 8, 2012 in Washington, DC. | Getty Chris Stevens' sister: Don't blame Clinton for Benghazi

When it comes to who was responsible for the security lapses that resulted in the death of her brother, Chris Stevens, and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012, the ambassador's sister and family spokesperson, Anne Stevens, is not pointing the finger at Hillary Clinton. And it is "inappropriate," she said, to make Benghazi an election issue.

"I do not blame Hillary Clinton or Leon Panetta," Stevens said in an interview published Tuesday with The New Yorker's Robin Wright, referring to the former secretaries of State and defense, respectively. "They were balancing security efforts at embassies and missions around the world. And their staffs were doing their best to provide what they could with the resources they had. The Benghazi Mission was understaffed. We know that now. But, again, Chris knew that. It wasn’t a secret to him. He decided to take the risk to go there. It is not something they did to him. It is something he took on himself."


Instead, Stevens remarked that if any entity had any culpability, it was Congress for the State Department's budget.

"Perhaps if Congress had provided a budget to increase security for all missions around the world, then some of the requests for more security in Libya would have been granted," Stevens told Wright.

As far as the reports issued this week by Democratic and Republican members of the House Benghazi Committee, Stevens indicated that she had learned very little. "It doesn’t look like anything new. They concluded that the U.S. compound in Benghazi was not secure. We knew that," she told Wright. While she remarked that her brother knew of and spoke of the risks of being in Libya, she never heard him discuss it as a personal concern, rather in terms of the rampant militias and loose weapons.

Asked whether she felt her brother's death had been politicized, Stevens was adamant.

"Yes! Definitely politicized. Every report I read that mentions him specifically has a political bent, an accusatory bent," Stevens said. "One point that seems to be brought up again and again is the accusation that the attack was a response to the video. I could understand why that conclusion would be made, because it was right after the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Egypt. But, frankly, it doesn’t matter that that was the thinking, that night, about why the attack occurred. It’s irrelevant to bring that up again and again. It is done purely for political reasons."