“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.