During a marathon 11-hour hearing before the House Republicans committee a year ago, Clinton said she bore responsibility for the attack, but rejected Republican attempts to blame it on poor security precautions at the two facilities where the Americans died.
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The press has more or less swallowed whole Beltway Democrats’ standard line that the House Select Committee’s in-depth investigation into the massacre was a conspiratorial, partisan waste of time and money.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which released its own report in 2014, said the report was “blatantly political”, “squandered $7 million of taxpayer funds”, and “diverted significant Defense Department, State Department and intelligence community resources”.
The House Select Committee on Benghazi’s Republican members officially unveiled their 800-page report and findings about the awful terrorist attacks on the USA consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including the US ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens.
Seriously, the FBI has been at this for over a year now, and while I get it that they want to to be thorough, Clinton, the Democratic Party, and the nation deserves to know at this point whether she will be indicted or cleared in this investigation.
“The report contains a significant amount of new information about what happened before, during, and after the terrorist attack that left four of our fellow citizens dead”, said House Speaker Paul Ryan. “No one even missed a paycheck”, he added. She said that Stevens had originally chosen to serve in Benghazi because “he understood America had to be represented there at that pivotal time”.
But Anne Stevens said she disagreed with efforts to pin blame on Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, or former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. “Take a look at the top secret emails they found on her server”, he wrote, linking to a separate campaign website devoted to attacks on Clinton and a solicitation for donations to the Trump campaign. “Certainly the State Department is underbudgeted”.
In his speech, Trump said Clinton “spread death, destruction and terrorism everywhere she touched”.
Technically, the report is not final until the full committee formally votes to accept it, which is expected as early as July 8. The Wesleyan Media Project estimated a few weeks ago that her camp had run 105,000 ads, compared with 33,000 run by Trump. There has been finger-pointing on both sides over security at the diplomatic outpost and whether Clinton and the White House initially tried to portray the assault as a protest over an offensive, anti-Muslim video, instead of a calculated terrorist attack. We got House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s boastfully truthful “gaffe” on Fox News last September about how the GOP’s inquiry was successfully denting Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers.
The committee interviewed more than 100 witnesses and reviewed about 75,000 pages of documents, but an nearly accidental discovery by the panel previous year has shadowed Clinton’s candidacy.
The report doesn’t implicitly accuse Clinton of any crime, but does call attention to several instances of supposed incompetence, including a lag in response time following the attack.
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Don’t be too surprised if the right starts to turn on Benghazi Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), whom conservatives invested so much hope in.
