After over two years and more than $7 million taxpayers dollars spent, the Republican-led House Select Committee on Benghazi has failed to find any new evidence of wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton or the Obama administration. The 800-page report, which was released Tuesday after the Democratic report, also forced Republicans to admit that the United States military forces could not have reached Benghazi in time to rescue the personnel that died in the 2012 attacks, a conclusion already made by the House Armed Services Committee in a February 2014 report.
The 339-page report released on Monday by the Democratic minority on the committee cleared Hillary Clinton of responsibility for the attacks and dedicated a fair amount of text to criticizing the partisanship of House Republicans, who had been using the investigation to damage the reputations of President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The Democratic report largely echoed the sentiments liberals have expressed for years now on the investigation. The final report is only exacerbating these sentiments, as it lacks charges of dereliction of duty or professional misconduct.
Despite having no significant revelations about Benghazi, the Republican-led Committee still tried to spin the deaths of four Americans as the Obama administration’s fault. Even in admitting that American forces were not in range to rescue anyone, a fact already known over two years ago, Republicans still framed it to look bad for the Obama administration:
“The assets ultimately deployed by the Defense Department in response to the Benghazi attacks were not positioned to arrive prior to the final lethal attack on the Annex. The fact that this is true does not mitigate the question of why the world’s most powerful military was not positioned to respond; or why the urgency and ingenuity displayed by team members at the Annex and Team Tripoli was seemingly not shared by all decision makers in Washington.”
Benghazi had already been investigated by nine different bodies – the State Department’s Accountability Review Board, the Senate Committee On Homeland Security And Governmental Affairs, the House Select Committee on Intelligence, the Senate Select Committee, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the Democratic House Oversight Committee, the House Armed Services Committee, and the House Republican Conference – with none of them finding evidence of administrative cover-ups or improper responses to the attacks.
Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio and Mike Pompeo of Kansas wrote a nearly 50-page addendum to the report where they harshly attacked the Obama administration, and in particular Hillary Clinton, for inadequate responses, misleading the public, and uncooperativeness with the investigators. Many of their accusations have been debunked in the House Select Committee report and earlier reports, including the assertion that the Obama administration purposely misled the public by saying that the attacks were an escalation of protests–an incorrect statement, but one that was made with reasonable assumptions.
One of the most contentious allegations by House Republicans is that the Obama administration has tried to thwart the investigation. Mark Toner, spokesperson for the State Department, denied this: “When combined with the seven previous Congressional inquiries, the Department has participated at least in 15 hearings, 64 briefings, 72 interviews, and has provided 100,000 pages of documents.” He added that Committee Republicans continually requested large amounts of information from the State Department that had nothing to do with the Benghazi investigation.
Though the final report was unable to support the Republican anti-Obama administration narrative with new facts, it did still find valid problems with elements of the executive response to the attacks. It also found that there had been inadequate security in Benghazi starting in late 2011, with requests for increased security going ignored by Washington, but not specifically Hillary Clinton. The report outlines what Clinton should have done and known, but fails to provide specifics, leaving no one in particular at fault for the systemic problems supposedly exposed by the investigation.
Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the Committee’s top Democrat, said of the final report:
“Democrats offered to work with Chairman Gowdy on a joint report, and we even offered to give him a draft of our report ahead of time. Instead, he mocked our idea and decided to go it alone right before the presidential conventions. We can’t comment on his partisan report because we haven’t read it, and we haven’t read it because Republicans didn’t want us to check it against the evidence we obtained.”
The Clinton campaign also responded with criticism. Spokesperson Brian Fallon said:
“After more than two years and more than $7 million in taxpayer funds, the Committee report has not found anything to contradict the conclusions of the multiple, earlier investigations. This report just confirms what Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and even one of Trey Gowdy’s own former staffers admitted months ago: this Committee’s chief goal is to politicize the deaths of four brave Americans in order to try to attack the Obama administration and hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”
