GOP Benghazi Committee Spent 2 Years, $7 Million, Found No New Evidence of Wrongdoing by Clinton

800 Page Report Turns Up Nothing New Against Former Secretary of State

In what has been called a hyper-partisan endeavor from the very start, the House Select Committee on Benghazi has finally released its report and finds, as The New York Times reports, “no new evidence of culpability or wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton in the 2012 attacks in Libya that left four Americans dead.”

The Committee, chaired by Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina (photo), spent more than $7 million of the taxpayers’ money over the course of two years, producing an 800-page report that offers some new details but zero evidence that Secretary Clinton did anything wrong or illegal. It is the eighth investigation into the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, and the eighth that has turned up no evidence of wrongdoing by Clinton.

The Times adds that the GOP report however, “delivered a broad rebuke of government agencies like the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department — and the officials who led them — for failing to grasp the acute security risks in the Libyan city, and especially for maintaining outposts in Benghazi that they could not protect.”

The paper of record also notes the report offers a “lack of any crisp, hard-hitting allegation of professional misconduct or dereliction of duty,” which is “certain to fuel further criticism of the length the investigation — more than two years — and the expense, estimated at more than $7 million, in addition to Democrats’ allegations that the inquiry was specifically intended to damage Mrs. Clinton’s presidential prospects.”

As evidence of the hyper-partisan nature of the investigation, Democrats on the House Select Committee on Benghazi have said they were locked out of interviews and key decisions, and complained the Republicans leaked information to the press. They also were not allowed any input on the final report nor were they even given a draft before it was released to the public.

They released a separate report Monday, which, the Times reports, “said that the Benghazi effort had dragged on longer than far more important congressional inquiries like the ones into the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the attack on Pearl Harbor and the response to Hurricane Katrina.”

Last September, House Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy admitted the Benghazi Committee was merely an organized effort to derail Clinton’s chances of winning the White House.

“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” Rep. McCarthy said. “But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought.”

 

Image by Speaker John Boehner via Flickr and a CC license