The normally-unfriendly-to-Hillary New York Times has had enough of the Benghazi thing. That’s pretty surprising since The New York Times has run one phony exclusive after another. First, her famous emails were illegal, except they’re not. Then they were contrary to regulations enacted, oops, 18 months after she left office. Next Hillary was the subject of an FBI criminal probe. Except that too turned out to be false. Now they’re making a big deal out of the exact date she changed email addresses. Seriously.
Well, welcome to the party, New York Times. Some of us had enough of the Benghazi investigations a long time ago when other congressional committees turned up nothing. But the McCarthy admission (explained below) seems to have been the last straw: there’s no question now that there is no “there” there, and the only Benghazi scandal is the committee itself, soaking up tax dollars on a political vendetta against Hillary Clinton. The NYT editors:
House Republicans may be disinclined to disband the Select Committee on Benghazi with the presidential race heating up. But at the very least they should rename their laughable crusade, which has cost taxpayers $4.6 million, “the Inquisition of Hillary Rodham Clinton.”
Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, a leading candidate to become the next speaker of the House, acknowledged last week that was the point of burrowing into the details of the 2012 attacks on government facilities in eastern Libya that killed the American ambassador and three colleagues.
“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” Mr. McCarthy said in an astonishing moment of candor that was clearly a gaffe, rather than a principled admission. “But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today?”
Lawmakers have long abused their investigative authority for political purposes. But the effort to find Mrs. Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time of the Libya attacks, was personally responsible for the deaths has lost any semblance of credibility. It’s become an insult to the memory of four slain Americans.
The deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and his colleagues have been exhaustively investigated by several other congressional committees and an independent panel of experts commissioned by the Department of State. The reviews found systemic failings at the State Department. But they found no evidence that Mrs. Clinton was directly responsible for the security lapses, which, of course, is the goal of the Republicans who want to derail her presidential bid. The possibility that all those investigators have somehow missed a crucial, damning piece of evidence seems negligible.
>Led by Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, a former federal prosecutor, the Benghazi committee has trudged on, summoning a seemingly endless list of witnesses who have offered little new substantive information about the attacks. Since it was impaneled in May 2014, the committee has spent more than critical congressional committees, including the House Intelligence and Veterans’ Affairs Committees, which have oversight over bureaucracies with multibillion-dollar budgets.
“There’s nothing to justify the committee’s long duration or expense,” said Representative Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California who sits on the committee and has called for it to be disbanded. “We have nothing to tell the families and nothing to tell the American people.”
Mrs. Clinton is scheduled to testify before the committee on Oct. 22. The hearing will give Republicans another chance to attack the credibility and trustworthiness of the leading Democratic presidential candidate. It will do nothing to make American embassies abroad safer or help the relatives of the four killed in Libya.
The hearing should be the last salvo for a committee that has accomplished nothing. If the Republicans insist on keeping the process alive, the Democrats should stop participating in this charade.
For her part, Hillary is running this ad:
And then there is this….
Two out of two Kevin McCarthys agree: @housebenghazi is a taxpayer-funded, partisan sham. https://t.co/iJQ7nVc09S
— The Briefing (@TheBriefing2016) October 7, 2015
Good for her.
Say this about him, House Benghazi Czar Trey Gowdy has a knack for getting reporters to give him good coverage no matter how absurd his claims. For instance, the Washington Post gave him an uncritical platform for his some more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger pushback against Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s public admission—or, really, bragging—that the Benghazi Committee’s purpose is attacking Hillary Clinton. Gowdy’s response is just precious:
“It’s tough,” he says after a moment. “People should go by what we’ve done. How many people have we interviewed? How many of those people have been named Clinton?”
This is where reporter Elise Viebeck could have gone back to something she herself wrote the very same day:
During his deposition, [Sidney] Blumenthal was asked more than 200 questions related to the Clintons, significantly more than about Benghazi. A source who was in the room said the first time the word “Benghazi” was uttered in a question to Blumenthal was at 6:30 p.m. The deposition began at 10:30 a.m.
They did not ask him about Benghazi, which is supposedly their entire focus, until eight hours into the interview. That is … something of a tell.