Nothing new from the Republicans’ Benghazi Report: A Waste of Taxpayers’ Money
The Republican Select Committee after spending about $3 million dollars on their Benghazi hearings finally released their report. The report did not reveal anything the public didn’t know already.
The Republicans knew all along what they wanted to accomplish with the Benghazi investigation – they wanted to make Hillary Clinton responsible for the attack. In so doing, they would brand her as incompetent and use this to render her unfit to be president.
Hillary Clinton’s eleven hours of grueling testimony before the Republican Select Committee last year which look more like a criminal investigation than a congressional investigation, revealed the overzealous attitude of the seven Republican members of the commission. At the end of the investigation, Chairman Trey Gowdy said they did not learn anything new from Sec. Clinton’s marathon testimony.
One can understand the Republicans’ desperate effort to damage or take down Hillary Clinton. She was the leading Democratic presidential candidate during the investigation and they knew she would be a formidable opponent in the presidential election.
A Washington Post report on the Benghazi report states that “The 5 most serious accusations from Republicans’ Benghazi report” were:
- The State Department failed to protect our diplomats in Libya
- The CIA missed warning signs
- The Defense Department failed to rescue Americans in time
- The Obama administration “stonewalled” the investigation
- A Clinton aide influenced the State Department’s review
Items 1, 2, and 3 are interesting because Fox News TV pushed these ideas through their Talk Shows and news reports. Item #3, especially is so simplistic and more like an oxymoron. Of course, the Defense Department failed to rescue Americans in time. If they had succeeded four men would not have been killed.
The last two items are not a surprise because they are the remnants from the effort of the anti-Obama crusade.
If there is anything the report should have included it is that the Republican Party’s anti-Obama crusade weakened the Obama administration to make it unable to provide adequate resources for foreign embassy.
With time running out on the Republicans to fulfill their anti-Obama crusade goals, the Benghazi report should be the last of a series of trivial Republican investigations. Trivial because they had no merit to them and smacked more of a political witch-hunt than a fact-finding mission. Their only hope now is for the FBI to indict Hillary Clinton on her email/server problem – another issue that seems to lack real legal implications.