Comparison of congressional reports on 2012 Benghazi attack

Allegations against Clinton were a main impetus behind the House Republicans’ creation of the politically charged, Watergate-style select committee.

With today’s Benghazi report out, you may remember there was another GOP-led Benghazi committed report that came out nearly two years ago.

“Since Republicans were unable to find any “smoking gun” on Hillary Clinton, they instead tried to justify the Select Committee’s two-year, $7 million investigation by highlighting anything new they could possibly find”, ranking Democrat Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland said in a statement.

Clinton’s campaign has slammed the report as partisan.

The House Benghazi Committee said the Central Intelligence Agency missed warnings about an imminent attack and then wrote faulty intelligence reports after it. They signed onto today’s report, but not that one. Republicans say that the latest investigation has yielded new witnesses and new revelations.

Congressman Jim Jordan said that Clinton publicly cited an anti-Muslim video circulating in the Middle East at the time as the reason for the assault, but that an hour later privately emailed her daughter, Chelsea, that terrorists had launched the attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and the three others. He said Benghazi is an issue that will likely be brought up again.

But even after the campaign is over and the issue starts to fade from memory, I hope both parties will learn a crucial lesson from it all – the only thing that will make voters more angry than governmental incompetence is being lied to about it.

Gowdy, visibly irritated by some of the questions about the politics associated with the report, urged reporters and the public to read all 800 pages and draw their own conclusions.

Last October, Clinton, already a Democratic presidential candidate, calmly deflected harsh Republican criticism of her handling of the attack during a testy 11-hour hearing before the Gowdy committee.

In its initial response, the State Department also paid tribute to the four slain Americans.

While the chair of the House Select Committee on Benghazi – South Carolina congressman Trey Gowdy – said a press conference that his background as a prosecutor made him focus the report on finding facts instead of assessing blame, his OH committee colleague – Champaign County’s Jim Jordan didn’t share those compunctions. But two Republican committee members said they did not think the report fully dealt with Clinton’s part in the events.

Clinton says no one has lost more sleep than she has over the attack which occurred while she was Secretary of State.

“The assets ultimately deployed by the Defense Department in response to the Benghazi attacks were not positioned to arrive before the final lethal attack”, the committee report said. It would have been physically impossible to fly in USA troops from outside the country before the first attack was over. This is where they planned to blame a YouTube video and insisted they needed approval from the Libyan government to deploy anyone to help the personnel. The Benghazi panel has scheduled a July 8 meeting to formally adopt the report – 10 days before the Republican National Convention begins in Cleveland.

The report claimed, however, that intelligence about a potential attack existed but Clinton and her aides failed to realize the risks posed to the mission compound.

Had Gowdy found evidence that the military could have saved the lives of the four Americans? But its release means the deepest, longest-lasting investigation into the Benghazi incident is finished.