No bombshells, but new details on Benghazi in GOP report

In a statement earlier today, the Clinton campaign slammed the Benghazi Select Committee for releasing parts of the report overnight and argued committee Republicans are “finishing their work in the same, partisan way that we’ve seen from them since the beginning”. Jim Jordan, R-Urbana and Mike Pompeo, R-Calif., that focused primarily on the conduct of Clinton – now the presumptive Democratic nominee for President – misled the public about what she knew about the attacks in Benghazi in order to help President Barack Obama’s re-election – set for 58 days after the attacks.

According to a website maintained by committee Democrats, the investigation cost more than $7.1 million, a figure that excludes money spent on investigations by the seven other congressional committees that investigated the attacks on the US diplomatic and Central Intelligence Agency posts in Benghazi.

The report delivered no new substantial evidence of Mrs Clinton’s culpability with regard to the attack, but accused her and her staff of a “shameful” lack of response to congressional investigators looking into the tragedy.

U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and State Department information officer Sean Smith were killed in the violence. Two of them, Mike Pompeo of Kansas and Jim Jordan of OH, wrote what amounts to a dissenting report that is far more scathing toward Clinton and Democrats generally. “This report just confirms. this committee’s chief goal is to politicize the deaths of four courageous Americans in order to try to attack the Obama administration and hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign”.

The panel’s chairman, Rep. Trey Gowdy of SC, says “nothing was en route to Libya at the time the last two Americans were killed nearly eight hours after the attacks began”.

The report is critical of the Obama administration’s response during and after the attack.

At a news conference on Capitol Hill, Representative Trey Gowdy of SC, the Republican chairman of the special panel, outlined what he said was a disconnect between the unfolding violence on the ground in Benghazi and the perception among top Obama administration officials that “the fighting had subsided” at the US diplomatic compound.

Findings highlighted by the committee underline members’ assertions that administration officials didn’t act with the urgency required of such a grave crisis.

He said military leaders told the committee that they thought an evacuation was imminent, slowing any response.

Gowdy, however, deflected questions about her, saying the report “is not about one person”.

Toner said the department cooperated extensively with the House panel, providing more than 50 current and former employees for interviews and over 100,000 pages of documents.

Military leaders have testified repeatedly that they didn’t have intelligence information on what was happening or the resources on alert to respond in time to the attacks, which occurred at two separate locations over 13 hours.

According to the committee’s report, the video was a featured talking point in a White House meeting on the night of the attack. Democrats said the military could not have done anything differently that night to save the lives of the Americans.

But Democrats, who released their own report on Monday to pre-empt the GOP version, say Republicans have been on a political witch hunt against Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton without uncovering anything new. “Republicans promised a process and report that was fair and bipartisan, but this is exactly the opposite”.

The committee’s five Democrats denounced the Republicans’ report as “a conspiracy theory on steroids – bringing back long-debunked allegations with no credible evidence whatsoever”.