Tag Archives: benghazi

Report: John Boehner Is the Guy Who’s Kept the Hillary Email Scandal Alive

Mother Jones

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Back when the Benghazi committee started up, Rep. Trey Gowdy swore that it was nothing more than an impartial search for the truth about a raid that cost four American lives. So how is that coming along? The New York Times reports:

Now, 17 months later — longer than the Watergate investigation lasted — interviews with current and former committee staff members as well as internal committee documents reviewed by The New York Times show the extent to which the focus of the committee’s work has shifted from the circumstances surrounding the Benghazi attack to the politically charged issue of Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.

….The committee has conducted only one of a dozen interviews that Mr. Gowdy said in February that he planned to hold with prominent intelligence, Defense Department and White House officials, and it has held none of the nine public hearings — with titles such as “Why Were We in Libya?” — that internal documents show have been proposed.

At the same time, the committee has added at least 18 current and former State Department officials to its roster of witnesses, including three speechwriters and an information technology specialist who maintained Mrs. Clinton’s private email server.

From the standpoint of a genuine Benghazi investigation, Hillary Clinton’s email issues wouldn’t matter. All the committee would care about is getting a look at the emails from her private server—which is now happening. For some reason, though, they care deeply about investigating that email server to death, even though it has nothing to do with the Benghazi attacks. Why is that?

A friend of mine has tried to persuade me that Gowdy is probably playing things straight. I’ve argued that I don’t believe it. He’s a true believer, and he cares a lot more about taking down Democrats than he does about Benghazi itself, which he probably knows perfectly well has already been investigated to death. So which of us is right? This tidbit sheds a bit of light on things:

Gowdy said that at one point this spring he told John A. Boehner, the House speaker, that he feared the task of investigating the email issue would distract from his committee’s work….and pressed Mr. Boehner to have another House committee examine the matter of Mrs. Clinton’s emails, but that Mr. Boehner had rejected the request.

….Senior Republican officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing confidential conversations, said that Mr. Boehner had long been suspicious of the administration’s handling of the attacks and that Mrs. Clinton’s emails gave him a way to keep the issue alive and to cause political problems for her campaign. But he thought that the task was too delicate to entrust to others and that it should remain with Mr. Gowdy, the former prosecutor.

If this is true, my friend is halfway right: Gowdy never really wanted to get distracted with politically motivated attacks on Hillary Clinton. But John Boehner did, and he figured Gowdy was the best man for the job.

I’m not quite sure what this says about Gowdy, but it’s certainly clear that Boehner thought that manipulating the media into nonstop reporting on Hillary’s email server was a great idea. He also figured the media would take the bait. And they did.

So Gowdy gets, oh, let’s say a C+. He tried to do the right thing, but caved in pretty quickly. Boehner gets a D. He was all about taking down Hillary Clinton from the get-go. The media gets an F. Boehner at least has the excuse of being a senior Republican leader, and attacking Democrats comes with the territory. But the media is not supposed to be so gullible that they believe everything Republicans say about Democratic leaders. In the case of Hillary Clinton, though, that rule seems to have been suspended. Again.

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Report: John Boehner Is the Guy Who’s Kept the Hillary Email Scandal Alive

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Benghazi Staffers Spent Their Days Designing Personalized "Tiffany Glocks"

Mother Jones

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Who said this?

He described to CNN an office environment in which employees spent their days Web surfing and sometimes drinking at work. He said staffers joined a “gun buying club” for “chrome-plated, monogrammed, Tiffany-style Glock 9-millimeters,” and some would spend hours at a time at work designing the personalized weapons.

Answer: Maj. Bradley Podliska, a former member of the House Benghazi committee, who claims he was fired for refusing to spend his time focused solely on Hillary Clinton instead of actually investigating Benghazi. I don’t know yet if I believe him, but the whole Tiffany Glock thing sounds way too weird to have been made up.

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Benghazi Staffers Spent Their Days Designing Personalized "Tiffany Glocks"

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House Benghazi Committee Breaks Record — Sort Of

Mother Jones

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Today’s news:

The House committee investigating the Benghazi attacks is now the longest congressional investigation in history, committee Democrats announced today. As of Monday, the House Select Committee on Benghazi, has been active for 72 weeks — surpassing the record previously held by the Watergate Committee in the 1970’s.

I suppose this is technically correct. But let’s gaze through a broader lens and take a look at the Whitewater investigation:

The House Banking Committee began hearings in March 1994, and they petered out in early 1995. Call it 50 weeks or so.
The Senate Whitewater Committee began in May 1995 and issued its final report in June 1996. That’s 57 weeks.
But wait! The Senate investigation was a continuation of the Senate Banking Committee investigation, which began in July 1994. If you count this as one big Senate investigation, as you really should, it lasted 98 weeks.
But wait again! The Whitewater investigation really started on January 20, 1994, when special counsel Robert Fiske was appointed. It ended on September 20, 2000, when Fiske’s successor, Robert Ray, announced there was “insufficient evidence” to show that the Clintons had done anything wrong. That’s 348 weeks.

So sure: in terms of a single congressional committee in continuous existence, Benghazi is now the all-time record holder. But in terms of how long a political investigation has lasted through all its permutations, I’d guess that 348 weeks is unlikely to be beaten anytime soon. When it comes to political witch hunts, Whitewater was—and remains—the king of fruitless idiocy.

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House Benghazi Committee Breaks Record — Sort Of

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Benghazi Hearings Now a Trip Down Memory Lane

Mother Jones

Jonathan Allen on the Trey Gowdy clown show better known as Benghazi! hearings:

Republicans finally stripped away any pretense that they are more interested in the Benghazi attack than in attacking Hillary Clinton. With the nine-hour interrogation of bit player Sid Blumenthal Tuesday, they jumped the shark.

The House Select Committee on Benghazi deposed the Clinton confidant in a closed hearing room in a sub-basement of the Capitol. Blumenthal’s never been to Libya. He doesn’t know anything special about the Benghazi attack. He did sometimes forward “intelligence” memos from an ex-CIA officer to his longtime friend Hillary Clinton.

Not surprisingly, the committee — tasked with investigating the Benghazi assault — learned absolutely nothing from Blumenthal about the terrorist attack that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, in September 2012.

However, by spending all that time on Blumenthal, they met someone who does know something about Hillary Clinton. Indeed, Blumenthal’s appearance on Capitol Hill — where he was last a prominent figure during Bill Clinton’s impeachment saga — felt like part of a national time warp in which Americans are forced to relive the partisan warfare of the 1990s, when Republicans summoned Clinton aides to testify about an endless string of investigations. A Clinton confidant testifying before Congress is the only thing more ’90s than a Bush and a Clinton running for president.

Apparently the questioning of Blumenthal was so transparently aimed at gathering campaign material against Hillary that Democrats on the committee want the full transcript released. They probably also want it released because Republicans in the past have had a bad habit of selectively releasing tiny little parts of transcripts purpose-designed to make Democrats look bad.1 Best to nip that in the bud.

There are so many things that I thought Republicans would eventually calm down about. Obamacare. Benghazi. Climate change. Iraq. Putin. Obama’s betrayal of Israel. But no. Granted, campaign season is upon us, and that’s when things always get hot, but still. Benghazi? Seriously? How many metric tons of evidence does it take for them to admit that it was a tragedy but not an act of treason?

1Though, in fairness, I don’t think Gowdy has ever done this.

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Benghazi Hearings Now a Trip Down Memory Lane

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Benghazi Is Over, But the Mainstream Media Just Yawns

Mother Jones

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After two years of seemingly endless Benghazi coverage, how did the nation’s major media cover the report of a Republican-led House committee that debunked every single Benghazi conspiracy theory and absolved the White House of wrongdoing? Long story short, don’t bother looking on the front page anywhere. Here’s a rundown:

The Washington Post briefly moved its story into the top spot on its homepage this afternoon. In the print edition, it ran somewhere inside, though I don’t know where.
The New York Times ran only a brief AP dispatch yesterday. Late today they finally put up a staff-written story, scheduled to run in the print edition tomorrow on page A23.
The Wall Street Journal ran a decent piece, but it got no play on the website and ran in the print edition on page A5.
USA Today ran an AP dispatch, but only if you can manage to find it. I don’t know if it also ran anywhere in the print edition.
As near as I can tell, the LA Times ignored the story completely.
Ditto for the US edition of the Guardian.
Fox News ran a hilarious story that ignored nearly every finding of the report and managed to all but say that it was actually a stinging rebuke to the Obama administration. You really have to read it to believe it.

I get that the report of a House committee isn’t the most exciting news in the world. It’s dry, it has no visuals, it rehashes old ground, and it doesn’t feature Kim Kardashian’s butt.

Still, this is a report endorsed by top Republicans that basically rebuts practically every Republican bit of hysteria over Benghazi spanning the past two years. Is it really good news judgment to treat this the same way they would a dull study on the aging of America from the Brookings Institution?

UPDATE: Late tonight, the LA Times finally roused itself to run a non-bylined piece somewhere in the Africa section.

I should add that the stories which did run were mostly fairly decent (Fox News excepted, of course). In particular, Ken Dilanian’s AP report was detailed and accurate, and ran early in the morning. The problem is less with the details of the coverage, than with the fact that the coverage was either buried or nonexistent practically everywhere.

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Benghazi Is Over, But the Mainstream Media Just Yawns

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Republicans Finally Admit There Is No Benghazi Scandal

Mother Jones

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For two years, ever since Mitt Romney screwed up his response to the Benghazi attacks in order to score campaign points, Republicans have been on an endless search for a grand conspiracy theory that explains how it all happened. Intelligence was ignored because it would have been inconvenient to the White House to acknowledge it. Hillary Clinton’s State Department bungled the response to the initial protests in Cairo. Both State and CIA bungled the military response to the attacks themselves. Even so, rescue was still possible, but it was derailed by a stand down order—possibly from President Obama himself. The talking points after the attack were deliberately twisted for political reasons. Dissenters who tried to tell us what really happened were harshly punished.

Is any of this true? The House Select Intelligence Committee—controlled by Republicans—has been investigating the Benghazi attacks in minute detail for two years. Today, with the midterm elections safely past, they issued their findings. Their exoneration of the White House was sweeping and nearly absolute. So sweeping that I want to quote directly from the report’s summary, rather than paraphrasing it. Here it is:

The Committee first concludes that the CIA ensured sufficient security for CIA facilities in Benghazi….Appropriate U.S. personnel made reasonable tactical decisions that night, and the Committee found no evidence that there was either a stand down order or a denial of available air support….

Second, the Committee finds that there was no intelligence failure prior to the attacks. In the months prior, the IC provided intelligence about previous attacks and the increased threat environment in Benghazi, but the IC did not have specific, tactical warning of the September 11 attacks.

Third, the Committee finds that a mixed group of individuals, including those affiliated with Al Qa’ida, participated in the attacks….

Fourth, the Committee concludes that after the attacks, the early intelligence assessments and the Administration’s initial public narrative on the causes and motivations for the attacks were not fully accurate….There was no protest. The CIA only changed its initial assessment about a protest on September 24, 2012, when closed caption television footage became available on September 18, 2012 (two days after Ambassador Susan Rice spoke)….

Fifth, the Committee finds that the process used to generate the talking points HPSCI asked for—and which were used for Ambassador Rice’s public appearances—was flawed….

Finally, the Committee found no evidence that any officer was intimidated, wrongly forced to sign a nondisclosure agreement or otherwise kept from speaking to Congress, or polygraphed because of their presence in Benghazi. The Committee also found no evidence that the CIA conducted unauthorized activities in Benghazi and no evidence that the IC shipped arms to Syria.

It’s hard to exaggerate just how remarkable this document is. It’s not that the committee found nothing to criticize. They did. The State Department facility in Benghazi had inadequate security. Some of the early intelligence after the attacks was inaccurate. The CIA should have given more weight to eyewitnesses on the ground.

But those are routine after-action critiques, ones that were fully acknowledged by the very first investigations. Beyond that, every single conspiracy theory—without exception—was conclusively debunked. There was no stand down order. The tactical response was both reasonable and effective under the circumstances. The CIA was not shipping arms from Libya to Syria. Both CIA and State received all military support that was available. The talking points after the attack were fashioned by the intelligence community, not the White House. Susan Rice followed these talking points in her Sunday show appearances, and where she was wrong, it was only because the intelligence community had made incorrect assessments. Nobody was punitively reassigned or polygraphed or otherwise intimidated to prevent them from testifying to Congress.

Read that list again. Late on a Friday afternoon, when it would get the least attention, a Republican-led committee finally admitted that every single Benghazi conspiracy theory was false. There are ways that the response to the attacks could have been improved, but that’s it. Nobody at the White House interfered. Nobody lied. Nobody prevented the truth from being told.

It was all just manufactured outrage from the beginning. But now the air is gone. There is no scandal, and there never was.

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Republicans Finally Admit There Is No Benghazi Scandal

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Don’t Worry, the Crazy Is Coming Soon in the House Benghazi Hearing

Mother Jones

Yesterday’s Benghazi hearing, chaired by Rep. Trey Gowdy (R–SC), was shockingly calm. Aside from a bit of gotcha over a 15-year-old report, there were no conspiracy theories, no hot buttons pressed, no shrieking clown shows. The extremely sober topic was whether the State Department has been successfully implementing the recommendations made by the Accountability Review Board shortly after the attacks. Everyone was on their best behavior, and even Ed Kilgore was impressed:

Now it’s possible Gowdy will be taken to the woodshed by other Republicans (not to mention the conservative media that has made Benghazi! a sort of national security counterpart to Agenda 21), and come back snarling and ranting. But for the first time since September 11, 2012, the subject is being discussed by Republicans in an atmosphere that isn’t reminiscent of a Tea Party street rally.

Go ahead and call me a stone partisan blinded by my own ill will toward Republicans, but come on. Gowdy doesn’t need to be taken to the woodshed by anyone. This is just well-played theater from a guy who’s a mite smarter than the usual tea party crackpot. He’s gulling everyone into treating this like a serious investigation so that he’ll have some credibility stored up when it comes time for the hundredth repetition of the stand-down myth or the latest insane parsing of the White House talking points. That’s what this is all about.

I’ll apologize if Gowdy manages to keep the tone of this hearing civil and judicious all the way to the end. But I’m not too worried about having to eat any crow here.

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Don’t Worry, the Crazy Is Coming Soon in the House Benghazi Hearing

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So the Benghazi Attacks Were Motivated by the Video After All?

Mother Jones

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From a New York Times article today about the capture of Ahmed Abu Khattala, believed to be one of the leaders of the Benghazi attacks:

On the day of the attack, Islamists in Cairo had staged a demonstration outside the United States Embassy there to protest an American-made online video mocking Islam, and the protest culminated in a breach of the embassy’s walls — images that flashed through news coverage around the Arab world.

As the attack in Benghazi was unfolding a few hours later, Mr. Abu Khattala told fellow Islamist fighters and others that the assault was retaliation for the same insulting video, according to people who heard him.

I’m a little puzzled. The story is by David Kirkpatrick, with additional reporting from Suliman Ali Zway in Tripoli. Kirkpatrick has written extensively about Benghazi, and he has suggested before that the “Innocence of Muslims” video did indeed motivate some of the attackers. But as far as I know, he’s never reported that Abu Khattala explicitly said that the video was his motivation. That makes this new and important reporting, but it’s casually buried in the 18th paragraph of today’s story—as if it’s old news that’s merely being repeated for this profile of Abu Khattala.

Maybe I just missed it before. But if this is truly new reporting, I’d sure be interested in knowing who the sources are and why they’ve never told us this before.

UPDATE: It turns out that Kirkpatrick has indeed reported this before. On October 18, 2012—five weeks after the Benghazi attacks—he wrote a profile of Abu Khattala that included this:

Mr. Abu Khattala, 41, wearing a red fez and sandals, added his own spin. Contradicting the accounts of many witnesses and the most recent account of the Obama administration, he contended that the attack had grown out of a peaceful protest against a video made in the United States that mocked the Prophet Muhammad and Islam.

This seems to have escaped everyone’s attention, including mine, but apparently it’s nothing new. Abu Khattala has claimed all along that the video was one of the motivations for the attacks.

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So the Benghazi Attacks Were Motivated by the Video After All?

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Chris Wallace Demands Answers to Yet More Benghazi Questions That Have Already Been Answered Dozens of Times

Mother Jones

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I was channel surfing this morning and happened to catch a few minutes of Chris Wallace talking to Claire McCaskill. The subject, yet again, was Benghazi. Why did Susan Rice blame the video? Also: Two sources said they knew it was a terrorist attack immediately, so why didn’t Rice say that? We need these questions answered!

I know, I know. It’s my fault for watching TV. But Jesus. Chris Wallace knows the answers to these questions. He has to know. But just in case he still doesn’t, here they are:

Why did Susan Rice blame the video?

On Chris Wallace’s own show aired four days after the Benghazi attack, here’s what Susan Rice said:

Well, first of all, Chris, we are obviously investigating this very closely. The FBI has a lead in this investigation. The information, the best information and the best assessment we have today is that in fact this was not a preplanned, premeditated attack. That what happened initially was that it was a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired in Cairo as a consequence of the video. People gathered outside the embassy and then it grew very violent and those with extremist ties joined the fray and came with heavy weapons, which unfortunately are quite common in post-revolutionary Libya and that then spun out of control.

But we don’t see at this point signs this was a coordinated plan, premeditated attack. Obviously, we will wait for the results of the investigation and we don’t want to jump to conclusions before then. But I do think it’s important for the American people to know our best current assessment.

Rice was very clear that she was providing a preliminary judgment. She was very clear about the role of the video: It had inspired protests in Cairo earlier in the week. She was very clear that we believed the Cairo protests sparked protests in Benghazi. She was very clear that we believed this provided extremist groups with a chance to launch an opportunistic attack.

In the end, almost all of this turned out to be true. The video did spark protests in Cairo. Some of the Benghazi attackers were motivated by the video. The attack wasn’t premeditated: it was planned no more than a few hours previously. The only part Rice got wrong was that there were, in fact, no initial protests in Benghazi. That was the best reporting we had at the time, but it turned out to be incorrect.

A couple of sources said they reported immediately that it was a preplanned terrorist attack. Why didn’t Rice and the rest of the Obama administration say that?

Because the intelligence community had multiple sources of reporting about Benghazi, and they conflicted. How hard can it be to understand this? Besides, the best evidence we have today is that it wasn’t a preplanned attack. It was an opportunistic attack organized in less than a day. What’s more, the groups that led the attack had only the most tenuous ties to Al Qaeda.

Aside from that, there’s this continuing weird totem around the word “terrorist.” What’s the point of this? Hillary Clinton called the attackers a “small and savage group.” Susan Rice called them extremists. Others used different words. It’s hard to understand why this matters. The attack was carried out by mostly local militant groups with mostly local grievances and no serious ties to Al Qaeda. The precise word you use to describe these folks can’t possibly be that important, can it?

And an aside….

Critics have focused heavily on the fact that the Obama administration blamed the “Innocence of Muslims” video for the violence that had erupted around the Middle East and then, indirectly, provoked the attacks in Benghazi. But I think everyone needs a trip down memory lane here. That video was a very, very big deal at the time. Maybe everyone has now forgotten this, but it did spark riots all over the region and it was the subject of nearly constant coverage in the local media both before and after the Benghazi attacks. The notion that it was responsible for regional violence at the time and at least partially responsible for what happened in Benghazi was hardly some bizarre flight of fancy.

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Chris Wallace Demands Answers to Yet More Benghazi Questions That Have Already Been Answered Dozens of Times

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Hillary Clinton Takes on the Benghazi Crackpots

Mother Jones

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Politico has “obtained” the Benghazi chapter from Hillary Clinton’s upcoming memoir, and their writeup includes this:

Clinton addresses lingering questions about how military assets were deployed to try to rescue personnel at the besieged compound, writing that Obama “gave the order to do whatever was necessary to support our people in Libya. It was imperative that all possible resources be mobilized immediately….When Americans are under fire, that is not an order the Commander in Chief has to give twice. Our military does everything humanly possible to save American lives — and would do more if they could. That anyone has ever suggested otherwise is something I will never understand.”

Me, me! Call on me! I understand. Allow me to blogsplain it to you….

Seriously, though, this is pretty much the right attitude for Clinton to take. Of all the nonsense that’s been spewed about Benghazi, the never-ending series of “stand down” conspiracy theories has undoubtedly been the stupidest. Every time one got swatted down, another one popped up to take its place. It was a fast-response team from Italy. No wait. It was a team Gen. Carter Ham was going to send in until Obama ordered him not to. It was a garrison in Tripoli. It was a C-110 team in Croatia. It was a different team from Tripoli. By the time all these theories had been aired, it was apparent that half the United States military was thought to be within striking distance of Libya on the night of the Benghazi attacks.

And as little sense as most of the Benghazi conspiracy theories make, this one made even less. There’s simply no reason that any president of the United States would get in the way of a rescue mission in a situation like Benghazi. But none of that ever mattered. To this day, there are millions of Fox News watchers who are convinced that the deaths in Benghazi could have been prevented but President Obama refused to allow it. Why? Well, if he’s secretly bent on undermining the strength and influence of the United States, it all starts to make sense, doesn’t it? And I wonder where anyone could have gotten that idea?

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Hillary Clinton Takes on the Benghazi Crackpots

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