National Review Online
Saturday, October 10, 2015
When the dust kicked up in the House-speakership race has
settled, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s artless comment about the House
Select Committee on Benghazi promises to cause further headaches for
Republicans. This week, House Democrats proposed a measure to abolish the
committee; and although it was tabled in a partisan vote, they are sure to
continue exploiting McCarthy’s misstep in order to derail the investigation.
That would be a victory for partisan bullying — and a defeat for the
nonpartisan cause of government accountability.
It is worth recalling the facts: On September 11, 2012,
the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked by al-Qaeda-linked
Islamic jihadists. They easily overran the inadequately secured diplomatic
compound and murdered four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, the
first U.S. ambassador killed in the line of duty since 1979. The first response
of the Obama administration was to blame — despite overwhelming evidence to the
contrary — an anti-Islam video, the maker of which, an Egyptian Copt living in
California, was suddenly arrested for violating his parole. The House Select
Committee on Benghazi was formed in May 2014 “to conduct a full and complete
investigation” into the policies, decisions, and activities that contributed to
and followed the attack.
To date, relevant questions about those activities remain
unanswered. Why, in the months preceding the attacks, while other nations were
rapidly withdrawing diplomatic personnel, were U.S. officials left in Benghazi?
Why were multiple requests for increased security rejected by the State
Department? On the evening of the attacks, why were available regional military
forces not deployed? Who at the White House ordered the Sunday-show talking
points of United Nations ambassador Susan Rice to be altered? Why was Cheryl
Mills, Hillary Clinton’s top aide at Foggy Bottom, permitted to alter the State
Department’s ostensibly independent accountability-review-board report on
Benghazi?
That last fact was uncovered by the Select Committee just
last month and is one of several reasons to reject Democrats’ claims that the
Select Committee is merely retreading territory covered by several previous
congressional investigations. In fact, the committee has examined thousands of
original documents and interviewed dozens of new witnesses, and with good
reason: Largely from the aggressive work of government watchdog Judicial Watch,
it is now known that the Clinton State Department withheld thousands of
documents from investigators, among them hundreds of classified messages, many
of them Benghazi-related. According to a letter from committee chairman Trey
Gowdy (R., S.C.) to ranking member Elijah Cummings (D., Md.), the committee is
preparing to release hundreds of e-mails showing that longtime Clinton
confidante Sidney Blumenthal was pushing U.S. intervention in Libya to forward
his own private business interests, and that he supplied Clinton with the name
of a CIA source — classified information
for sure — which she then forwarded to an underling. For a former official who
has spent the last three years withholding this sort of sensitive information
from investigators to then claim that those investigations showed no wrongdoing
is rich, even for a Clinton.
The political ramifications — chief among them that
Hillary Clinton is reflexively associated with words such as “untrustworthy”
and “dishonest” — are a side effect of, not a justification for, the Select
Committee. Clinton has not even appeared before the committee, and committee
chairman Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.) has been clear that his authority is limited.
When Republicans called on him to seize Clinton’s illicit private server, he
noted that it was outside his authority to do so.
That does not mean that Gowdy’s investigation has been
ideal. As a former prosecutor, Gowdy knows how to conduct an inquiry. But his
prosecutorial inclination to operate behind closed doors has fueled rumors of
partisan targeting. At issue are public wrongs; they ought to be investigated
publicly. Some private hearings will be necessary, but Gowdy should opt to hold
as many hearings as possible in public. It will aid transparency, and undermine
Democrats’ accusations to the contrary. Hillary Clinton’s deposition, scheduled
for October 22 and open to the public, is a good start.
The Obama administration, with the help of congressional
allies, has managed to avoid taking responsibility for an astonishing panoply
of failures, from the incompetence of its Department of Veteran Affairs to its
Fast and Furious debacle to the brazen lawlessness of its IRS. Redoubled
accusations of partisanship should not stop Republicans from working to hold
accountable any government officials who failed to do their duty to our men in
Libya.
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