Tuesday, the House Select Committee on Benghazi released an 800 page final report on their probe into the 2012 attacks that left four Americans dead including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens.
So what did an 800 page report on top of two years of investigation and 16,000 pages of transcripts reveal?
In short, nothing new.
That’s right, an investigation that cost roughly $7 million dollars and more intensive than the assassination of president John F. Kennedy, 9/11 Terror Attacks, Hurricane Katrina and the attacks on Pearl Harbor that jettison the United States into World War II yielded essentially nothing.
But the report had to tell us something right?
Sure it did. It told us there was no new culpability or evidence of any wrongdoing on the part of then Secretary of State and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton:
Here’s Gawker with more:
“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 wrote. “The fact that this is true does not mitigate the question of why the world’s most powerful military was not positioned to respond.”
“What was disturbing from the evidence the Committee found was that at the time of the final lethal attack,” they added, “no asset ordered deployed by the Secretary had even left the ground.
House Republicans added, inadvertently at times, to the general sense that the committee was focusing too intently on Mrs. Clinton, even though she was never suspected of directly mishandling the Benghazi situation. Democrats seized on comments by the House majority leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, who boasted on Fox News in September that the committee’s work had put a dent in Mrs. Clinton’s poll numbers.
“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” Mr. McCarthy said. “But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought.”
Those comments helped derail Mr. McCarthy’s bid to succeed Speaker John A. Boehner. Mr. Gowdy has long disavowed the remarks, saying the discovery of the private email server was highly unexpected and not a focus of his continuing work.
It’s unfortunate and sad that four American’s had to lose their lives however what’s becoming more disturbing are their deaths turning into political talking points and agenda items. What’s also sad are the efforts put into something like this, when majority Republicans shrug their shoulders, offer thoughts and prayers and hide behind the second amendment when 19 children are fatally shot at their school or 49 night club goers are killed because of people possessing guns who shouldn’t.
But hey… priorities right?