Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appeared this week before the House Select Committee to Drive Down Her Poll Numbers. It did not go well for the committee, and I suspect their little show will drive Clinton’s numbers in the opposite direction.
Going into the hearing, Chairman Trey Gowdy and others had promised important revelations as a result of their 18-month investigation, the eighth major investigation into the Benghazi attacks that killed four Americans in 2012. They created high expectations, especially among conservatives, that they had damning information that would undermine Clinton’s candidacy and substantially alter our understanding of Benghazi.
Well, not so much. As even Gowdy was forced to concede later, very little new information emerged, and nothing that altered the already well-established narrative. After an interrogation that began at 10 a.m. and lasted well into the night, it became clear that once again, Republican leaders had overpromised and dramatically underdelivered.
Of course, most of the previous seven Benghazi investigations had also been led by Republicans, and every one of those investigations had concluded that the Obama administration aggressively pursued every possible military option to help our people in Benghazi, but none was available in the short time frame involved. They also concluded that more could have been done beforehand to improve security at the facility, and that better intelligence might have allowed us to prevent the attacks in the first place. Those recommendations and shortcomings have been acted upon, and none is controversial at this point.
So without new revelations to exploit, committee members ventured down some pretty bizarre byways and pathways. For example, U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia and others focused at length on exchanges between Clinton and her longtime associate Sid Blumenthal, conducted via Clinton’s private email account. None of those emails had a thing to do with Benghazi, but that didn’t appear to matter.
They also spent a lot of time on a very odd line of questioning: Why did Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton friend, have direct access to her private email while our slain ambassador, Chris Stevens, did not? Shouldn’t Stevens have also been able to contact Clinton directly, through her private email, to discuss issues such as the security of our facility at Benghazi?
Well no. He should not. He absolutely should not.
If a U.S. ambassador had communicated highly sensitive information about the security of U.S. diplomatic facilities to the U.S. secretary of state through an unsecured private email, as Westmoreland seemed to advocate, that would indeed be the scandal that he and others so desperately want to uncover.
Here’s the bottom line:
Four Americans died in Benghazi. More than 3,000 Americans died on Sept. 11. But the norms of basic decency and patriotism that appropriately prevented Sept. 11 from becoming a partisan issue have been ignored by GOP leadership regarding Benghazi. They have taken a tragedy in which Americans were attacked overseas by our enemies and they have used it in a protracted, cynical effort to divide us here at home.
If there’s a scandal here, that’s it.
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