After former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli told a CNN panel that the Benghazi committee was important because “Americans have real questions,” Brazile interrupted.
“Let me stop you,” she said. “Because we’ve had eight investigative hearings. The State Department has spent $14 million responding to congressional requests. We know the defense department has spent an insurmountable amount of man and women hours. If Mr. [Trey] Gowdy and his Select Committee was interested in getting to the truth, they would have brought witnesses throughout the year to talk to intelligence, to talk to defense, to talk to the State Department.”
“This has been a partisan witch hunt,” Brazile continued. “What are they investigating now? Where are the public hearings? $4.6 million of taxpayers’ money.”
Keep reading for video and commentary.
Brazille did a good job of knocking down most of the GOP talking points spouted by Cuccinelli and John Hagye, but she didn't cover everything.
In addition to Brazille's points showing that the Select Committee is redundant and has done little more than waste time and money trying to bring down Hillary Clinton there's also this.
1) Kevin McCarthy bragging about the Select Committee bringing down Clinton's Poll Numbers.
“Let me give you one example,” McCarthy said, citing his conservative credentials during an appearance on Fox News with Sean Hannity Tuesday night. “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? 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’ve known any of that had happened had we not fought and made that happen.”
2) McCarthy's statement is backed by the claims of former committee investigator Air Force (Reserve) Officer Major Bradley Podliska that he was fired because
he resisted focusing exclusively on Hillary Clinton in their investigation and actually wanted to get to the truth.
“I knew that we needed to get to the truth to the victims’ families. And the victims’ families, they deserve the truth — whether or not Hillary Clinton was involved, whether or not other individuals were involved,” he told CNN. “The victims’ families are not going to get the truth and that’s the most unfortunate thing about this.”
...
Podliska was fired after 10 months as an investigator for the committee. He claims it was because he resisted pressure to exclusively probe Clinton and the State Department’s role in the attack. He also alleges he was fired in part for taking time away to fulfill his duties with the Air Force, which would be an illegal cause for termination, CNN reports.
3) Cuccinelli claims we still don't know what resources were available to aid the Benghazi annex, and that should be largely proof of Brazille's point because the fact is that a drone, two different CIA Tactical Teams and at least four Special Forces Teams were deployed
within those first critical 13 hours.
The attack began at about 9:40 p.m. local time in Benghazi. Less than 20 minutes later, the U.S. military began moving an unarmed drone to a position over Benghazi, so it could provide real time intelligence to the CIA team on the ground. The CIA team went to aid the Americans at the consulate. The drone arrived shortly after 11 p.m. By 11:30 p.m., a CIA team was able to get all the Americans out of the compound.
At this point Ambassador Stevens and Information Manager Sean Smith were already dead, their bodies along with survivors were taken back by the CIA team that included Tyrone Woods to the Annex a mile away.
At the same time a second CIA security team that included Glen Doherty which had been located at the Embassy in Tripoli commandeered a plane for the 600 mile trip to Benghazi, they arrived at the annex to support the first team at 5:00 am. But Panetta and the Pentagon were already moving additional resources into place.
Between midnight and 2 a.m., Panetta began to issue verbal orders, telling two Marine anti-terrorism teams based in Rota, Spain, to prepare to deploy to Libya, and he ordered a team of special operations forces in Central Europe and another team of special operations forces in the U.S. to prepare to deploy to a staging base in Europe.
...
As the military units begin moving, just before dawn, the Americans in Benghazi, who were now at the CIA base less than a mile away from the consulate, again came under attack around 5:15 a.m. when five mortars were fired at the building. Two missed, but three hit, killing two CIA security officers who were on the roof.
Those two officers, Doherty and Woods
wouldn't have even been there if there had been "no resources deployed" to aid the Benghazi compound. Following the mortar attack both teams and survivors were evacuated back to the seconds team's plane and flew back to Tripoli.
4) Doug Heye's claim that the FBI is conducting a "criminal investigation" into Hillary Clinton's server is completely false as Brazille points out, but an even more serious issue on that point is the fact that the DOJ has declared that there were no improprieties in Clinton's use of such a server, and nothing wrong with her decision to delete personal emails after turning over her work emails to the State Department.
"There is no question that Secretary Clinton had authority to delete personal emails without agency supervision - she appropriately could have done so even if she were working on a government server," Department of Justice lawyers told a judge.
U.S. Justice Department lawyers told a federal court Wednesday that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a private email account was not against the law, nor was it illegal for her to unilaterally determine which messages were considered work-related and necessary to return to the State Department for record keeping.
This shouldn't be surprising because apparently Secretary of State Colin Powell also used a private email account and eventually deleted
all his emails not just those that were personal.
“He was not aware of any restrictions nor does he recall being made aware of any over the four years he served at State,” the statement says. “He sent emails to his staff generally via their State Department email addresses. These emails should be on the State Department computers. He might have occasionally used personal email addresses, as he did when emailing to family and friends.”
The statement continues: “He did not take any hard copies of emails with him when he left office and has no record of the emails. They were all unclassified and mostly of a housekeeping nature. He came into office encouraging the use of emails as a way of getting the staff to embrace the new 21st information world.”
And...
“I don’t have any to turn over. I did not keep a cache of them. I did not print them off. I do not have thousands of pages somewhere in my personal files,” Powell said on ABC’s “This Week.” “A lot of the emails that came out of my personal account went into the State Department system. They were addressed to State Department employees and state.gov domain, but I don’t know if the servers in the State Department captured those or not.”
All of this simply bolster Brazille's argument that the Select Committee's focus and goals are all about defeating Hillary Clinton, not about getting out what really did happen in the Benghazi attack or else even many of these facts, many of which can be found
on wikipedia, would be far more common knowledge.
The committee has been supposedly trying to scour Clinton's emails to find some information that contradicts her previous testimony or indicates she or the president influenced Ambassador Rice's connection of the attack to an Anti-Islam video even though Rice never actually made that connection, and what she did say was based on what the intelligence community had, as a group, approved for unclassified dissemination at that time. The fact that better information became available later, is not her or Hillary Clinton's fault. We still to this very day don't exactly know who was involved in the attack and why as no terrorist organization ever took credit for it.
It's been almost 3 years and Congress has spent more time investigating Clinton and what was said on TV and in emails after this tragic attack where 4 Americans died than they did examining how Colin Powell ended up in front of the U.N. claiming that Iraq had Anthrax viles, mobile labs, yellowcake uranium and aluminum tubes for centerfuges that were in fact a total fantasy that ultimately led to the death of 4,000 U.S. service men. Somehow I think priorities are distinctively out of whack here.