Remember when Republican Kevin McCarthy admitted that the purpose of the Benghazi hearings was simply to hurt Hillary’s popularity? Remember when Hillary faced off with the Republican-led committee in a marathon session where they were unable to make a single one of their lies and conspiracy theories stick?
You might—but Republicans don’t. Republican presidential candidates, and all too many Republican legislators, continue to act as if the multiple hearings on the events in Benghazi never took place.
With Trump and Cruz both making Benghazi myths part of their standard stump speech, and the Republican Desperate Attack on Hillary Select Committee on Benghazi on a seemingly endless loop, even the Pentagon has had enough. Rather than continue to line up and answer the same questions for the millionth time, they provided a very special reply to the latest request from the committee.
The three-page letter, which is available in its entirety online (pdf), is from Assistant Secretary of Defense Stephen C. Hedger, and was sent to Benghazi Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) yesterday. In it, Hedger goes into quite a bit of detail noting the extent to which the Pentagon has already cooperated with the panel’s request for materials and information, but the letter also suggests Gowdy and his Republican colleagues are … what’s the phrase I’m looking for … pushing their luck.
So, 725 days and counting. That’s how long this taxpayer-funded, partisan witch hunt has continued without delivering results—except to show that the testimony received by the seven previous congressional inquiries was true.
To give you a sense of just how little sense is going into the requests from Howdy Gowdy, here’s a typical request.
The Committee has requested to interview an individual identified as "John from Iowa" who described himself as a Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) camera operator on a talk radio show, where he described what he allegedly saw in the video feed from the night of the attack. The Department has expended significant resources to locate anyone who might match the description of this person, to no avail. The Committee staff then expanded this initial request to include all RPA pilots and RPA sensor operators who operated in the region that night. This expansion has resulted in a time-intensive search that required DOD to locate another half-dozen current and former service members. We continue to believe interviewing these individuals is unnecessary since we have given the Committee access to the relevant RPA video from that night and it remains unclear what additional information could be gained from these interviews, especially the pilots.
They might want to check on the whereabouts of I. C. Wiener that night.
Benghazi hearings have now gone on far longer than those investigating 9/11 because … actually, Republicans have already told us why.
