Rep. Trey Gowdy with select Benghazi committee that will never go away.
The Republican-led House Intelligence Committee had a news dump Friday afternoon, releasing a long-awaited report on Benghazi that confirms
the administration's statements about the attacks. The issue that Republicans have been trying to blow up to the thing that brings Hillary Clinton down in 2016 has, well, been blown up. By Republicans.
Similar to five other government reports, the one released by the House Intelligence Committee on Friday said that the administration had not intentionally misled the public about what occurred during the attacks in talking points it created for officials to use in television appearances that turned out to be inaccurate.
It also said that no order was given by the military to "stand down" in responding to try to save the four Americans killed in the attacks, a claim that Republicans have made based on the account of a member of the security team in Benghazi that day.
Coming six months after Speaker John A. Boehner created a separate special committee to investigate the Benghazi attacks, the report raised questions about what that panel might uncover that the Intelligence Committee—whose chairman, Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, is leaving Congress—and the other investigations missed.
Does this mean they're finally going to let it go? Of course not! Because the Benghazi committee to (maybe) end all Benghazi committees is still at work. That would be the $3.3 million special committee created by Boehner and headed by Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC). Gowdy says, in essence, thanks but no thanks to Intelligence Chairman Hal Rogers. "It will aid the select committee's comprehensive investigation to determine the full facts of what happened in Benghazi, Libya, before, during and after the attack and contribute toward our final, definitive accounting of the attack on behalf of Congress," he said in a statement after the report was released.
In other words, yeah, we're still going to keep spending money on this because that's what we do. There's no other way they can keep talking about Benghazi and keep the conspiracy theory going through 2016. That's what matters the most.
