Hillary’s Faux Benghazi Anger

It looks like Hillary’s email scandal is finally getting the best of her and her campaign.  While she has tried to laugh the matter off in the past, it seems as though Hillary’s email situation has become serious enough that her advisors have recommended she shift course and play the Four Dead Americans anger card in an effort to save her run for the White House.

Taking advantage of the gaffe House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy made last week, Hillary supporters and her campaign staff have moved the discussion as far away from the email scandal that surrounds the former Secretary of State as possible.  Instead of the email scandal, they have turned the focus to Benghazi, a topic of which they have vehemently avoided, for the past three years.  The poorly worded comment, made by Representative McCarthy, created an opportunity for Democrats and they pounced on it.  McCarthy’s comment, which was intended to stress the point that it was the result of, not the reason for, the investigative work of the Select Committee on Benghazi that Hillary’s email indiscretions have surfaced.

Democrats assuredly are aware that how McCarthy’s comment came out was little more than a wording gaffe but in a desperate effort to save their golden girl from a second loss at a run for the presidency, they have twisted the gaffe into what they are pushing in the media as an admission of guilt.  Democrats claim that McCarthy’s statement makes it clear that the sole purpose of Select Committee was to dethrone Queen Hillary.  There is one problem with this accusation however, it does not fit the most fundamental interpretation of facts.

Unless Democrats wish to go on record and claim that the Benghazi tragedy was some kind of sick and twisted Republican conspiracy crafted for the sole purpose of taking down Hillary, the attack can be attributed to nothing more than a failure of US foreign policy.  Stemming from the attack however, was a single event that raised a simple question by those whose task it is to conduct oversight on all such incidents.  A press brief, released by Secretary Clinton, which blamed the attack on an internet video set the wheels in motion which eventually led to the unexpected discovery of a private Clinton email address and server.

The attack on US assets in Benghazi could not have come at a worst time politically for President Obama, whose foreign policy was coming under heavy attack by Republicans and specifically Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney.  And so, it is fair to speculate that when no viable explanation could be provided as to why Secretary Clinton blamed that attack on an internet video, an account that contradicted reports coming directly from the ground, the claim could be viewed as being politically motivated. 

Speculation of political motivation only increased after Hillary Clinton’s surrogate, U.N. Ambassador for the United States Susan Rice, was sent out the following Sunday to five times repeat a prepared set of talking points in an attempt to sell the narrative that the attack was spurred by a group of angry protestors said to be fueled by an internet video.  But now, several days after the incident, we knew a little more about the situation on the ground including the fact that just prior to the attack there were no protestors outside the US Consulate, as reported by Ambassador Stevens himself.


It’s Time To Put the Oversight Investigations Lie to Bed

Maybe the most misunderstood activity performed by the US Congress is congressional oversight.  There are a number of House and Senate committees and subcommittees, each with their own oversight responsibilities.  And as was the case with the Benghazi attack, several oversight committee responsibilities were involved therefor, by default, prompting a large number of targeted investigations.  It must be understood that each oversight committee has a well defined scope of responsibilities and while there may be some overlap in the investigative process, each committee reports only on its specific area of responsibility such as the intelligence community, the Department of Defense, the State Department etc.

In regards to Benghazi, three of the four completed congressional oversight investigations noted in their final report that while it was not in their purview to investigate the State Department, their investigation did require that they request documents from the State Department.  Each of these committees clearly stated in their final report that they received little or no cooperation from the State Department in fulfilling their requests.  A forth congressional oversight committee closed its investigation without conclusion, reporting that due to a complete lack of cooperation from the State Department, to turn over requested documents, became impossible to achieve its oversight goals.

So the narrative repeatedly put forth by Democrats that numerous oversight investigations have found no wrong doing is completely false.  Congressional Democrats, and senior members of the Obama Administration are willfully misleading the American people with their false narrative of the various investigations.  You can find a more detailed explanation to the purpose and findings of each of the Benghazi oversight investigations in my blog titled Congressional Oversight DoesNot Give State Department a Free Pass on Benghazi.


How Did This Become About Hillary?

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform was the fifth and most aggressive of all the investigative committees in trying to get to the who, what, why, where and when answers in a broader scope of the Benghazi attack.  It was this committee that came up against the greatest amount of stonewalling, pushback and obstruction, not just from the State Department but from committee Democrats as well.  Public hearings were a sham and the State Department absolutely refused to comply with countless document requests.  It was clear that there was no way that requested information was ever going to be obtained from the State Department using the very limited number of tools available to the oversight committee.  The State Department was simply going to stonewall the committee into submission and the Department of Justice and Executive Branch were not going to intervene.

But that all changed in May of 2014, when the House of Representatives approved the formation of the Select Committee on Benghazi.  The reason for this new committee was to untie the hands of those investigating the events surrounding the Benghazi attack. The Select committee has significantly more investigative tools at its disposal and far fewer restrictions than congressional oversight.  It was through the use of these enhanced capabilities that the Select Committee hoped it could break the investigative stalemate between the State Department and the investigative body, and it worked!

For the first time the State Department was made to answer as to why they were not cooperating with document request and as the investigation pressed on, more was learned about how obstructive the State Department had been and continues to be.  It was not without the help of watchdog groups, such as Judicial Watch, that progress was finally being made in obtaining massive amounts of missing documents pertaining to Benghazi, documents which had repeatedly been requested over the prior two years.  And as a result of the persistence of the Select Committee, and the added legal pressure created by these watch dog groups that the Clinton email scandal surfaced.  The State Department was ultimately forced to release long awaited documents which lead to the Clinton private email account and email server discovery.  Now it was clear as to why the State Department had been withholding the release of documents pertaining to Benghazi.


So What’s With the Faux Anger Hillary?

A full two years after the Benghazi attack and a year and a half after Hillary Clinton left the State Department was it first learned by the Select Committee that the former Secretary held full possession of her email record as Secretary of State.  And shortly after this discovery it was learned the she housed those personal emails on a private home brewed server.  Since these discoveries, Hillary Clinton has been under constant scrutiny as her email scandal grows larger almost daily. 

Clearly the discovery of Hillary Clinton’s private email and server was not the result of a partisan witch hunt intended to take the former Secretary down as Democrats are wanting us all to believe.  The focus of the Select Committee has been to obtain the facts and answer the long pending list of unanswered questions, the objective has never changed.  And the Select Committee has made major headway in doing so, having recovered some 50,000 formerly unreleased documents pertaining to Benghazi, only a fraction of which have any ties to Hillary Clinton.  As well, the Chairman just advised that his committee has interviewed more than 40 new witnesses all of which had never before been interviewed by any of the past Benghazi committees.

Despite Democratic claims to the contrary, the Select Committee, nor any of the other oversight committees related to Benghazi for that matter, was formulated to target and destroy Hillary’s political aspirations.  Hillary Clinton’s name is rarely even mentioned by the likes of Trey Gowdy, other than when Hillary or Democrats running cover for her happen to bring her name up.  

Hillary is in trouble at her on accord.  She can direct her anger at anyone or anything she wishes but at the end of the day it has been her actions and her actions alone which have put her in the situation she is in, a situation that is not only killing her political aspiration of being the first woman to serve as President of the United State but also may help her find her way in front of a Federal Judge or worse.

And to think, this all stemmed from a single lie Hillary told about an internet video!

Putting the Benghazi Investigations in to Perspective

Since the September 11^th, 2012 attack on the US Consulate and CIA Annex in Benghazi Libya transpired, there have been five congressional oversight investigations and one internal review conducted by the State Department, each related to the tragic incident which took the lives of four brave Americans and left many others wounded.

Politically, the eight hour attack could not have come at a worse time for President Obama as he and Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney were in the midst of a heated run for the White House.  A major component of the Obama campaign was the liberation of Libya after he {President Obama} authorized the successful killing of Osama bin Laden.  The Obama campaign and the president himself came under heavy attack by Team Romney who argued vehemently that Libya was anything but stable and liberated and the foreign policy put forth by the Obama administration in this region was failing.  Mitt Romney could not have been more correct!

As photos and information began to trickle in to the news media, the White House response to the Benghazi attack was limited to say the least.  In his now infamous Rose Garden Speech, President Obama spoke for over five minutes however, his carefully crafted speech spoke very little of the attack itself, was unforceful in the manner to which it denounced the attack and was void of ever calling the tragedy that just took place a “Terrorist Attack”, a failure which enraged millions upon millions of Americans and raised both the eyebrows and curiosity of the political community.  The soft footedness of his words and failure by President Obama to address what happened that evening as a Terrorist Attack made absolutely no sense and set the wheels in motion of those who demanded a better explanation.

It did not appear odd at the time but once we learned that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton remained inside the private walls of her office and residence at the State Department, just as the president did at the White House, neither of them ever joining their teams inside the situation room during the ordeal, to see Hillary standing quietly next to the president during the Rose Garden speech now seems out of place and even staged to give the appearance that they had been together throughout the ordeal.

The Rose Garden speech video

The Investigations

Over the course of the past two years, four of the five congressional investigations that were set in motion have been concluded and their findings released, along with the State Departments Accountability Review Board (ARB) Report on Benghazi.  The fifth congressional investigation remains open but may likely yield to the Special Investigation now being conducted by the Select Committee on Benghazi headed up by Rep. Trey Gowdy.

So what have the investigations concluded?  Let’s take a look!


No. 1 - The Accountability Review Board on Benghazi

Up until recently the most widely publicized of the investigation was not one of congressional oversight but one conducted by the State Department.  The Accountability Review Board on Benghazi (ARB) was an internal review set in motion by Secretary Clinton most likely at the direction of the White House.  The ARB was in no way an investigation into the attack on Benghazi, it was never intended to be.  The objectives of the ARB, as specified by Secretary Clinton, were to audit State Department’s internal procedures and practices, as they pertained to Benghazi, to identify any shortcomings and make recommendations where improvements were needed.  The review revealed many failures in the handling of security matters surrounding Benghazi, from within the State Department, and most have since been corrected. 

The ARB was successful in its intended mission which was in no way to look into why the internet video was blamed for the attack, who floated the idea and why the president was not in the situation room managing the crises.  The investigation to those questions was outside the jurisdiction of the State Department. 

Democrats and the left leaning media were quick to make point that the finding the ARB, while quite critical of the State Department, revealed no wrong doings from within the White House, conveniently ignoring the fact that the ARB was merely an audit of the State Department and had no authority or jurisdiction to investigate the White House.     The White House was just as guilty in portraying the ARB as something it is not as it was politically advantageous for them to do so even though it is misleading and deceptive.


No. 2 - Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Investigation

The only Benghazi oversight conducted at the Senate level was by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.  Chaired by Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and vice chaired by Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), the committee was tasked to scrutinize the Intelligence Community’s roll in the events leading up to, during and after the attack on Benghazi.  It was NOT the intent of this investigation to ferret out who floated an internet video as being the cause of the attack or who and why it was floated.

The investigation and subsequent report have been deemed to be fair and impartial and in summary states that the attacks were PREVENTABLE based on the known security shortfalls.  The report also indicates that analysts inaccurately referred to protests without sufficient intelligence or eyewitness statements, causing confusion for policymakers.  It must be noted that while the report summary did state that the intelligence community inaccurately referred to the attack as a protest, this portrayal came long after the attack had concluded and Secretary Clinton had released her news brief stating that the attack was due to an internet video.

Like the ARB, this senate investigation does not try to answer the questions as to why the internet video was blamed for the attack, who floated the idea and why the president was not in the situation room managing the crises.

No. 3 - House Armed Service Subcommittee Investigation

The House Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation investigated the DoD response to Benghazi.  In its February 2014 report the committee concluded that the White House failed to comprehend or ignored all together the rapidly failing security issues faced at the US Consulate and that personnel had known, almost from the onset, that Benghazi was a terrorist attack.  Like the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence investigation, which focused only the intelligence community’s role in Benghazi, this investigation looked only at the DoD’s role and in no way was seeking out the answers as to why the internet video was blamed for the attack, who floated the idea and why the president was not in the situation room managing the crises.


No. 4 - House Committee on Foreign Affairs Investigation

The House Committee on Foreign Affairs investigation was less targeted on the events surrounding the Benghazi attack and focused more on State Department accountability.  Their investigation failed to obtain answers to the questions as to why the internet video was blamed for the attack, who floated the idea and why the president was not in the situation room managing the crises.  The committee reported that documents were difficult to obtain from the White House often sidelining the investigation.

However, over time, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs investigation was eventually completed and resulted in a less than flattering report on the lack of accountability from within the State Department.  The Executive Summary of their report draws out all the key issues that were discovered during the investigation.

View the Report

No. 5 - House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Investigation

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence focused largely on putting the “Talking Points” chain of events together.  The committee held over 18 mostly closed session hearings, due to the secure nature of the witnesses and testimony, but has been open with their overall frustration to get a clear and concise answer from anyone.  Stemming from this frustration, the last hearing to have taken place once again put Mike Morell, CIA Director at the time of the Benghazi attack, front and center in an open hearing.

What the general public was finally able to hear was that despite over one dozen indicators that the Benghazi event was a terrorist attack, the CIA still made it their opinion that the source of the attack was based on an internet video.  Morell’s testimony was clear that the information that they used to draw this conclusion did not follow that of what was reported by direct witnesses on the ground but instead followed the narrative of what was happening in other parts of the world.  More damaging to the video narrative pressed by the White House came when it was disclosed in the open hearing that the day before Susan Rice went on her Sunday Morning Show sweep, Morell told senior members within the Obama Administration that the chief of station in Benghazi reported that there was NO PROTEST!

The House Permanent Select Committee has recently concluded its investigation and subsequent report.   The findings of the investigation are well explained in the executive summary of the report which makes clear that the committee found no fault in the actions of the intelligence community to which the investigation was focuses.  While it was not this committees charter to investigate the actions of the State Department, in the execution of its investigation it did in fact find a number of shortcoming from within the State Department which are also stated in the Executive Summary of their report. 

Here is the report!  

No. 6 - House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Investigation

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has been the most diligent in seeking out the truth behind the numerous inconsistencies in documents and testimony that has been provided in regards to the events surrounding Benghazi and advancing its investigation closer to revealing the truth to the American people.  As a result, push back on this particular oversight body has been immense.  Democrats on the committee have been non-cooperative throughout the process and as the investigation edges closer to the truth the push-back intensifies.

Contrary to the claims of many leading democrats, the committee has no more reached a dead end than it has received answers to all of its questions.  The committee continues to push for documents that the State Department has refused to turn over and has issued a number of subpoenas for both documents and persons to testify as more and more evidence continues to point to a cover up at the highest levels of the White House.

With the new congress taking over in January, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R) will be taking up the Chairman duties from Darrell Issa.  While the committee’s investigation on Benghazi is still on going, Chaffetz has already stated that, due to the circumstances that prompted the formation a Select Committee on Benghazi being headed up by Trey Gowdy, his committee will stand down on the investigation.  It was through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, made by Judicial Watch  back in April, that emails were obtained directly linking the White House to the shaping of the talking points that Susan Rice used to mislead the nation as to the cause of the attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi.  In her rounds on the Sunday talk shows, Rice concluded that the attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi was the result of an internet video. 

The new special committee has much greater jurisdiction and tools at its disposal that will prevent it from getting caught up in the procedural pitfalls of partisan congressional oversight.  


What Can Be Concluded from these Investigations?

If you believe the majority of the main stream media sources and the liberal social network hacks, these investigations have concluded, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there were no wrong doings by anyone in the events surrounding the handling of the Benghazi attack, both during and afterwards.  But we have learned to expect no less from those who have bent over backwards to protect the Obama Administration and their political brand, even if it means ignoring, misleading and sometime even lying about the facts!

To those who are familiar with the role of the various oversight committees, in reading through the various reports, they have found that each committee targeted the very specific subject matter that falls within their jurisdiction of oversight.  For example, the most recent report released by the Republican led House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence focuses almost exclusively on the role the intelligence community played before, during and after the attack on Benghazi.  The oversight committee found no wrong doings in the direct actions of the intelligence community and draws no other conclusions as to wrong doings or failures from others outside the their area of jurisdiction.

Regardless of the intended purpose of each of the oversight committees, the liberal media has made an art form out of picking a particular aspect of these reports, such as the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence vindicating the intelligence community of any wrong doings, and transforming that aspect into a full pardon of all those involve.

There is however a common thread in the findings of all the completed reports, that being that there was a number of systemic failures that originated in the State Department.  Be it a documented fact, such as failing to meet security requests, the State Departments willingness to providing misleading statements or worst of all, the obstruction of the investigations by failing to turn over requested documents, all fingers point to something amiss inside then Hillary Clinton’s State Department.

Where Do Things Go From Here?

There is without a doubt a cover-up that has been taken place pertaining to the events surrounding Benghazi, from within the Obama Administration, or else Trey Gowdy would not have accepted the appointment to be the Chairman of the Select Committee. 

Gowdy is taking a lawyer’s approach to the investigation, unlike Darrell Issa who seemed to be chasing each single piece of evidence, as they came to him, in hopes that it was the smoking gun that would blow the lid off of the cover-up.  Gowdy also has more tools at his disposal as well and is not constrained by certain procedural rules of congressional oversight that make it easy for obstruction to take place by those trying to create a smoke screen.

There will be a firm conclusion reached at the end of the Select Committee’s investigation which will reveal the full cover-up being perpetrated by the White House or the end of investigation will bring forth a laundry list of troubling questions created by a verifiable trail of evidence but left unanswered due to the administrations continued failure to cooperate in the investigation.  If the latter is the case then it will be up to the public to decide what they wish to see happen to the administration but either way, the conclusion will not bode well for the Obama Administration.

It’s hard to say how much push back Gowdy is receiving from the administration at this point as he is not making a public spectacle of the Select Committee’s work, and for good reason.  There will be push back but to what degree really depends on who can be hurt the most by the truth behind the cover-up being revealed.

For President Obama, as each day passes the lid getting blown off of the story matters less and less.  If it was in fact learned that Obama had direct involvement in the cover-up there will most certainly be Articles of Impeachment bestowed upon him but he does not have enough time remaining in office for the hearings and verdict to reach conclusion so it matters little.  The White House, with great help from the liberal media, has bought the president enough time.

Hillary Clinton is likely more concerned by what the Select Committee might uncover.  The investigation may in fact be the reason Hillary has not yet thrown her name in the hat for 2016.

But who has the most to lose by the findings of the Select Committee on Benghazi is the entire Democratic Party who has been all in on defending their social experiment from the day he was elected into office.  If the facts lead to the door of the Oval Office, it will be a major blow to the Democrats and will likely lead to the uncovering of the truth behind a number of other scandals surrounding the administration of which Democrats have just as much invested in. 

More important, if it is in fact learned that the White House covered-up the actions of the Commander in Chief during the Benghazi attack to protect the president from his own failed foreign policy in Libya, the deaths of four brave Americans will look to be a sacrifice for political gain to hold the presidency in 2012.  This is why learning the truth is so important and sadly as likely the reason there has been such an enormous amount of push back from the White House to suppress the truth!