“The Big Benghazi Dance”: In The End, Both Democrats And Republicans Are Going To Get Exactly What They Want
Nancy Pelosi has now announced the five Democratic members of Congress who will serve on the Republicans’ select committee to investigate Benghazi. They will be outnumbered by the committee’s seven Republicans, but at this point we can safely predict what’s going to happen with this committee.
To quote Macbeth, it will be a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
OK, so maybe the “idiot” part is too harsh — no one thinks that Rep. Trey Gowdy, who will be leading the committee, isn’t a smart guy. But it’s easy to see exactly how the big Benghazi dance will unfold, and how everyone will play their appointed parts.
That’s partly because of the nature of this matter, partly because of everything that has happened up until this point, and partly because of who’ll be on the committee. This description in the New York Times makes the contrast in who got chosen to represent each party:
The Democrats chosen were Mr. [Elijah] Cummings, who clashed repeatedly over Benghazi with the chairman of the Oversight Committee, Representative Darrell Issa of California; Adam Smith of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee; Adam B. Schiff of California, a member of the Intelligence Committee; Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, a decorated and severely wounded combat veteran of the Iraq war; and Linda T. Sánchez of California, the ranking Democrat on the Ethics Committee.
The Republican members, by contrast, largely lack foreign policy and military credentials, although with Mr. Gowdy and Representative Susan W. Brooks of Indiana, they have prosecutorial experience. They include Representative Peter Roskam of Illinois, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, Representative Mike Pompeo of Kansas, Representative Martha Roby of Alabama and Representative Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia.
Just by looking at the committee’s membership, you can see what the two parties are trying to achieve. John Boehner picked a combination of prosecutors, intense partisans, and hard-right blowhards, people who are there to pound the table, shake their fists, and raise their voices. Pelosi could have picked similar Democrats (there was a move to get Rep. Alan Grayson on to the committee), but instead she selected a group of serious members who come with some knowledge on the matters to be explored. Despite the fact that Democrats (even those on this committee) think this is all a waste of time, they’re taking a high road approach, hoping that they’ll look reasonable and sober while Republicans look wild-eyed and angry.
So here’s how this is going to go down:
1) The first day of hearings will get blanket coverage in the media. The members will each get a chance to make their opening statements, which will leave the walls of the hearing room quivering under the power of all the thunderous outrage the Republicans can muster.
2) At some point, Hillary Clinton will testify. The media will rub their hands together in anticipation of the confrontation, the smack-down, the Capitol Hill cage match! Republican members will preen for the cameras, and Clinton will, most likely, parry all their assaults. It’ll be good television, but no new information will be revealed.
3) After that, the media will quickly lose interest.
4)Republicans will then complain that the liberal media are covering up the scandal.
All that is predicated on the assumption that the committee is not actually going to discover damning new evidence of Obama administration malfeasance that will lead to resignations, criminal indictments, or even (be still the Republicans’ hearts) impeachment. I feel secure in assuming that, given how much Benghazi has been examined over the last year and a half. Keep in mind that there have already been investigations and hearings on Benghazi not only by Darrell Issa’s oversight committee, but also by House and Senate committees on foreign affairs, intelligence, armed services, and homeland security (not to mention lengthy investigations by the FBI and news organizations). Is it theoretically possible that there is some blockbuster revelation that none of these committees were able to uncover, but the select committee will? Sure. It’s also theoretically possible that there really are space aliens being held at Area 51.
In the end, both Democrats and Republicans are going to get exactly what they want out of this committee. Republicans will be able to show their base that they’re holding Barack Obama’s feet to the fire and giving Hillary Clinton the business. Democrats will be able to show their base that Republicans are crazy. Everybody wins.
By: Paul Waldman, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, May 22, 2014
“An Election-Year ‘Hustle The-Base’ Strategy”: Democrats Should Boycott Latest Benghazi Charade
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is trying to make the GOP’s latest Benghazi theater more than partisan drama by asking Speaker John Boehner to appoint an equal number of Democrats and Republicans to the new “investigative” panel he’s convening. The speaker is unlikely to do that, so Democrats should boycott this latest GOP fundraising stunt.
Five House committees have already investigated the Benghazi tragedy and issued biased reports; there have been two Senate committee reports plus the Accountability Review Board’s findings. The bipartisan reports found errors on the part of State Department personnel and recommended staffing and other changes. But because none of the investigations were able to charge then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with incompetence, or prove that President Obama tried to cover up the truth to get re-elected, Republicans won’t believe them, and insist there’s more to “investigate.”
Thus we have the latest House Benghazi stunt – and Democrats should stay away from it. There’s precedent for boycotting such a panel: Dems did so in 2005, when Republicans organized a sham “investigation” into how President Bush handled the Katrina catastrophe, when it became clear the effort was meant to be a whitewash, not a thorough probe.
I admit, Benghazi is to progressives what climate change is to conservatives: No matter how much the right wing shrieks about it, and purports to have new evidence of wrongdoing, we don’t believe it. The difference is, progressives are right. The notion that a newly uncovered email from national security communications staffer Ben Rhodes “necessitated” this latest investigation is another partisan cover story.
On one level, the new committee is actually a rebuke to histrionic House Oversight Committee chair Darrell Issa, whose many forays into the swamp of Benghazi conspiracy theories uncovered nothing to hurt Democrats, not even the Rhodes email. As ranking Democrat Elijah Cummings has pointed out, Issa denied Democratic members the most basic tools with which to participate in his committee’s sham investigation:
Over the past year, House Republicans have conducted their Benghazi investigation in a completely partisan manner by denying access to hearing witnesses, leaking cherry-picked excerpts to create a false narrative, issuing unilateral subpoenas without Committee votes, releasing multiple partisan staff reports, excluding Democratic Members from fact-finding delegations to Libya in violation of the Speaker’s own rules, and launching unsubstantiated accusations that turn out to be completely false. So I do not have much faith that a new select committee will be any different.
The new committee won’t have any more power than Issa’s did. And there’s no reason to believe chairman Trey Gowdy will be smarter or fairer than Issa (check out Simon Moloy’s profile here.) Gowdy is the Oversight Committee member who has set his hectoring of witnesses to action-movie music and posted it to You Tube. He is likely to out-Issa Darrell Issa.
There’s possible political risk in boycotting the Gowdy charade. “Some of these hearings are going to be televised,” political scientist Norman Ornstein told the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent. “The question is, does it make more sense to be in there, participating in the process and pointing out Republican overkill again and again, or does it make more sense to further destroy the image of the committee by staying out of it?”
It’s true that as the Oversight Committee’s leading Democrat, Cummings has been able to regularly thwart Issa and counter the chair’s allegations in the media. But he did so at a constant disadvantage, since he was shut out of the investigative process by Issa. There’s no reason to expect Gowdy to treat Democrats any differently. (Cummings’ office says he has not yet taken a position on the boycott idea.)
Gowdy’s committee is best understood as as a base-energizing fundraising tool for the GOP, part of what Politico’s Michael Hirsch calls “the Benghazi industrial complex,” engineered to damage Clinton so much she either can’t run for president or decides it’s not worth the pain. Of course, Benghazi fever hasn’t spread beyond the fever swamps of Obama hatred that afflict the GOP’s far-right base. But that’s enough to keep it alive, and potentially make it a potent midterm-election organizing tool. House Democrats should make that role clear by boycotting it.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, May 6, 2014
“Darrell Issa, GOP’s Resident Thug”: Contempt For Congressman Elijah Cummings, Contempt For The American People
The farce that is Rep. Darrell Issa continues. He put on an amazing spectacle shutting down the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, Elijah Cummings, on Wednesday, repeatedly cutting off Cummings’ microphone and, finally, turning his back and walking away. I especially loved Issa’s little gesture pulling his finger across his throat like a knife, to cut the mic a second time. I called it “thuggish” on “Politics Nation” and folks on the right aren’t happy. That’s OK; it was thuggish.
Issa had once again called former IRS supervisor Lois Lerner to testify before the committee, knowing she was going to again use her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. But what Issa didn’t reveal is that Lerner’s attorney had offered last month to share her answers to the committee’s questions via what’s called a “proffer.” That’s when the subject of an investigation reveals the rough outlines of what they know, which can also help determine whether they deserve immunity from prosecution (in order to get them to share more). But Issa rejected the proffer and staged a show trial designed to have Lerner take the Fifth again, in front of television cameras and a packed hearing room.
Cummings asked for time to make a statement, once Issa announced himself satisfied that Lerner wouldn’t testify Wednesday and tried to adjourn. That’s when Issa cut his mic.
“We’re adjourned. Close it down,” Issa said.
“I am a member of the Congress of the United States of America. I am tired of this!” Cummings replied, though his mic was off. “You cannot just have a one-sided investigation. There is something absolutely wrong with that. It is absolutely un-American … Chairman, what are you hiding?”
On “Politics Nation” Wednesday committee member Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton explained Cummings was going to ask about Lerner’s attorney’s proffer, and that was why Issa shut him down. Issa was trying to “keep us from revealing that we could have learned exactly what [Lerner] would have said,” Norton explained. Cummings’ office confirmed her account.
So why would Issa reject that proffer if he was committed to learning the truth about the IRS “scandal”? Because from the beginning he’s known it wasn’t a scandal. From the beginning Issa has selectively leaked testimony and other evidence from his committee’s investigation to Fox News – which he treats as a fourth arm of government — consistently distorting the facts.
We now know that IRS staffers, overwhelmed by post-Citizens United political activism, used certain terms to screen groups on the right and the left to make sure they deserved tax-exempt status. Groups with “Tea Party” or “Patriots” in their names, as well as “Occupy” or “Blue,” were flagged for special scrutiny. So far the only known group to lose its tax exemption was a Democratic group, Emerge America, which works to elect Democratic women to public office.
But over and over again, Issa has leaked one-sided testimony designed to show a bias against conservatives. Over and over Cummings has asked him to make public all of the testimony and evidence gathered by their committee, only to have Issa refuse. A few times Cummings has himself released testimony, including that of a self-identified “conservative Republican” manager of an IRS screening group who said no one from the Obama administration had anything to do with the selection of Tea Party groups for scrutiny.
Issa showed remarkable contempt for Cummings on Wednesday, but he also showed contempt for the American people. Issa’s investigation has cost at least $14 million, and eaten up 97,542 hours of IRS staffers’ time. The agency has coughed up more than 500,000 pages of documents; 35 former and current IRS employees have sat for interviews. Treasury and IRS officials have testified at 15 separate congressional hearings. After all of that, a leader who wanted the truth would have listened to what Lerner had to say through her attorney. That’s not what Issa’s after. He’s trying to shame the White House, and Cummings makes a great stand-in.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, March 6, 2014
“A Confederacy Of Dunces”: President Obama Is Truly Blessed In The Idiocy Of His Enemies
You probably saw a news item about a hearing yesterday of the House Government Oversight Committee. The reason you saw it is that it ended with some shouting, which is a relatively rare occurrence on Capitol Hill, and therefore that became an irresistible piece of news. But what really mattered about that hearing wasn’t Darrell Issa cutting off Elijah Cummings’ mike, causing Cummings to get extremely angry. It was that the hearing was happening at all. I’m not sure if there’s ever been an opposition party more thoroughly convinced of a president’s corruption yet so utterly incapable of doing anything about what they see as his crimes. You might think that’s because Barack Obama is not particularly corrupt, and that’s part of the story. But the Republicans’ buffoonery—and Issa’s in particular—when it comes to making Obama pay for his alleged misdeeds seems to know no bounds.
If I were a Republican, I’d really be wondering right now whether Issa can tie his own shoes, much less whether he’ll be able to take down the President of the United States. Just look at how this thing developed. On Sunday, Issa went on television and said that Lois Lerner, the former IRS official whom Republicans believe holds the key to showing how a lengthy application process for Tea Party groups seeking 501(c)(4) status was the linchpin of a White House conspiracy to destroy its enemies, would finally be testifying in front of his committee, answering all the biting and incisive questions Republicans have. Later that day, Lerner’s attorney told reporters that he had no idea what Issa was talking about. Lerner had invoked her Fifth Amendment rights, and she was going to continue to do so; there would be no testimony. Yet Issa still maintained she would be answering questions, and when she was brought before the committee on Wednesday, he was apparently surprised that she invoked those rights and would not answer their questions.
There are a few explanations for how this happened. One is that Lerner’s lawyer simply lied to Issa and his staff, telling them that she was ready to answer questions when he had no intention of letting her do so. This seems rather unlikely, particularly since he said publicly that she wouldn’t testify. The second possibility is that there was some kind of misunderstanding somewhere along the way, leading Issa and his people to believe she would answer questions when she actually wouldn’t. Again, this would seem to be contradicted by the fact that the lawyer said publicly she wouldn’t testify. The third is that Issa sensed some weakness in her position and thought that if he got her under the hot lights, he might force a few answers out of her.
Not knowing anything about the internal deliberations, I can’t say which of those three most resembles what happened, but given that from the outset this investigation has been an endless string of embarrassing pratfalls on Issa’s part, I suspect it’s the third. But what I wonder is, do they actually believe that they’re just one hearing away from busting this whole thing wide open? Just how deluded are they?
Meanwhile, you have Republicans like Lindsey Graham telling anyone who’ll listen that the reason for the crisis in Ukraine is…Benghazi! Yes, that must be it. If we can’t actually use it to impeach Obama, at least we can blame it for everything that happens anywhere in the world that we don’t like. Why is China still communist? Benghazi. Why did Oscar Pistorius shoot his girlfriend? Duh, Benghazi. Why did the women’s hockey team lose the gold medal game to Canada? Obviously, the Canadians were emboldened by Benghazi.
And I think they genuinely believe that Benghazi is going to keep Hillary Clinton from the White House. Sure, their potential 2016 candidates may look like a collection of amateurs and extremists. But just you wait—once Americans hear the truth about Benghazi, she doesn’t stand a chance!
Barack Obama has ridden a lot of ups and downs in his presidency, some of his own making and some that he could not have controlled. But he has been truly blessed in his enemies. They’re such a bunch of incompetent clowns, he could strangle the Dalai Lama on the White House lawn in full view of the cameras and they wouldn’t be able to pin it on him.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, March , 2014
“When A Bombshell Is A Dud”: Republicans Don’t Seem To Realize The Extent To Which They Are Embarrassing Themselves
House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), struggling to shake his well-deserved reputation as a “laughably inept” clown, did his level best this week to revive the discredited IRS “scandal.” Relying on a partial transcript — one of his favorite tactics — Issa fed the media what he said was a scoop.
When IRS officials in Cincinnati needed guidance on how to deal with questionable tax-exempt applications, they solicited feedback from the agency’s Washington office. Among those who weighed in was the IRS’s lawyer, which obviously makes sense given the circumstances.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Peggy Noonan, whose uncontrollable contempt for President Obama has become difficult to watch, found this revelation fascinating.
The IRS scandal was connected this week not just to the Washington office — that had been established — but to the office of the chief counsel.
That is a bombshell — such a big one that it managed to emerge in spite of an unfocused, frequently off-point congressional hearing…. Still, what landed was a bombshell. And Democrats know it.
Sigh.
It troubles me that the right doesn’t realize the extent to which it’s embarrassing itself. The revelation isn’t a “bombshell”; it’s trivia we learned in mid-May. Indeed, Peggy Noonan herself knows this. I don’t mean she should know this; I mean there’s evidence she literally knows it — she wrote a column in May that referenced the same boring tidbit she now considers a “bombshell.”
Here’s what probably happened. Noonan learned a fairly mundane detail in May and wrote about it in a column. Then she forgot it. Two months later, Darrell Issa said he wants the media to take the mundane detail seriously for no particular reason, and Noonan, unwilling to reference her own work, rediscovers her fascination with the unimportant point.
Ben Smith recently characterized Noonan as the “last interesting columnist standing.” If by “interesting” he meant “lazy and blindly partisan,” I’m inclined to agree.
Of course, Noonan isn’t the only Republican who’s failing miserably to revive the ridiculous IRS “scandal.”
Issa’s hearing was itself an attempt to convince the political world the story still deserves to be taken seriously. It arguably had the opposite of the intended effect.
The inspector general behind the critical report about the IRS’ targeting of tea party groups acknowledged Thursday that the information in his report was not complete.
J. Russell George, the IRS inspector general, told the House Oversight Committee that only in the past few weeks has he become aware of documents showing that the IRS screened progressive groups in addition to conservative ones. George said he was “disturbed” by the fact that these documents were not provided to his team of investigators prior to the audit’s release and that he was continuing to investigate the issue.
“I am concerned that there may be additional pieces of information that we don’t have,” he said. “I’m very concerned about that sir.”
Oh, you mean “additional pieces of information” such as the fact that liberal groups were subjected to the same scrutiny as conservative groups? And there was no targeting of conservative organizations? And that politics had nothing to do with the added scrutiny?
And that this entire controversy is based on a report that by its author’s own admission, presents an inaccurate picture of reality?
Perhaps my favorite moment of yesterday’s hearing came when George was asked why his report failed to mention that he found literally zero evidence of political motivations on the part of the IRS, even after he reviewed 5,500 emails on the matter. George responded that he couldn’t have known “if there was an email that was destroyed.”
Oh my.
Making matters much worse, the hearing devolved into farce when Issa accused Oversight Committee Ranking Member Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), who is African American, of reminding him of a “little boy.” Issa later clarified he didn’t mean for the comment to sound so racist.
I’m not going to say the IRS scandal is officially over now, because for anyone who gives a darn about reality, this point came and went weeks ago. I will say that to continue to believe this story has merit and deserves to be taken seriously is deeply, painfully foolish.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 19, 2013
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