“Gross Failures In Journalism”: The Media Needs To Get Over Its Blind Hatred Of Hillary Clinton
Last week, Hillary Clinton got in one of her periodic fights with the press, extending a long-running battle that has been raging for decades now. In the media corner was The New York Times, which beclowned itself with a false report alleging that Clinton was about to be the subject of a criminal inquiry over emails she sent while at the State Department.
The episode is the latest evidence that the Times needs to take a hard look at its Clinton coverage. But there’s also a lesson here for the broader mainstream media, which needs to get over its blind hatred of the Clintons. It not only leads to gross failures in journalism, but ends up being a massive distraction from the actual scrutiny Hillary Clinton deserves.
It’s worth noticing what a stupendous journalistic faceplant this was. As Kevin Drum points out, pretty much every single word in the original headline was wrong:
Clinton was not a target. The referral was not criminal. The emails in question had not been classified at the time Clinton saw them. When the dust settled, it appeared that the whole thing was little more than a squabble between State and CIA over whether certain emails that State is releasing to the public should or shouldn’t be classified. In other words, just your garden-variety bureaucratic dispute. [Mother Jones]
This isn’t the first time the Times has printed a gravely mistaken story suggesting ethical lapses on the part of a Clinton running for president. Back in 1992, Times reporter Jeff Gerth wrote a story about how the Clintons were involved in a seemingly shady real estate deal called Whitewater. It suggested that the Clintons had gotten a big share of potential profits without putting up much cash, and that Bill Clinton had used his power as Arkansas governor to protect a savings and loan owned by a Whitewater associate from being closed down by the feds.
Just as with the most recent story, about every part of Gerth’s account was wrong or misleading, as Joe Conason and Gene Lyons wrote in their book on the Clinton impeachment, The Hunting of the President. The Clintons actually lost a ton of money on the deal, and the Arkansas government had recommended to the feds that the S&L be liquidated.
But that was only the start of hundreds of Whitewater articles and reports. The political press ditched any notion of objectivity and pursued the Clintons with a deranged, prudish zealotry. These journalists never actually revealed any concrete wrongdoing, but the incessant repetition convinced many that the Clintons must have done something wrong — which eventually led to the appointment of a special prosecutor. The rest is history.
Not much has changed. Much of the centrist press still quite obviously loathes the Clintons. Ron Fournier, the id of centrism, knocks her PR strategy (that is, writing a devastating, accurate takedown of the Times report), insists where there’s smoke there’s fire, and generally makes dim excuses to keep hounding her.
On the other hand, the Times’ atrocious report was caught out almost immediately. Unlike the 90s, there is a reasonably powerful left-leaning press today, and fact-checking can spread rapidly through social media. It is much harder to get away with that kind of lazy hack job on a prominent candidate.
It’s hard to figure out how the Times could have been so incredibly sloppy. But I suspect the traditional media suspicion of the Clintons played a big role. The Clintons’ reputation is so bad that reporters tend to discard their vaunted skepticism the moment a bad piece of news about them comes over the transom.
And that, as we see, leads to disastrous mistakes. A story that confirms a strong prior belief is exactly the point at which journalists ought to be at their most skeptical.
And perhaps more importantly, this annoying, narcissistic media spectacle is proving to be an enormous distraction from the important task of actually reporting on Hillary Clinton. There are all manner of things to cover, from her poor choice in advisers, to her foreign policy views, and yes, even the deleted emails from her years at the State Department. Just make sure to actually, you know, check the facts before hitting publish.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, August 3, 2015
“An Expensive And Partisan Excursion Into Nowhere”: Benghazi! Why Trey Gowdy Is Still Hiding Blumenthal Transcript
The strange saga of the House Select Committee on Benghazi continues as its chair, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) fends off renewed questions about the committee’s purpose, as well as demands to release the sworn deposition of Sidney Blumenthal, taken behind closed doors on June 16.
In a July 7 CNN interview, Hillary Clinton – the actual target of Gowdy’s investigation – brushed off accusations about her use of a private email server and mocked his partisan probe. “This is being blown up with no basis in law or in fact,” she said. “That’s fine. I get it. This is being, in effect, used by the Republicans in the Congress, OK. But I want people to understand what the truth is. And the truth is everything I did was permitted and I went above and beyond what anybody could have expected in making sure that if the State Department [servers] didn’t capture something, I made a real effort to get it to them.”
Gowdy answered by reiterating previous claims that only his committee’s intrepid work had revealed Clinton’s email practices. “The fact of the matter is it took the Benghazi Committee to uncover Secretary Clinton’s use of personal email and a server to conduct official State Department business,” the chairman insisted after her interview aired. He went on to make a series of further accusations about the emails, insisting that the messages about Libya sent to her by Sidney Blumenthal were “solicited” by her and not, as she described them, “unsolicited.”
These disputes might be cleared up if Gowdy would release Blumenthal’s testimony, since he answered all the committee’s questions on these and other matters under oath.
In actuality, Blumenthal probably mentioned the indisputable fact that Clinton’s use of a private email server was revealed not by the Benghazi committee but by a Romanian hacker known as “Guccifer” — now serving time in prison for stealing messages from Blumenthal as well as former Secretary of State Colin Powell and Dorothy Bush, the sister of former president George W. Bush. Many of those emails, obtained by Guccifer in a suspected Russian intelligence operation, were published on the Internet months before the Benghazi committee came into existence.
And Blumenthal surely noted, again under oath, that his emails to Clinton were “unsolicited,” despite Gowdy’s strained attempt to prove otherwise — as Gowdy undoubtedly knows. That is one of many reasons why he continues to suppress the former Clinton aide’s testimony. The excuse proffered by committee Republicans is that releasing closed testimony might discourage candor by future witnesses – an argument undercut by letters from Blumenthal attorney James Cole, urging the committee to release it.
No, it is now clear that Gowdy prefers to leak the Blumenthal testimony to smear both Clinton and the witness he claims to be protecting. For weeks, snippets of Blumenthal’s testimony and of his emails to and from Clinton have turned up in the media, to advance negative, highly distorted perceptions of both the former Secretary of State and her longtime friend.
These cowardly, bullying tactics are designed not only to embarrass Clinton and Blumenthal but to justify the committee’s increasingly expensive and partisan excursion into nowhere.
On July 7, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen too took a hard shot at Gowdy, under the headline “Placating The Right-Wing Clinton Haters.” He capably sums up the results of the committee’s inquisition into Blumenthal and Clinton:
The committee, the eighth to look into the Benghazi matter and determine if Clinton, as Secretary of State, was somehow complicit in the deaths of four colleagues — you know, those Clintons are capable of anything —asked Blumenthal 160 questions regarding his relationship with Clinton and fewer than 20 regarding Benghazi. (The Democratic minority kept count.)
The committee also asked Blumenthal more than 50 questions about his relationship with the Clinton Foundation and only four about security in Benghazi [the ostensible purpose of its existence]. Blumenthal was additionally asked more than 270 questions about his business dealings in Libya, which, considering that he has none, is commendable thoroughness run amok.
The committee in its wisdom came to appreciate that regarding Libya, Blumenthal not only had no business interests there, but also that he had never even been in the country. The emails concerning Libya that he had passed on to Clinton had come originally from Tyler Drumheller, the CIA’s one-time top spy and someone who just might have had something interesting to say. It seemed reasonable to Blumenthal to relay them to Clinton and it seemed reasonable for her to relay them to her staff for vetting. In fact, it seems downright admirable, because the last thing you want is a government official who operates in a bubble. Given what the committee learned, its Republican majority then nimbly pivoted from insinuating a Blumenthal conflict of interest over Libya to accusing him of having nothing of interest to say about it. They got him there.
The Republicans, led by Gowdy, have learned little of significance, despite spending millions of taxpayer dollars. But they have keenly pursued political matters of interest to them, such as Blumenthal’s work for Correct The Record, a political committee that publicly defends Clinton and other Democrats, and Media Matters for America, the watchdog against right-wing misinformation wherever it appears. Today Gowdy also received a sharply worded letter from David Brock, the founder of both groups, and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the former Maryland lieutenant governor who chairs Correct The Record’s board.
Noting that Gowdy and other Republican committee members asked at least 45 questions about Blumenthal’s “association with our organizations,” the letter from Brock and Townsend urged him to disgorge the testimony in full:
Mr. Chairman, we are entitled to know what questions you and other committee members asked about our organizations in Mr. Blumenthal’s deposition. Judging by the portions that have been leaked to favored people in the press and various right-wing blogs by Republican committee staff aides in direct violation of your committee’s own rules, presumably with your approval, aspersions have been cast upon our work. Your unethical leaking was a further abuse of Congressional power. The only way we can clear our good name is by knowing exactly what innuendoes and insinuations Republican members made about us behind the committee’s closed doors.
Indeed, Gowdy no longer seems to expect anyone to believe his denials that the leaks emanate from him and his staff. In his Washington Post media blog, Erik Wemple wrote that the Select Committee chair seemed to “wink” at a recent leak to Politico that sparked a brief controversy last week. And nobody else would have either the motive or the opportunity to orchestrate the leak campaign.
Meanwhile, the New York Times and other outlets that have published the leaks continue to slant their reporting against Blumenthal and Clinton. The easiest way to measure the Times bias is to note that Blumenthal’s attorney, former Deputy Attorney General James Cole, has written not one or two but three pungent letters to Gowdy, protesting the committee’s cheap-shot leakage and urging the release of his client’s testimony. For reasons best known to Michael S. Schmidt, the Times reporter covering the Benghazi committee, the paper has failed to mention those letters from Cole, let alone to quote them.
Times editors might well ask themselves why their Washington bureau is in cahoots with a congressional committee that epitomizes partisan abuse. Even Maureen Dowd, of all people, understood what was going on when she aptly renamed it “the House Select Committee To Keep Republicans in Power and Harass Hillary Clinton.”
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editors Blog, Featured Post, The National Memo, July 8, 2015
“The Hunt For Clinton ‘Scandals'”: Newly Released Emails Reveal The Hillary You (Still) Don’t Know
With the release of the first batch of the thousands of emails that Hillary Clinton turned over to the State Department, what has America learned about the former Secretary of State and current presidential candidate?
Nothing voyeuristic or venal to thrill journalists ever on the hunt for Clinton “scandals” — but just a few things that voters might be learning for the first time, if all they know about her is what the mainstream media always tell them.
According to the New York Times – a “liberal” newspaper that no longer attempts to conceal its longstanding animus against the Clintons – this initial batch of 3,000-plus emails is “striking” in its “banality,” because so many of the messages from her early months as the nation’s third-ranking official deal with daily problems like scheduling, fax machines, and snow days at Foggy Bottom. Seeking to embarrass her whenever possible, the Times account leads with her apparent concern over possible press comment on a 2009 joint interview with her most notorious predecessor.
Evidently she fretted, for a few minutes at least, that her “distant” relationship with President Obama might be compared invidiously to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s leech-like fastening upon his old boss, Richard M. Nixon.
“In thinking about the Kissinger interview, the only issue I think that might be raised is that I see POTUS at least once a week while K saw Nixon every day,” noted Clinton in an email to aides, using the abbreviation for President of the United States. Then the woman who helped to impeach Nixon snarked: “Of course, if I were dealing w that POTUS I’d probably camp in his office to prevent him from doing something problematic.”
Like so many matters dredged up in her old emails, that fleeting anxiety has faded into oblivion. As for weightier decisions, declares Times reporter Peter Baker, those must have been discussed and debated on the telephone rather than via email, where she seemed “acutely aware that anything she wrote could someday be read by a wider audience.” (A strange observation in a newspaper where the working assumption is that she schemed to conceal her emails from public scrutiny forever, but never mind.)
Still, if these emails offer no hint of titillating scandal or slander, they cannot be said to offer no insight into America’s best-known female leader. While the Times grudgingly concedes that these messages reveal “hints of personality,” Time magazine found a woman in full – and someone whose very existence may surprise voters more familiar with the secretive, imperious, self-centered figure so often caricatured in American media over the past 25 years.
Time informs us that the “complex portrait” of Clinton emerging from the emails shows “a management style that is efficient under pressure and reflective in the late hours of the day,” with “bursts of thinking” that sometimes erupted during “sleepless nights circling the globe.” Nothing new there: Everyone knows she is sharp, thoughtful, and driven to get stuff done. But Time describes her with adjectives rarely used in conventional profiles: “humble,” “self-deprecating,” “concerned,” “generous,” and “one of the best bosses” that members of her staff have ever had.
Humble? She usually went out of her way to meet with friends and colleagues, rather than insisting they come to her. Self-deprecating? She joked constantly about herself and her foibles. Concerned? She repeatedly sought ways to help a young girl she had met in Yemen — and she admonished John Podesta, an old friend who now serves as her campaign chair, to “wear socks to bed to keep your feet warm.” Generous? She often expressed gratitude to staff and kept close track of births, illnesses, and other milestones affecting friends, acquaintances, and employees.
Does any of that sound familiar? Not unless you’ve spoken with people who know Hillary Clinton well. The point isn’t that she is any kind of paragon. She is simply a human being, whose friends and former staffers might also mention her flashes of impatience and temper, her wariness toward the press, her efforts to protect family privacy that can sometimes seem excessively secretive.
The question is whether major media outlets, often hostile and suspicious toward Clinton, can yet draw a fuller portrait of a candidate who is so well known; a candidate whose true character, in all its complexity, has been obscured by negative coverage for so many years; a candidate who, despite those persistent distortions, may yet make history again.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Featured Post, Editors Blog, The National Memo, July 3, 2015
“Contemptible Congeries Of Con Men”: Ambassador Chris Stevens’s Friends Are Tired Of This Benghazi Nonsense
My friend Sid Blumenthal was deposed yesterday by the House Benghazi committee. Yep, my friend. For 20 years or so, since before he joined the Clinton White House. You have a right to know that as I say that he had no business whatsoever being dragooned before that contemptible congeries of con men, because he was a private citizen who had absolutely nothing to do with the events that led to the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and the three other Americans who died in that consular attack, the investigation of which is—or, as we’ll see, was—the ostensible reason the body was empanelled.
I know what much of Washington thinks of Sid. But I don’t go around dumping friends of longstanding because they get thrown headlong into the news cycle, so yes, you bet I will defend him. He had no “business interests” in Libya, and all he did was pass on intelligence assessments—not just about Libya, but about all kinds of places—from a friend of his who once ran the CIA’s European operations to another friend of his who happened to be the secretary of state.
But here’s the thing: You don’t have to like Blumenthal. In fact for all I care you can think he’s Rasputin and Albert Bacon Fall (look him up) and Bobby Baker (look him up too) all rolled into one. But the fact is he went before that committee for one reason and one reason only: because its real job is not to investigate those four deaths, which in any case have been investigated eight times by seven congressional committees and once by a State Department review board, none of which found any wrongdoing on Hillary Clinton’s part.
No, this committee’s real job is to get Clinton.
Let’s mention high up what is the main point here. This “investigation” now constitutes openly and defiantly urinating on the grave of Amb. Stevens. Many diplomats and friends of Stevens’s are aghast at this. “It’s a desecration of Chris’s memory,” says his old friend Daniel Seidemann, the American-born and Jerusalem-based peace activist who got to know Stevens during the latter’s time in Israel. “That this should be the ‘reward’ for the finest American public servant I ever met is a sad commentary on the decay of political culture in the United States. Shameless.”
Robert Ford, the courageous former ambassador to Syria, told me: “Chris Stevens cared deeply about the people of the Middle East and North Africa, and about helping them build better futures for themselves and their families and about building better relations between them and the United States. Those goals weren’t Republican or Democratic. Using his tragic death, and the deaths of his dedicated colleagues, for partisan, tear-down political gain minimizes the importance of their deaths and the issues with which they were grappling. It’s really an insult to demean them this way.”
Daniel Serwer, who was a special envoy to Bosnia in the 1990s, didn’t even know Stevens but feels similarly. “There really isn’t anything to be investigated about the incident itself until they get someone who was personally responsible for the attack on the U.S. facilities,” Serwer says. “In the meanwhile, they are going after Hillary Clinton. Does anyone think they would be doing that if she were not a candidate for president?”
The committee’s motivation has always been obvious, but it became undeniably so on Monday, when Politico ran a piece headlined “Beyond Benghazi.” The gist of it was that committee chairman Trey Gowdy has now expanded the scope of the probe to include “the administration’s entire policy toward Libya, not just the brief period before and after the Benghazi attacks of September 11, 2012.” Why would Gowdy be doing this? Gowdy told Politico, referring to the White House and State Department: “They believe we’re supposed to be Benghazi-centered, looking at a couple of days on either side of the Benghazi attacks. But the language of the [House] resolution is pretty clear: We’re to examine all policies and decisions that led to the attacks.” “All policies” can include virtually anything—the decision under NATO’s banner to intervene in Libya in the first place, and everything that happened thereafter.
In other words—Gowdy’s investigators have come up empty on the consular attack itself, but their assignment, undoubtedly never spoken but equally undoubtedly always understood, is to find something that will keep Clinton out of the White House. And so the net will now be cast far more widely.
It wasn’t so long ago that Gowdy was singing from a very different songbook. Here is an April 15, 2015, letter, made public by the committee’s Democrats, from an assistant secretary at State to Gowdy. Click on it and jump to page seven. There, you will see that the letter quotes from a letter Gowdy had written to Clinton attorney David Kendall on December 2, 2014, in which Gowdy wrote that the “Committee has no interest in any emails, documents, or other tangible things not related to Benghazi.”
More recently, in March of this year, Gowdy said on Face the Nation: “We’re not entitled to everything. I don’t want everything…There are three tranches [of what we need to know]…Why did we have a facility that didn’t meet any security specification whatsoever?…Our military response, where were our assets located?…And then, thirdly, the aftermath. I continue to naively believe that people have a right to expect their government to tell them the truth in the aftermath of a tragedy.”
As I said above, and as Serwer noted, those three questions have already been answered many times over. We know exactly where our military assets were, and everything else. But the answers to these questions have not been to Republicans’ liking, so Gowdy wants different answers. And now, fearing that he’s not going to get them, he’s changed the whole basis of the probe.
Now, all of Libya policy is fair game. Did Clinton make a policy recommendation—even one—that turns out to have been bad in retrospect, thus proving her utter lack of foreign policy clairvoyance? Did she make any misjudgments? Why, this of course would be unforgiveable; after all, Libya is a very easy country to apprehend and master, so there’s no excuse for misjudgments of any sort! The thinking now is clearly this: Well, if we can’t nail her to the wall on the attacks, at least we can raise questions about her foreign policy judgment.
Which returns us to Blumenthal. He spent nine hours—nine hours—being deposed yesterday. About half an hour was spent on the Benghazi attack. He wasn’t even asked by Republicans about the attacks until around 6 p.m., seven-and-a-half hours after he sat down in the chair.
The Republicans didn’t even seem to know that Blumenthal didn’t write these intelligence assessments, that they were written by the former CIA operative, Tyler Drumheller, not Blumenthal, who was just passing them along. At one point, Darrell Issa—not a member of the committee—sauntered in, but not being a member of the committee was escorted out by Gowdy himself. “It seems obvious that my appearance before this committee was for one reason and one reason only,” Blumenthal told me Tuesday night. “And that was politics.”
The point of all this was obvious: It was to see if they could lure Blumenthal into saying one thing that might in some way contradict anything Clinton has said publicly or will say to the committee. The committee’s staff knows very well that the media will pounce on any inconsistency, happily keeping the grassy-knoll narrative about Blumenthal as the Clinton whisperer bouncing along, without pausing for a moment to examine Gowdy and the committee’s actions and motivations, or God forbid to demand that these people stop spending taxpayer money—$3.5 million so far, with an estimate that it could run up to $6 million—on this obviously political hunt for scalps, or one particular scalp.
There’s a scandal going on here all right. It’s just not the one the press thinks.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, June 17, 2015
“Little To Show For The Significant Rabbit Hole Expenditure”: Benghazi Investigation Spends Fortune To Harass Hillary Clinton
The Benghazi Select Committee moves slowly but spends quickly, exceeding the budget of the entire House Intelligence Committee.
On June 16th, the Benghazi Select Committee, meeting behind closed doors, questioned Hillary Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal for nine hours about emails he sent to the then-Secretary of State containing privately gathered intelligence reports from inside Libya.
The release of new emails from Mr. Blumenthal marked a milestone for the committee, characterized committee chairman, Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, as “noteworthy,” because no Congressional committee that “has previously looked into Benghazi or Libya has uncovered these memos.”
Yet there was no explanation as to how these emails contained any new insights or information about the September 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound and CIA base in Benghazi, Libya that resulted in the murders of Ambassador Chris Stevens, Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith, and CIA contractors Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty.
Mr. Blumenthal himself noted “my testimony has shed no light on the events of Benghazi—nor could it—because I have no firsthand knowledge.”
This has been a consistent theme of the House’s investigation—a frenzy of media fireworks, with little substantive progress made in pursuit of the committee’s actual mandate. (The majority staff of the Benghazi Select Committee did not respond to requests for comment).
Led by a an 18-member Republican staff, whose full time employees are paid an average of $128,750 per year, the Benghazi Select Committee has proceeded at a plodding pace. Thus far, it has held only three hearings and by the end of this week will have interviewed just 29 witnesses. In comparison the Congressional investigation into the Iran Contra scandal lasted 10.5 months, during which time investigators conducted 500 interviews along with 40 days of public hearings.
The lack of progress is especially striking considering seven Congressional committees and a State Department Accountability Review Board already conducted inquires into the attack. Most recently the findings of the Republican led House Intelligence Committee found no evidence for many of the accusations hurled at President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and other government officials.
Over 13 months the Benghazi Select Committee has spent more than $3,500,000, exceeding the budget of the entire House Intelligence Committee. This figure does not include significant expenditures made by the State Department and Defense Department to find and declassify material requested by the committee or the expense of witness travel for those who work for the government.
While exact dollar amounts spent by federal agencies are unavailable, details released about other declassification processes shed light on these costs. In March 2014 the Defense Department informed Democratic Rep. Adam Smith, they had spent “millions of dollars” and “thousands of man-hours to responding to numerous and often repetitive Congressional requests regarding Benghazi.” Currently the State Department has 12 full-time staff members paid between $63,700 and $150,000 reviewing Hillary Clinton’s emails “a process that could cost more than $1 million” according to the National Journal. The total cost for these document queries could run well into the eight figures. For example, the IRS spent $14 million responding to Congressional investigations into accusations it politicized the tax-exemption application process.
The Benghazi Select Committee has little to show for the significant expenditure—aside from a trail of unfulfilled promises by its Chairman. “We will have hearings in January, February and March,” Rep. Gowdy (R-SC) announced in December.
That never happened.
The committee held a single hearing in January, focused on berating State Department legislative liaison Joel Rubin about the production of documents. CIA representative Neil Higgins escaped with a mild talking to.
Two days after his December announcement, Rep. Gowdy told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren the committee would hold a hearing in January to explore why the State Department was in Benghazi. That hearing never occurred.
In February, Rep. Gowdy sent a letter to the committee’s ranking Democratic member Elijah Cummings (D-Md) informing him that “beginning as early as April I intend to start interviewing” a list of twenty prominent members of the Obama administration including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, former White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, Clinton State Department Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills among others.
According to a Democrat committee staff member, “The committee has yet to interview a single person on Gowdy’s list.”
In April, Gowdy again appeared on Van Susteren’s show claiming, “we’re doing four witness interviews a week, whereas we were doing two.”
A Democratic committee, who requested anonymity, aide told the Observer, “The Select Committee has never done four interviews a week.”
Rep. Gowdy now states the committee will continue its work into 2016 raising its cost to taxpayers to more than $6,000,000, casting his inaction as the result of the Obama administration’s slow pace at producing requested documents, a questionable premise. Rep. Gowdy began receiving documents in August. The committee did not make its first request to the State Department until mid-November, six months after beginning its work. His document request to the Department of Defense was only delivered in early April of this year.
Rep. Gowdy has proceeded in a similar vein while attempting to schedule Hillary Clinton’s appearance before the committee. In early September Stop Hillary PAC, which was “created for one reason only—to ensure Hillary Clinton never becomes President of the United States,” delivered a petition with 264,000 signatures demanding Gowdy call the Secretary of State to testify.
The next day, he asked Rep. Cummings to reach out to Ms. Clinton on his “behalf to determine whether she would testify.” On a November 12 phone call with majority and minority committee staff, Clinton’s team confirmed she would be willing to testify before the committee in December. Rep. Gowdy recently moved the goal posts, asking she appear for a private transcribed interview, as opposed to a public hearing.
Recently, the committee has shifted some of its focus from investigating the actual attack in Benghazi, to reviewing policy decisions made by Hillary Clinton regarding Libya more than nineteen months prior to the attack. Rep. Gowdy, confirmed this to Politico, which reported that “broader problems with the Obama administration’s Libya policy—could prove to be an ugly albatross weighing on the Clinton campaign.”
Rep. Cummings believes these efforts are part of “a fishing expedition for anything they can use against Secretary Clinton in her presidential campaign.” He continued, “After a full year, it now seems obvious that this investigation is being dragged out in order to attack Secretary Clinton and her campaign for president—squandering millions of taxpayer dollars in the process.”
In May of 2014 it was reported that Republicans worried that if they created a Benghazi Select Committee it would fail to produce tangible results. “Investigate and find nothing new, and the committee looks like a bunch of tin-hatted obsessives,” wrote Eli Lake. One House member told Lake, “This could be a rabbit hole.”
It has turned out to be an extremely deep one.
By: Ari Rabin-Havt, Featured Post, The National Memo, June 18, 2015; This piece originally appeared in The New York Observer
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