“Another Bad Day For Benghazi Conspiracy Theories”: Still No Evidence To Bolster The Far-Right Paranoia
The U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, better known as the Senate Intelligence Committee, published an 85-page report (pdf) today on the attack that left four Americans dead in Benghazi in September 2012. Its findings will likely seem pretty familiar.
The State Department’s failure to heed warnings and requests for more security by diplomatic staff left the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, and its CIA annex vulnerable to the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks that ultimately took the lives of four Americans, according to an unclassified Senate Intelligence Committee report released Wednesday.
The report, which the committee approved by a voice vote, concluded that the attacks could have been prevented and makes several recommendations for improving security of U.S. diplomatic facilities in areas where U.S. personnel are likely to face threats.
If this seems to cover familiar ground, that’s because previous investigations have led to very similar conclusions. The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake noted that Republicans, especially those eager to tear down former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, are likely to be “sorely disappointed” by the findings.
That’s clearly true. As Adam Serwer’s report makes clear, there was no “stand down” order; Susan Rice did nothing wrong; and there was no White House interference with the creation of post-attack talking points. Indeed, of all the various Republican allegations about a conspiracy, there remains literally no evidence to bolster the far-right paranoia.
Indeed, if GOP officials who tried to destroy Susan Rice’s reputation apologize now that their attacks have been discredited, I remain confident that she’d be gracious about their misguided smear campaign.
All of this, however, leads to a larger question: just how much more will it take to convince the Republican conspiracy theorist they were wrong?
I did a little digging this afternoon and found that over the course of the last 15 months, the deadly attack in Benghazi has now been investigated by:
* the independent State Department Accountability Review Board, led by former Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen and career diplomat Thomas Pickering;
* the Senate Intelligence Committee;
* the Senate Armed Services Committee;
* the House Intelligence Committee,
* the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee;
* the House Armed Services Committee;
* the House Committee on Oversight & Government Reform;
* and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
And those are just the official investigations, led by current and former U.S. officials, and don’t include investigative reports from journalists at major news organizations.
After all of this scrutiny, there’s still no evidence of a cover-up or a conspiracy. None. The allegations raised by the Obama administration’s fiercest and angriest critics are still without substantiation.
Given the latest report, which reinforces the previous reports, are Republicans finally prepared to move on to some other alleged conspiracy? Of course not. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) saw the findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee and said, “It should be clear, even to my critics by now, that Benghazi is bigger than Watergate.”
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) added, “I’m familiar with cover-ups throughout history, the Pentagon Papers, Iran-Contra, all of them. This is gonna go down as the greatest cover-up in history because the president and Susan Rice both knew it was an organized terrorist attack and deliberately sent Susan Rice to tell the American people it was not.”
It doesn’t matter that they’re wrong; they don’t care. They start with the conclusion and try to work backwards to find evidence that satisfies their goal. If the evidence doesn’t match the preconceived answer, then there’s a problem with the evidence, not the assumptions.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 15, 2014
“A Lot Of Homework To Do”: Rand Paul’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week
It’s probably safe to say Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has had better weeks. Just over the last few days he started to lose his cool on NPR when asked about a neo-confederate he co-authored a book with; he was caught making ridiculous boasts about his record on minority rights; and he repeated a bizarre conspiracy theory about George Stephanopoulos that’s already been debunked.
And then, after all of this, the Kentucky Republican sat down for a chat with Businessweek‘s Josh Green.
Green: A recent article in the New Republic said your budget would eviscerate the departments of Energy, State, Commerce, EPA, FDA, Education, and many others. Would Americans support that?
Paul: My budget is similar to the Penny Plan, which cuts 1 percent a year for five or six years and balances the budget. Many Americans who have suffered during a recession have had to cut their spending 1 percent, and they didn’t like doing it, but they were able to do it to get their family’s finances back in order. I see no reason why government can’t cut 1 percent of its spending.
Except, whether the senator realizes it or not, his description of his plan is extremely deceptive. As Ezra Klein explained, Paul’s response wasn’t actually an answer: “Paul’s budget eliminates the Department of Commerce. It also eliminates the Department of Education. And the Department for Housing and Urban Development. And the Department of Energy. The State Department gets cut by more than 50 percent. Meanwhile, it increases spending on defense by $126 billion. Perhaps these are good ideas! But Paul doesn’t defend them. He obscures them. He tries to make his cuts sound small even though, in the areas Green asked about, they’re huge.”
In theory, Paul could at least try to explain why he thinks cutting the State Department budget in half would be good for the United States. But he either can’t or won’t do that, so he repeats vague talking points that obscure the facts.
Wait, it gets worse.
Green: Any political consultant who saw that list [of cabinet agencies Paul intends to eliminate] would tear out his hair and say the American people would never accept it. You disagree with that conventional wisdom?
Paul: You know, the thing is, people want to say it’s extreme. But what I would say is extreme is a trillion-dollar deficit every year. I mean, that’s an extremely bad situation.
Except, we’re not running trillion-dollar deficits every year. If the senator takes this issue so seriously, shouldn’t he keep up with the basics of current events?
Green: Who would your ideal Fed chairman be?
Paul: Hayek would be good, but he’s deceased.
Green: Nondead Fed chairman.
Paul: Friedman would probably be pretty good, too, and he’s not an Austrian, but he would be better than what we have.
Again, Paul doesn’t seem to know what he’s saying. As Jon Chait explained, the senator’s answer “makes no sense” because, “Paul is a hard-money fanatic who wants to abolish the Federal Reserve’s role in using money policy to stabilize the economy. That’s the joke. Milton Friedman, though, had the complete opposite view of monetary policy. His central academic insight was support for very active monetary policy.”
My principal concern with Rand Paul is not his ideology. On plenty of subjective questions, he and I would recommend very different courses of action, which is what spirited political debate is all about.
Rather, what troubles me about the senator is that he doesn’t seem to have the foggiest idea what he’s talking about. Worse, it’s not like he’s ignorant of obscure policy details on issues he deems irrelevant — Paul is strikingly confused about the issues he claims to care about most.
This Businessweek interview was a mess for the senator on economic matters, but let’s not forget that Paul also doesn’t seem to understand his own views on the use of drones, which is another issue he says he cares deeply about.
If this guy intends to seek national office and ask the American mainstream to consider him credible, he has a lot of homework to do — homework he probably should have done before making the transition from self-accredited ophthalmologist to U.S. senator.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 9, 2013
“Another Fringe Activitist”: Shock-Jock Publicity Seeker Darrell Issa’s Summer Fun Already Underway
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus was on “Fox & Friends” yesterday, fielding questions about various ongoing political controversies, when he said something interesting. In reference to the chairman on the House Oversight Committee, Priebus boasted, “I’ve got a good feeling that Darrell Issa is going to have quite a summer.”
As it turns out, Issa’s summer fun is already underway.
Several top aides to Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former secretary of state, are targets of the latest subpoena for information about the drafting of talking points after the siege last fall on an American compound in Benghazi, Libya.
Representative Darrell Issa, the California Republican who is the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, wrote in a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry that the Obama administration’s refusal to cooperate fully with a House investigation left him “with no alternative but to compel the State Department to produce relevant documents through a subpoena.”
What do you know, it really is 1997 all over again — a far-right chairman of the House Oversight Committee, hoping to undermine a Clinton, is needlessly sending out subpoenas over a trumped up political controversy.
The attack on the U.S. outpost in Benghazi was a deadly national security crisis, which left four Americans killed, but the effort to create a political “scandal” has run its course. Indeed, it effectively ended a couple of weeks ago with the release of internal administration emails that helped prove that the White House’s claims were accurate; there was no cover-up; and Republican accusations are without foundation in fact. It’s reached the point at which House GOP staffers are mocking their own party’s nonsense on this issue.
So why is Issa issuing subpoenas to Clinton aides anyway? Largely because, as the chair of the Republican National Committee put it, Issa is eager to “have quite a summer.”
If this seems eerily familiar, there’s a good reason for that — Issa is following in Dan Burton’s footsteps.
Remember Burton and his wildly unhealthy hatred for President Clinton?
Burton was at his most famous in the 1990’s, when he led many of the investigations against President Bill Clinton. “If I could prove 10 percent of what I believe happened, he’d [Clinton] be gone,” Burton declared in 1998. “This guy’s a scumbag. That’s why I’m after him.”
Over the last six years of Bill Clinton’s presidency, Burton led the House Government Reform Committee and unilaterally issued 1,089 subpoenas to investigate allegations of misconduct. That roughly translates to an average of a politically-inspired subpoena every other day for six consecutive years, including weekends, holidays, and congressional recesses.
Burton once held hearings — for 10 days — on the Clintons’ Christmas card list. He ended up targeting 141 different Clinton administration officials with subpoenas, including at least one instance in which Burton and his staff were so reckless, they subpoenaed the wrong person (they were looking for someone with a similar name).
Burton also fired a bullet into a “head-like object” — reportedly a melon — in his backyard to test the theory that former White House counsel Vincent Foster was murdered.
Burton, of course, wasn’t just some shock-jock or publicity-hungry provocateur; he was the chairman of a congressional committee with oversight authority over the White House. And he wielded that gavel as if he were a fringe activist with a chip on his shoulder.
The Indiana Republican has since left Congress, but his legacy remains. Indeed, his successor on the House Oversight Committee is picking up where Burton left off.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 29, 2013
“The Real IRS Scandal”: Lawmakers Who Pushed The Agency To Rely On Bone-Headed Tactics By Refusing To Fund It To Do Its Job
David Simon, of “The Wire” fame, once responded to the idea of “doing more with less” by saying, “That’s the bullshit of bean counters who care only about the bottom line. You do less with less.” For the Internal Revenue Service, the line should perhaps be updated to “you do less with less, and also cause a scandal.”
The IRS, of course, was recently caught singling out conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status for extra scrutiny. IRS employees in a Cincinnati office used search terms such as “tea party” and “patriot” to find organizations they deemed worthy of more attention in their request to be exempted from paying federal taxes. (The irony of tea party groups complaining about not getting effectively subsidized by the government in a timely enough fashion will be left for another time.)
The “scandal” has already caused the acting commissioner of the IRS to lose his job and prompted a hearing on Capitol Hill Friday during which lawmakers expressed their outrage that the tax agency could act in such a manner. But Congress deserves its own share of blame for the debacle.
Now, the IRS employees who were searching for “tea party” surely should have known better. But the fact of the matter is that the agency has been dealing with a deluge of applications for tax-exempt status at a time when its budget is shrinking. The size of the IRS workforce has dropped 9 percent from its 2010 level, and the agency has seen its budget cut in each of the last two fiscal years. This fiscal year, the amount the IRS spends per capita (meaning per citizen) will be 20 percent lower than it was in 2002, according to an analysis by tax expert David Cay Johnston.
Meanwhile, as Reuters reported, “The IRS has seen the number of groups applying for 501(c)4 status double in the wake of a January 2010 Supreme Court decision that loosened campaign-finance rules.” The Obama administration has requested budget increases for the IRS, but Republicans in Congress refuse to approve them. So it’s perhaps not surprising that already overworked employees at the agency looked for a few shortcuts.
And things are likely not going to get any better this summer when the IRS shuts down entirely for five days due to budget cuts under the so-called “sequester.” These cuts don’t just inconvenience people who need tax assistance; they cost the Treasury money. The IRS estimates that every dollar spent on enforcement brings in $4 to $5 in additional revenue, so cutting the IRS budget is akin to the government cutting off its nose to spite its face.
My colleague Robert Schlesinger noted today that the real scandal surrounding the attack at the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, is not who edited which talking point when, but that the State Department was denied funds to beef up consular security. Much the same can be said for the IRS. The scandal is not about the agency’s shortcuts, but the lawmakers who pushed it towards relying on bone-headed tactics by refusing to give it the money it needs to do its job.
By: Pat Garofalo, U. S. News and World Report, May 17, 2013
“Not Half As Clever As They Think They Are”: Does Anybody In Washington Know How To Run A Conspiracy?
In case you’ve forgotten, what took Benghazi from “a thing Republicans keep whining about” to “Scandal!!!” was when some emails bouncing around between the White House, the CIA, and the State Department were passed to Jonathan Karl of ABC last Friday. The strange thing about it was that the emails didn’t contain anything particularly shocking—no crimes admitted, no malfeasance revealed. It showed 12 different versions of talking points as everybody edited them, but why this made it a “scandal” no one bothered to say. My best explanation is that just the fact of obtaining previously hidden information, regardless of its content, is so exciting to reporters that they just ran with it. They’re forever trying to get a glimpse behind the curtain, and when they do, they almost inevitably shout “Aha!” no matter what.
But then the problem comes. The White House decided to release a whole batch of emails related to the subject, and when they were examined, it turns out that what was given to Karl had been altered. Altered by whom, you ask? Altered by Karl’s source: Republican staffers on the House Oversight Committee, which had been given the emails by the White House (CBS’s Major Garrett confirmed this yesterday).
Let me just explain quickly in case you haven’t been following this, and then we’ll discuss what it means. Two changes to the emails were made, one in an email from Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, and one from State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland. Rhodes actually wrote, “We need to resolve this in a way that respects all the relevant equities, particularly the investigation.” That was changed to, “We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don’t want to undermine the FBI investigation.” In the Nuland email, she actually wrote, “the penultimate point could be abused by Members to beat the State Department for not paying attention to Agency [CIA] warnings so why do we want to feed that either?,” which was changed to, “The penultimate point is a paragraph talking about all the previous warnings provided by the Agency about al-Qaeda’s presence and activities of al-Qaeda.”
So the changes have the effect of making it look like 1) the CIA was tying the attack to al Qaeda, but the State Department wanted to play that down publicly, and 2) the White House was taking special pains to protect the State Department. Neither of these things appear to be true, but there’s a logic to the Republican staffers wanting to paint that picture. Their argument, after all, is that the wrongdoing here consists of the White House (Obama!) and State Department (Clinton!) trying to fool everyone in America into thinking Benghazi wasn’t a terrorist attack, because Obama’s re-election hinged on the false belief that he had defeated al Qaeda forever, and if there’s any al Qaeda left then Mitt Romney would have won. And yes, that’s ridiculous, but it’s what many conservatives seem to believe.
Kevin Drum offers a good explanation for how this probably happened:
Republicans in Congress saw copies of these emails two months ago and did nothing with them. It was obvious that they showed little more than routine interagency haggling. Then, riding high after last week’s Benghazi hearings, someone got the bright idea of leaking two isolated tidbits and mischaracterizing them in an effort to make the State Department look bad. Apparently they figured it was a twofer: they could stick a shiv into the belly of the White House and they could then badger them to release the entire email chain, knowing they never would.
And then the White House called their bluff, because why not? It isn’t like there was anything incriminating in the real emails. But in their zeal to expose an imaginary White House/State Department conspiracy to mislead the public, the Republicans made their own little conspiracy to mislead the public. Or maybe it wasn’t a conspiracy, but just one person. We don’t know yet, because Karl hasn’t said who his source is. That’s his call to make; I’d argue that while in ordinary circumstances, the confidential relationship between reporter and source is sacrosanct, the reporter has every right to expose the source if the source lies to the reporter and makes him a party to a deception.
This is one of those times when you have to ask, “What the hell were they thinking?” Did the Republican staffers think they could get away with this? That once the White House noticed the alterations, they wouldn’t release the originals and use it to discredit their whole investigation? It’s another reminder that as a general rule, in politics nobody is half as clever as they think they are. Every once in a while you get a real honest-to-goodness conspiratorial scheme like Iran-Contra, but most of the time people are just bumbling about, making one poorly thought-out decision after another. The reason there aren’t more conspiracies is that people aren’t smart enough to put them together.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 17, 2013
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