Republican report on Benghazi released
House panel blasts agencies for delay in response, failure to grasp security risks
A final report issued by the GOP-majority committee finds fault with the White House’s response but provides no new evidence of wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton.
WASHINGTON — Ending one of the longest, costliest and most bitterly partisan congressional investigations in history, the House Select Committee on Benghazi issued its final report Tuesday, finding no new evidence of culpability or wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton in the 2012 attacks in Libya that left four Americans dead.
The 800-page report, however, included some new details about the night of the attacks, and the context in which they occurred, and it delivered a broad rebuke of government agencies like the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department — and the officials who led them — for failing to grasp the acute security risks in Benghazi, and especially for maintaining outposts there that they could not protect.
The committee, led by Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., also harshly criticized an internal State Department investigation that it said had allowed officials like Clinton, then the secretary of state, to effectively choose who would investigate their actions. In addition, it reiterated Republicans’ complaints that the Obama administration had sought to thwart the investigation by withholding witnesses and evidence.
The report, which includes perhaps the most exhaustive chronology to date of the attacks on a U.S. diplomatic compound and their aftermath, did not dispute that U.S. military forces stationed in Europe could not have reached Benghazi in time to rescue the personnel who died.
Still, it issued stinging criticism of the overall delay in response and the lack of preparedness on the part of the government.
“The assets ultimately deployed by the Defense Department in response to the Benghazi attacks were not positioned to arrive before the final lethal attack,” the committee wrote. “The fact that this is true does not mitigate the question of why the world’s most powerful military was not positioned to respond.”
Cost estimated at $7 million
But the lack of any clear-cut finding of professional misconduct or dereliction of duty was certain to fuel further criticism of the length the investigation — more than two years — and the expense, estimated at more than $7 million, in addition to Democrats’ allegations that the inquiry was specifically intended to damage Clinton’s presidential prospects.
After a campaign stop in Denver on Tuesday, Clinton told reporters that the investigation had uncovered nothing to contradict past findings, arguing that the House committee’s work had assumed a “partisan tinge.”
“I’ll leave it to others to characterize this report,” she said,
after taking a rare question from the traveling news media, “but I think it’s pretty clear, it’s time to move on.”
In a sign that Gowdy was also facing pressure from the right, two of the committee’s conservative members, Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Mike Pompeo of Kansas, wrote a 48-page addendum including somewhat harsher criticism of the Obama administration, its response to the attacks and its subsequent public explanations.
Technically, the report is not final until the full committee formally votes to accept it, which is expected as early as July 8.
By far, the committee’s most significant disclosure, even by Republicans’ own account, was unintentional and not directly related to Benghazi: that Clinton had exclusively used a private email server during her four years as secretary of state. That
revelation has spurred separate investigations into whether classified material was mishandled.
The Democrats on the committee said the Benghazi investigation dragged on longer than far more important congressional inquiries like the ones into the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The Democrats also complained that they had been excluded from the development of the panel’s conclusions.
House Republicans added, inadvertently at times, to the general sense that the committee was focusing too intently on Clinton. Democrats seized on comments by the House majority leader, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, who boasted on Fox News in September that the committee’s work had put a dent in Clinton’s poll numbers.
The previous investigations had concluded that State Department officials had erred in not better securing the diplomatic compound amid reports of a deteriorating security situation. But the inquiries also determined that the attacks had come with little warning and that it would have been difficult to intervene once they had begun.
‘Simply was not enough time’
The investigations generally concluded that after the attack, the Obama administration’s talking points — a matter of much dispute — were flawed but not deliberately misleading.
The Pentagon had no forces that could be readily sent to Benghazi when the crisis unfolded. The closest AC-130 gunship was in Afghanistan. There are no armed drones within range of Libya. There was no Marine expeditionary unit — a large seaborne force with its own helicopters — in the Mediterranean Sea.
The unclassified version of a 2012 independent report into the attacks, headed by Thomas Pickering, a former diplomat, concluded that “there simply was not enough time given the speed of the attacks for armed U.S. military assets to have made a difference.”
But the report did not address whether it would have been prudent to station quick-reaction forces in the region — a step the Pentagon has since taken in the aftermath of the tragedy.
On Sept. 11, 2012, Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and Sean Smith, a State Department information officer, were killed in an attack on the main U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi by a mob of militia fighters who had been incited by an Americanmade video deriding the Prophet Muhammad. The fighters were apparently further inflamed by news of an assault on the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.
Two other Americans, Tyrone S. Woods and Glen A. Doherty, who were contractors for the CIA, died later when a separate annex run by the agency came under mortar attack.