House Benghazi panel finds no evidence of wrongdoing by Clinton

WASHINGTON — Ending one of the longest, costliest and most bitterly partisan congressional investigations in history, the U.S. 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 it 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 the Libyan city, and especially for maintaining outposts in Benghazi 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, however, did not dispute that U.S. military forces stationed in Europe could not have reached Benghazi in time to rescue the personnel who died — a central finding of previous inquiries.

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.”

“What was disturbing from the evidence the Committee found was that at the time of the final lethal attack,” the panel added, “no asset ordered deployed by the Secretary had even left the ground.”

But the lack of any crisp, hardhitting allegation 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.

And 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