The Select Solyndra IRS Committee to Investigate the Benghazi ACORN Birth Certificate has finally released the blockbuster report they've been building for years and, just as we all suspected, it's a nothingburger.
The long anticipated report includes no new information proving former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did Benghazi and does not explicitly blame her for anything. The report appears to be more critical of the military while also admitting that U.S. forces could not have reached the embassy quick enough to stop the attack.
From the New York Times:
The report, however, did not dispute that United States military forces stationed in Europe could not have reached Benghazi in time to rescue the personnel who died — a central finding of previous inquiries.
“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.”
The report makes a big deal out of the lack of assets positioned to respond to an emergency, but I'm sure everyone remembers that congressional Republicans cut funding for State Department security. Austerity and sequestration pushed by congressional Republicans drastically cut funding for the Department of Defense and the State Department.
The report also claims their "investigation" was stonewalled by the White House, the State Department, and Hillary Clinton, but really, who gives a shit?
This "investigation," if you could legitimately call it that, has been ongoing for 4 years. Multiple Republican-controlled committees have issued reports over multiple sessions of Congress that all say essentially the same thing. The report released today is a redundant document that doesn't tell us anything relevant that we didn't already know.
With all of that said, this doesn't necessarily mean Benghazi(!), as it were, is going away.
Several Republican members of the Select Benghazi Committee published their own report that is more critical than the official report released by Chairman Trey Gowdy. This suggest to me that the Republican appetite for Benghazi conspiracy theories is not going away. If would not surprise me if Chairman Gowdy is thrown under a bus and accused of being a sellout by wingnut writers and some of his own colleagues in the House.
Rather that concede that there is no smoking gun, they might accuse Gowdy of not trying hard enough to fabricate it.
Moreover, I doubt Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and the RNC are going to stop talking about Benghazi. It's all they've got.
Let's never forget how this all started on that night in 2012.
