Former Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) may not be a member of the Select Solyndra IRS Committee to Investigate the Benghazi ACORN Birth Certificate, but they're following his playbook to the letter.
Having failed to uncover anything incriminating or exciting in Hillary Clinton's emails, staffers of the Bullshit Committee have begun leaking misleading information in the same vein as Darrell Issa.
According to an anonymous staffer, emails have led the committee to believe the former secretary of state and former Clinton White House aide Sidney Blumenthal may have colluded with Media Matters to cover up ..something.. following the attack on the American embassy in Benghazi.
This is how Politico originally reported it:
While still secretary of state, Clinton emailed back and forth with Blumenthal about efforts by one of the groups, Media Matters, to neutralize criticism of her handling of the deadly assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, sources tell POLITICO.
"Got all this done. Complete refutation on Libya smear," Blumenthal wrote to Clinton in an Oct. 10, 2012, email into which he had pasted links to four Media Matters posts criticizing Fox News and Republicans for politicizing the Benghazi attacks and challenging claims of lax security around the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, according to a source who has reviewed the email exchange. Blumenthal signed off the email to Clinton by suggesting that one of her top aides, Philippe Reines, "can circulate these links," according to the source. Clinton responded: "Thanks, I'm pushing to WH," according to the source.
This is the truth:
Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), ranking member of the Committee, writes in a July 6 letter that "a Member of the Committee, a staffer on the Committee, or someone who has been given access to the Committee's documents inaccurately described to the press email exchanges obtained by the Committee in a way that appeared to further a political attack against" Clinton. Cummings describes this as "only the latest in a reckless pattern of selective Republican leaks and mischaracterizations of evidence relating to the Benghazi attacks." [...]
Cummings notes that Clinton's email reading "Thanks, I'm pushing to WH" came not in response to Blumenthal's email with the Media Matters links, as Politico indicated, but rather in response to a "completely different" Blumenthal email from nine days earlier "forwarding an article from Salon.com reporting that Republicans were planning to claim inaccurately during the presidential debates that the White House had advance knowledge about the Benghazi attacks and failed to act on it."
The idea that Media Matters was enlisted by Hillary Clinton to run interference on the fallout from Benghazi or cover-up the story is sexy, but there's not an ounce of truth to it.
Furthermore, there is nothing to cover up and there never was. Multiple Republican-controlled committees, including the Intelligence Committee and the Armed Services Committee, confirmed there was no conspiracy during the previous session of Congress.
By its nature of being a media watchdog, Media Matters would necessarily find itself countering a cavalcade of right wing media manure following the attack on Benghazi. We all continue to find ourselves in this position several years after the attack.
If an anonymous staffer from the Select Benghazi Committee (or any other committee that is singularly focused on a fake scandal) contacts you with salacious information, you may want to verify it with a second source before publishing.