On Fox News’s Special Report Thursday night, host Bret Baier and panelist Laura Ingraham discussed the role of former House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers in heading up national security planning for Donald Trump’s transition. Both mentioned that conservatives are concerned with his position, given the heavy criticism he received for his committee’s 2014 report on Benghazi. The Republican lawmaker’s work was assailed as incomplete, and it differed dramatically from what Rep. Trey Gowdy’s select committee produced in summer 2016.
“Here’s a candidate [Trump] who ran in part on the Benghazi issue. You’ve got the 13 Hours guys that endorsed Donald Trump. And you’ve got a guy running your national security transition that comes under fire from conservatives over Benghazi,” Baier said.
“The 13 Hours guys were infuriated, fuming when that report came out, because the report basically called their integrity into question—said that these heroes were doing it just to sell a book,” Ingraham added.
The WEEKLY STANDARD’s Stephen F. Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies detailed Rogers’s report in December 2014, and noted the conservative pushback against it—including from some members of the Intelligence Committee in his own party:
As lawmakers headed home for Thanksgiving two weeks ago, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a report concluding that there were no intelligence failures related to the September 11, 2012, attacks in Benghazi and otherwise bolstering claims by the administration and its defenders that the controversy surrounding the attacks and their aftermath was rooted more in the imaginations of critics than in reality. For many of those who had been following the story closely, the report was bizarre and troubling. Key events were left out. Important figures were never mentioned. Well-known controversies were elided. Congressional testimony on controversial issues was mischaracterized. The authoritative tone of the conclusions was undermined by the notable gaps in evidence presented to support them. “If this was a high school paper, I would give it an F,” says John Tiegen, a former CIA officer who fought on the ground that night in Benghazi and lived through many of the events the report purports to describe. “There are so many mistakes it’s hard to know where to begin. How can an official government report get so many things wrong?” It’s a good question. Representative Tom Rooney, a Florida Republican who serves on the committee that produced the report, disputes the premise. “I don’t think this is the official government report. It’s Mike Rogers’s report,” says Rooney. “The members of his own committee don’t even agree with it.” Indeed, several committee members we reached distanced themselves from the report released in their name, some on background, others on the record. “I probably would have written it differently,” says Representative Mac Thornberry, a Republican from Texas who will assume the chairmanship of the House Armed Services Committee in the new Congress. “And it’s important to remember that this is a narrow look at just one part of the Benghazi story. All of the talk that this report answers this, that, and the other? It doesn’t. That’s the reason that Boehner appointed the select committee.” Representative Peter King, a Republican from New York, signed an “additional views” statement but was unhappy with the report itself. “It was nowhere near the report I would have written,” King told us. “I agreed with some of the key findings—that the State Department was told about threats, that the intelligence community determined almost immediately that it was a terrorist attack. And I thought to reject it altogether wouldn’t have been smart; better to get some of that out there. But the best interpretation is that it was an attempt to be bipartisan. And that’s the best interpretation.”
