Bloomberg is reporting that President Trump is considering former Rep. Mike Rogers to replace James Comey as FBI director. Rogers is a former FBI agent; by the end of his seven terms in Congress he was the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Bloomberg’s report suggest that Rogers “would likely be well received by Republican leaders in Congress.” However, as THE WEEKLY STANDARD reported in December 2014, Rogers earned the ire of many of his House colleagues with his mishandling of the Benghazi investigation. Stephen F. Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn enumerated the many details that emerged in the months after the attack that killed four Americans including Ambassador Chris Stevens and reported that:
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?”
Lest that be considered ancient history or information of which Donald Trump was not aware, that very bungling is what reportedly got Rogers kicked off Trump’s transition team back in January. As TWS’s Michael Warren reported at the time:
While others are reporting that Rogers was pushed out because of his alliance with ousted transition chief Chris Christie, sources tell THE WEEKLY STANDARD that the Trump transition team grew skittish about Rogers over concerns about the former congressman’s Intelligence committee report on the September 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. The transition team’s executive committee discussed the 2014 Rogers report, which most of his fellow Republicans on the Intelligence committee did not endorse, on its first conference call on Saturday.
Read the 2014 article by Hayes and Joscelyn here; read Warren’s January report here.
