The Department of Defense’s recent criticism of the House Select Committee on Benghazi and headlines like “The Benghazi slow-walk: How to drag out an investigation for maximum political impact” demonstrate the level of scrutiny that has been placed on the committee’s chairman, Rep. Trey Gowdy.
The left and its shills in the media have done everything they can to discredit and undermine the work of the committee. But while they attack Gowdy, it is important to remember why the investigative committee exists in the first place: We lost four Americans in Benghazi and the administration lied about it.
At the base level, the mere fact the United States failed to protect U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, Foreign Service officer Sean Smith, and CIA contractors Tyrone S. Woods and Glen Doherty at a U.S. Consulate in Benghazi warrants further investigation. Congressional review and oversight is needed to ensure that the proper safety precautions are being enforced at embassies and consulates to protect Americans living abroad.
Further, the investigation might be over if the administration had not peddled a false narrative for political gain and stonewalled the investigative process by refusing to turn over documents.
The administration lied about Benghazi to help get President Obama re-elected. It was Secretary Hillary Clinton and United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice who knowingly and falsely blamed a YouTube video for the attack. They did so just two months before the 2012 election and shortly after President Obama said at campaign events that al Qaeda was “on the run.”
We know it was a lie because Hillary Clinton emailed her daughter on the night of the attack, writing, “two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an al Qaeda-like group.” She said the same thing to the Libyan president that night and the Egyptian prime minister the next day, even stating the attacks “had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack — not a protest.” Yet, despite those statements she chose to repeat the false video narrative at a transfer of remains ceremony for our four dead Americans just days later.
On the morning of the funeral, a State Department official at the embassy in Tripoli, Libya, wrote in an email “it is becoming increasingly clear that the series of events in Benghazi was much more terrorist attack than a protest which escalated into violence.” Michael Morell, former deputy director and acting director of the CIA, also said that intelligence “analysts never said the video was a factor in the Benghazi attacks.”
Chairman Gowdy has recently said that the committee’s work will reveal information about the Department of Defense’s response to the attack that many will consider “eye opening.” Perhaps the Pentagon is getting nervous, which is why an official released a contradictory letter stating that the committee is asking questions based on speculation instead of facts. But former CIA Director David Petraeus has undermined that narrative by claiming in the past that the committee’s time with him was “very constructive.”
The Democrats on the committee continue to claim that Gowdy has not uncovered anything new, but that is not the case. The investigation is working and the committee’s work is not finished. It was the Benghazi Committee that unearthed Hillary Clinton’s use of private email for official State Department business, which the Associated Press later linked to a private email server. The committee has also been obtaining and reviewing information from four parts of the federal government: The military, the intelligence community, the White House and the State Department.
The committee has compiled a massive amount of information since it was established on May 8, 2014. It has interviewed 97 witnesses so far, 75 of whom had never before been interviewed by Congress. Since the Clinton hearing alone, the committee has interviewed 42 witnesses and obtained more than 74,000 new pages of documents. All of these documents are in addition to the approximately 50,000 that had been previously produced to other committees. In February, after months of negotiations with the White House, the Benghazi Committee also interviewed Susan Rice and Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, which is something no other congressional committee has done. In early April, the committee was finally able to view a specific type of CIA records that no one else has ever seen.
The Democrats on the Select Committee have also complained about the length and cost of the investigation. But those complaints would be more credible if the Democrats hadn’t wasted more than $2.3 million obstructing the process. And those complaints could be taken more seriously if the Democrats had requested even a single document or witness from the Obama administration.
Investigations take time and Chairman Gowdy should be given as much of it as he needs to get to the bottom of what happened. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s report on the CIA enhanced interrogation program, which did not involve interviewing witnesses, took five years and cost taxpayers $40 million.
The House Select Committee on Benghazi is not finished with its investigation. The victims’ families deserve to know that Congress and the Obama administration have done everything they can to get answers and protect other Americans living overseas.
Lisa Boothe is a contributing columnist for The Washington Examiner and president of High Noon Strategies.
