POLITICS - Latest GOP Benghazi Report

aka "A Primer on How to Waste Taxpayer Money"

"Two years, $7 million, 800 pages later, GOP Benghazi report lands with a thud" PBS NewsHour 6/28/2016

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton loomed large in the House Republican probe of the deaths of the U.S. ambassador to Libya in the Benghazi attack.  Hauled before a GOP panel, she was grilled for eight hours.  On Tuesday, an 800-page report landed and House Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-SC), denied the probe was ever about Clinton.  Political director Lisa Desjardins joins Gwen Ifill.

GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  After years of investigations, interviews, and hearings, the House special committee looking into the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, released 800 pages of findings today.

The assault, which resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador, slams the Obama administration for lax security and a sluggish response, but it doesn’t lay blame at then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s doorstep.

Republican Congressman Trey Gowdy, the panel’s chairman, said Clinton, now the Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee, was never the focus of the inquiry.

REP. TREY GOWDY (R), Chairman, House Select Committee on Benghazi:  Speaker Boehner asked me to find out what happened to four of our fellow citizens, and I believe that is what I have done.

You are welcome to read that report.  I hope you will.  I know you will.  If you at the end of reading that report can conclude that it is about one person, instead of about four people, I will be shocked.  I think the American people ought to look at it.  They ought to look at it because fellow Americans died and fellow Americans were injured and fellow Americans went to heroic lengths to save other Americans.  What conclusions they draw after reading it is up to them.

GWEN IFILL:  The White House, and Clinton herself, said the investigation was always politically motivated.  She weighed in during a campaign stop today in Denver.

HILLARY CLINTON (D), Former Secretary of State:  After more than two years and $7 million spent by the Benghazi committee out of taxpayer funds, it had to today report that it had found nothing, nothing to contradict the conclusions of the independent accountability board or the conclusions of the prior multiple earlier investigations.

I will leave it to others to characterize this report, but I think it’s pretty clear it’s time to move on.

GWEN IFILL:  Lisa Desjardins (NewsHour) has been reading into the report and its findings.  She joins me now.