http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/articles/drip-drip-drip_1042861.html?nopager=1Drip, Drip, Drip
Congress’s Benghazi investigation has been slandered.
Stephen F. Hayes
October 19, 2015, Vol. 21, No. 06
There was never any doubt that Democrats in Washington would launch an aggressive campaign to discredit the House Select Committee on Benghazi. The only question was when they’d do it.
That inevitable effort got under way last week, after House majority leader Kevin McCarthy boasted to Sean Hannity that the committee’s work had hurt Hillary Clinton’s public standing.
McCarthy’s claim is undeniably true. The investigation uncovered the existence of Clinton’s personal email server, and her mendacious efforts to explain why she didn’t use a secure government email account to carry out her work as secretary of state have complicated her presidential bid. But it was a monumentally foolish thing for McCarthy to say. And his efforts to clean up the mess—in a follow-up interview on Fox News and later in a written statement—only made matters worse. When McCarthy stunned the political world on October 8 by announcing he would not be a candidate to replace John Boehner as speaker of the House, he cited his unhelpful comments and the furor they created as a contributing factor.
Within hours of his original comments, Democrats were recasting McCarthy’s words as an admission that the committee’s purpose had been political. And within days the Clinton campaign released an ad featuring McCarthy’s comments, echoing claims that the committee had been designed to bring down Clinton. “The Republicans finally admit it,” says the narrator. “The Republicans have spent millions attacking Hillary because she’s fighting for everything they oppose.”
So much drama. So much nonsense.
Acknowledging that the probe has had a political impact is in no way an admission that it was conceived to do so. But like Republicans who mischaracterize Clinton’s “what difference” comment as a declaration of indifference to the murder of the American ambassador and three colleagues in Benghazi (it was not), Clinton defenders are happy to distort McCarthy’s comment to make a political point.
Here’s the reality: Chairman Trey Gowdy has gone out of his way to accommodate Democrats on the committee. The committee has obtained copious amounts of fresh information somehow missed by the previous Benghazi inquiries. And Gowdy’s had this success despite a concerted and sustained effort by the Obama administration to obstruct his efforts.
The committee began its public work in the spring of 2014 with a hearing focused on the State Department’s progress in making policy changes that might prevent future attacks like the one in Benghazi. There was no shouting and little partisan rancor. The topic had come from Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, often a partisan one, who floated the subject after Gowdy asked Democrats for input. Some conservatives criticized Gowdy for going soft. Dana Milbank, a left-leaning columnist at the Washington Post, wrote that the hearing “was exactly what congressional oversight should be.”
This wasn’t just a public show of good faith. Behind the scenes, Gowdy invited Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the committee, to add topics to the investigation and to suggest witnesses that Democrats wanted to hear from. Cummings made no additions and offered no witnesses.
Gowdy set aside a tall stack of résumés from lawyers and investigators interested in the all-important job of chief counsel—many of them well-qualified, but with partisan background. He selected instead a no-nonsense three-star general whose political leanings, if he has any at all, remain a mystery even to his colleagues. His deputy chief counsel is a career former prosecutor who served under both Republicans and Democrats.
Despite these efforts, Democrats on the committee have sought to undermine its work and tarnish its credibility. The Obama administration has consistently refused cooperation or slow-rolled responses to the committee’s requests for access to witnesses or documents. What little cooperation the administration has provided has often come only after courts responding to outside lawsuits have forced the administration to cough up information.
Despite the administration’s attempt to thwart his investigation, Gowdy has managed to gain access to thousands of pages of previously unseen documents and more than 50 witnesses who were not interviewed in any previous Benghazi inquiry. The committee’s day-to-day focus remains on the attacks—the conditions that preceded them, the events of September 11-12, 2012, and the false narrative offered afterwards by key administration officials to downplay their significance. But public attention on the committee’s work has shifted from the attacks themselves to Clinton’s emails, in part because most journalists long ago lost interest in Benghazi details but more directly because so much of what Clinton has said about her emails has turned out to be untrue.
Clinton at first claimed she turned over all work-related emails to the State Department. False. (The committee later found emails between Clinton and both Sidney Blumenthal and David Petraeus that were not included by Clinton in her initial production.) She claimed that she turned over her emails in response to a routine request the State Department made of former secretaries. False. (A State Department spokesman acknowledged the request for Clinton’s emails was triggered by the revelation that she had a private server.) She claimed she never received a subpoena for the emails. False. (Gowdy produced one publicly to demonstrate that Clinton’s claim was untrue.) She claimed she used only one email device as secretary of state. False. (Clinton herself has acknowledged using multiple devices, and FOIA requests make clear that she used at least an iPad and a BlackBerry.) She claimed that she withheld her “personal” emails because of her private communications with her husband, among others. False. (A spokesman for Bill Clinton said the former president has sent just two emails in his life, both when he was president.) She claimed she never sent classified information on her email. False. (Reviews by the inspector general for the intelligence community found dozens of Clinton’s email exchanges included classified information.) She claimed that everything she did with respect to her email was allowed. False. (Clinton’s email setup indisputably violated the record retention requirements of the Obama administration, and the chief transparency officer at the State Department said the arrangement was “not acceptable.”) She claimed Blumenthal’s emails to her were “unsolicited.” False. (Clinton repeatedly solicited more information from Blumenthal in their email exchanges.)
On October 8, the Benghazi scandal and the email scandal, often treated as only tangentially related, converged in a striking way. That day, Gowdy released a blistering 13-page missive he had sent to Cummings. The letter opened by pushing back forcefully against claims of GOP partisanship, arguing such claims are undermined by the fact that the Obama administration—including the FBI and inspectors general of the intelligence community and the State Department—is now investigating the potential criminal wrongdoing surrounding the emails.
Gowdy waited until page 10 to drop the bombshell. As Sidney Blumenthal was advising Clinton on Libya in early 2011, specifically pushing greater U.S. support for the Libyan opposition, a company he was working with was seeking security contracts with the Libyan opposition.
In an email to Clinton on May 5, 2011, under the subject “French economic grab,” Blumenthal warns that the French are seeking security contracts with the Libyan opposition, a development he argues would give them an important foothold with the post-Qaddafi Libyan government. Clinton responds after meeting with officials of Libya’s Transitional National Council (TNC). “Just met with TNC again, but no signed contracts! Thx.”
While it wasn’t clear whether Clinton knew about Blumenthal’s interest at that time, she certainly knew about it in a subsequent exchange where she appeared to offer to serve as a Blumenthal emissary to the TNC. On July 14, 2011, Blumenthal provides Clinton information about U.S. security contracts in advance of her meeting with TNC representatives. Under the subject “H: IMPORTANT FOR YOUR MEETING. Sid,” Blumenthal tells Clinton that she will soon learn about an agreement between a new company named Osprey Global Solutions and the Libyan opposition. Blumenthal touts the unique ability of Osprey to meet the security needs of the TNC and reports: “This is the group the TNC wants to work with.” Blumenthal then notes that he and two other informal Clinton advisers “acted as honest brokers, putting this arrangement together through a series of connections, linking the Libyans to Osprey and keeping it moving.”
Clinton responds by forwarding Blumenthal’s email to Jake Sullivan, her deputy chief of staff, with a note that she wants to discuss it with him, and replying to Blumenthal, affirming that she’d received his memo and asking, “Anything else to convey?”
What exactly was Blumenthal’s role with Osprey Global Solutions? Was he paid for brokering these deals? How much? What else did Clinton know about the arrangement? Did Osprey get the contract?
Why weren’t these emails included in the initial Clinton email production? And what other emails haven’t we seen?
These are just a few of the many questions that arise from the revelations last week. And we can be sure that Hillary Clinton will be asked about them when she appears before the committee on October 22.
