It is likely that other pundits and political observers have made the following connections, as we have. However, we’ve not seen any.
The Daily Caller attempts to mitigate the damage done by Kevin McCarthy’s GOP political “gaffe of the millennium” by noting that the Benghazi Select Committee was created BEFORE Hillary had announced her candidacy AND because her emails had been withheld by the White House, suggesting that because of the Republicans’ relentless search for truth , Speaker Boehner moved decisively to get to the bottom of it.
Unfortunately this article also reveals in the excerpt below that the Republicans discovered nothing until “conservative watchdog group, Judicial Watch” uncovered the evidence of withheld emails. Poor John Boehner then had no choice but to actually do something that might have a chance of being effective. So after 18 months of resisting pleas by fellow Republican congressmen, who had very reasonable suspicions that there was much more to the Benghazi debacle than the Obama administration had revealed, he named the Select Committee.
While Congressman McCarthy was so eager for the GOP leadership to get credit for the withheld email scandal, it is a fact that it wasn’t the committee or the leadership, of which McCarthy is a part, who uncovered it! It was the independent watchdog group, Judicial Watch.
Then there is also former Republican congressman and Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Mike Rogers’ valiant effort to completely discredit any GOP investigation. If you are a conservative you wouldn’t want Mr. Rogers in your neighborhood. His “investigation findings” of the Benghazi matter was not just “controversial”, it was embarrassingly suggestive of ham- handed corruption. Rogers’ final report on the results of his inquiry should have made him “former congressman” the same afternoon. It would be charitable to say “the fix was in”.
Finally, it seems a bit silly for the “spinners” to rely on Hillary not having yet announced her ’16 presidential candidacy as “proof” that the Select Committee was not really intended to damage her campaign. If only they’d asked us, we would have advised Speaker Boehner that Hillary’s candidacy was a pretty good bet.
All in all, Kevin McCarthy’s historically stupid comments may well doom the GOP’s fortunes in the 2016 election. It is certain that the weak spin we’ve seen so far isn’t going to save the party.
Our belief is that the only chance for the Republicans at this point to repudiate the charge that the Benghazi investigation is merely political is to insure that Mr. McCarthy is not elevated to the Speaker’s position. But then, the GOP Establishment wouldn’t be the Establishment if it did sensible stuff like that. Right, Karl?
Never Forget That The Benghazi Committee Was Created Because The White House Withheld Emails
Democrats and the Hillary Clinton campaign are pushing back hard against the investigation being conducted by the House Select Committee on Benghazi. They claim that its goal is to thwart Clinton’s White House presidential bid.
But as Bloomberg View’s Eli Lake asserts in a new report, the Clinton camp has only the Obama administration to blame for the special panel’s creation.
Despite what Democrats argue now, the special committee was created well before Clinton had announced her presidential bid. It was also created before anyone knew that she used a personal email account and private server as secretary of state. On top of that, House GOP leadership resisted the idea up until it was revealed in April 2014 that the Obama administration had withheld smoking gun emails from the House Oversight Committee. . . .
“Virginia Rep. Frank Wolf, who is now retired, pushed Boehner to create a special committee to investigate further. He even drummed up enough votes to support the special panel, but Boehner declined to move forward.
“But that all changed in April 2014 when the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch obtained an email sent on Sept. 14, 2012 by Deputy Strategic Communications Adviser Ben Rhodes.
“In the email, Rhodes provided talking points to White House press staff about an upcoming conference call to prepare Susan Rice, then the U.S. Ambassador to the UN. Rice was slated to appear on Sunday morning political talk shows to discuss the Benghazi attack, which left four Americans dead.”
Once again, it was Judicial Watch that discovered that fact, forcing the issue on Republican leadership, lest their nonfeasance be aggravated.
DLH
