By Karoun Demirjian
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — House Republicans on Tuesday released an 800-page report on the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, with no significant new blame placed on then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The panel’s report, spearheaded by South Carolina Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy, contended Clinton was “inadequately prepared” to explain the September 2012 attacks on a U.S. diplomatic outpost and a CIA annex that left four Americans dead, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens.
But significantly, it did not reveal any new evidence of concrete wrongdoing on the part of Clinton but a series of miscommunications and oversights that left the secretary of state and her team unable to properly respond to or explain the attack in the hours and days that followed.
The lack of a smoking gun that would assign more responsibility for the incident to Clinton is only likely to embolden Democrats, who have long called for the probe’s end and dubbed it nothing more than a partisan witch hunt.
Nonetheless, the episode was among the low points of Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state and the report’s release comes just before the Democratic convention in Cleveland, where Clinton is expected to be nominated for president.
On Tuesday, Gowdy objected to the idea there was not much new information in his report – and to Democrats’ criticism that his committee had political aims.
“You didn’t know about any of the emails from Ambassador Stevens,” Gowdy charged. “You didn’t know that a single U.S. military asset did not meet a single designated timeline … all of that is new.”
“Color me shocked that they are critical of our report,” Gowdy said of Democrats, accusing them of being “serial leakers of information” during the two-year investigation.
He also disputed the notion that the report or its timing was intended to affect Clinton’s political campaign, arguing that neither former House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, nor current Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., had “ever asked me to do anything about presidential politics.”
“My job is to report facts,” Gowdy told reporters. “You can draw whatever conclusions you want to draw.”
At a press conference to mark the report’s release on Tuesday — attended only by Republicans — Gowdy placed most of the blame for the attacks on the military for failing to be prepared and respond quickly enough to the assault.
“Nothing could have reached Benghazi because nothing was ever headed to Benghazi,” Gowdy stated. “Not a single wheel of a single U.S. military asset had even turned toward Libya.”
Gowdy rebuked the military and Washington leaders for failing to make convincing moves to rush assistance to Benghazi once they knew it was under attack – even if it would have been difficult for that help to arrive in time.
“Washington had access to real-time information,” Gowdy continued, “but that real-time information did not inform and instruct the actions” that were being taken.
The Obama administration has argued that the eight-hour span in which the attacks took place was simply not enough time to muster an effective response. But the panel’s Republicans seemed to blame the administration for not trying hard enough anyway.
The release of the lengthy report – after two years and at least $7 million spent – could mark the end of the congressional probes into Benghazi and its aftermath. Benghazi panel Democrats did not sign on to the report offered their own version of events, which charged the panel “squandered millions of taxpayer dollars” on the probe.
Two Republican panel members – Reps. Jim Jordan, Ohio, and Mike Pompeo, Kan. – issued a more harshly worded supplement to the full report, however, and the full panel won’t vote on the report until July 8.
“Secretary Clinton failed to lead,” Pompeo and Jordan wrote. “She missed the last, clear chance to protect her people.”
And Clinton – now the Democrats presumptive presidential nominee – slammed Republicans for failing to act in a bipartisan manner and for the GOP’s conduct during the investigation.
“The Republicans on the House Benghazi Committee are finishing their work in the same, partisan way that we’ve seen from them since the beginning,” said spokesman Brian Fallon.
“… the Committee report has not found anything to contradict the conclusions of the multiple, earlier investigations,” Fallon added, contending that as some Republicans have said, the probe’s “chief goal is to politicize the deaths of four brave Americans in order to try to attack the Obama administration and hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”
Among the panel’s findings released Tuesday was a CIA intelligence assessment dated two days after the Benghazi attack that it called “rife with errors.”
One such error was a simple word substitution that had “major implications” in how the administration spoke of the attacks: A CIA report that told of how “Extremists Capitalized on Benghazi Protests” actually should have said “Extremists Capitalized on Cairo Protest,” the panel reported.
Republicans on Tuesday stressed that the goal of their investigation was not to tarnish Clinton, but to discover the truth about what had happened and thus ensure a similar attack would never reoccur.
But congressional Democrats were already slamming the probe as a complete waste of time.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, charged that the report was “blatantly political,” “squandered $7 million of taxpayer funds,” and “diverted significant Defense Department, State Department and intelligence community resources.”
“And what do we have to show for it?” Feinstein continued. “Yet another report that finds no wrongdoing by Secretary Clinton.”
The Senate Intelligence Committee in 2014 released its own report, which was bipartisan, that faulted both the State Department and the intelligence community for failing to prevent the attacks.
That report said the State Department failed to increase security at its mission despite warnings, and blamed intelligence agencies for not sharing information about the existence of the CIA outpost with the U.S. military.
The GOP-led panel interviewed 81 new witnesses and reviewed 75,000 pages of new documents, it said.
Among its new findings, Republicans said:
– No military assets were sent or en route to Benghazi as many as eight hours after the attacks began, despite direct orders from President Barack Obama and then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.
– A “Fleet Anti-Terrorism Security Team” sat on the runway in Rota, Spain, for three hours, with the crew “changing in and out of their uniforms four times.”
– None of the military forces “met their required deployment timelines.”
– The Libyan forces who helped evacuate the CIA annex near the Benghazi airport were not U.S. allies, but instead former Gadhafi loyalists who the CIA had helped to oust from power.
– Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Paul Winnefeld did not participate in a White House meeting the night of the attacks because “he went home to host a dinner party for foreign dignitaries.”
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