House Benghazi Report Finds No New Evidence of Wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton
David M. Herszenhorn
“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” Mr. McCarthy said. “But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought.”
Those comments helped derail Mr. McCarthy’s bid to succeed Speaker John A. Boehner. Mr. Gowdy has long disavowed the remarks, saying the discovery of the private email server was highly unexpected and not a focus of his continuing work.
Watch the Benghazi Hearing in 3 Minutes
Watch highlights from the House hearing about an attack in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, when Hillary Rodham Clinton was secretary of state. The hearing began at 10 a.m. and, with breaks, lasted until 9 p.m.
By PAUL VOLPE and QUYNHANH DO on October 22, 2015. Photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times. Watch in Times Video »
The discovery that Mrs. Clinton had used the private email server, including during the time of the Benghazi attack, led to at least a temporary shift in focus of the investigation, which had already shown signs of drifting and dragging amid the acrimony between congressional Republicans and the Obama administration.
There was also internal discord, which led to a former investigator for the committee, Bradley F. Podliska, a major in the Air Force Reserve, filing a lawsuit alleging that he was fired for trying to conduct a thorough investigation into attacks while superiors wanted to focus on the private email server.
The committee said Mr. Podliska was fired for cause, including mishandling of classified information.
In the most dramatic confrontation over the two years of the investigation, Mrs. Clinton testified before the committee for more than eight hours in October.
The hearing, which took place not long after Mr. McCarthy made his remarks, was widely perceived to have backfired on Republicans, as Mrs. Clinton answered their questions and coolly deflected their attacks. The hearing produced no major revelations about Mrs. Clinton’s handling of the Benghazi assaults.
By the time of her testimony, Mrs. Clinton had already taken responsibility for the State Department’s handling of the attacks.
The previous investigations had concluded that State Department officials had erred in not better securing the diplomatic compound amid reports of a deteriorating security situation. But the inquiries also determined that the attacks had come with little warning and that it would have been difficult to intervene once they had begun.
The investigations generally concluded that after the attack, the Obama administration’s talking points — a matter of much dispute — were flawed but not deliberately misleading.
On Sept. 11, 2012, Mr. Stevens and Sean Smith, a State Department information officer, were killed in an attack on the main American diplomatic compound in Benghazi by a mob of militia fighters who had been incited by an American-made video deriding the Prophet Muhammad. The fighters were apparently further inflamed by news of an assault on the American Embassy in Cairo.
Two other Americans, Tyrone S. Woods and Glen A. Doherty, who were contractors for the C.I.A., died later when a separate annex run by the agency came under mortar attack.
Previous investigations, including the internal inquiry by the State Department, found serious security gaps but also concluded that American forces could not have reached Benghazi in time to save the Americans, despite claims by some Republicans that Mrs. Clinton had ordered troops to “stand down.”
The Republican-controlled House adopted a resolution establishing the Select Committee on the Events Surrounding the 2012 Terrorist Attack in Benghazi, Libya, on May 8, 2014. The vote was 232 to 186 with seven Democrats joining Republicans in favor. Not a single Republican opposed the resolution.
At that point, in addition to the State Department’s review, there had been at least seven other congressional inquiries into the Benghazi attacks. A House Intelligence Committee investigation, perhaps the most comprehensive until now, found that Obama administration officials had not intentionally misled the public with their talking points in the days after the attacks.
By its own count, the select committee interviewed at least 107 witnesses, including 81 who committee staff members said had not previously been interviewed by Congress. The committee also said it had reviewed 75,000 pages of documents.
In a statement accompanying the release of the report, Mr. Gowdy praised the Americans who died as “heroes” and he defended his own handling of the investigation.
“When the Select Committee was formed, I promised to conduct this investigation in a manner worthy of the American people’s respect, and worthy of the memory of those who died,” Mr. Gowdy said. “That is exactly what my colleagues and I have done.”
But in a flash of the combative posture that has drawn criticism, he also urged citizens to form their own conclusions, saying: “You can read this report in less time than our fellow citizens were taking fire and fighting for their lives on the rooftops and in the streets of Benghazi.”
On Monday, Mr. Gowdy issued yet another statement accusing the administration of obstructing the investigation.
“For nearly a year and a half, the State Department has withheld documents and information about Benghazi and Libya from the American people’s elected representatives in Congress,” Mr. Gowdy said. “Whatever the administration is hiding, its justifications for doing so are imaginary and appear to be invented for the sake of convenience. That’s not how complying with a congressional subpoena works, and it’s well past time the department stops stonewalling.”
Mr. Gowdy said some of the documents were first requested in November 2014.
Among the committee’s most substantive recommendations were a change in the security standards for temporary diplomatic outposts.
“The State Department should comply with the requirements of the Overseas Security Protection Board and the standards provided for in the Secure Embassy Construction and Counterterrorism Act for all premises/facilities occupied for more than 30 days, whether official or unofficial,” the committee wrote, adding: “The State Department should identify a specific funding source for immediate security upgrades for posts in high threat areas.”
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