It has loomed over Hillary Clinton’s political ambitions for four years: the death of four Americans, including her friend the ambassador, at a previously obscure outpost in Libya, all on her watch as secretary of state.
Benghazi was and is, arguably, the biggest black mark on Clinton’s legacy in office. And with Republicans on Capitol Hill digging in for a long and extensive examination of the incident and Clinton’s role back in September 2012, it represented a significant threat to Clinton’s presidential candidacy from its start.
But today’s release of the long-delayed and extraordinarily expensive report of the House Select Committee on Benghazi suggests it will have limited, if any, political fallout for Clinton. The committee did not uncover any startling new details of Clinton’s involvement or culpability, and the report appears unlikely to significantly alter public perceptions of a highly politicized tragedy.
The Benghazi committee, itself an answer to political pressures for a streamlined approach to GOP investigations of Benghazi, got tripped up in its own politics along the way.
Chairman Trey Gowdy, a former prosecutor, maintained from the start that the committee wasn’t interested in politics. The public side of his actions bore that out, for the most part.
But the committee was already a year and a half old when House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy famously cited its creation as contributing to Clinton’s then-suffering poll numbers.
“We put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today?” McCarthy, R-Calif., said last fall in comments that contributed to his withdrawal from the race for House speaker.
When the committee finally got its shot at interviewing Clinton, the 11-hour marathon grilling wound up eliciting enough sympathy for Clinton to create a campaign talking point out of it.
Clinton was lectured about her responsiveness and email habits. She was chided for finding it amusing to be asked whether she spent the whole night alone. And she was still standing at the end.
Even in releasing the report, the committee found itself enmeshed in politics. Democrats, who once considered boycotting the committee, released their own prebuttal report to protest not being allowed to review the report authored by Republicans.
To further confuse matters, two conservative members of the Benghazi panel went out on their own to author a more politically tinged side report to blast a “tragic failure of leadership” on behalf of Clinton and the Obama administration.
Asked today about the politics of the committee -- specifically, whether he agrees with the slogan “Hillary lied, people died” -- Gowdy deflected, insisting that the panel’s work was never about Clinton in particular.
“You don’t see that T-shirt on me, and you don’t see that bumper sticker on any of my vehicles,” the Republican from South Carolina said.
There were, and continue to be, serious questions worth pursuing about Benghazi: The Obama administration’s reaction to leader Muammar Gaddafi’s ouster; the commitment to that particular outpost in Libya, when other countries were withdrawing; the political tinge of the administration’s reaction to the tragedy in the weeks before the 2012 election.
There’s nothing in the report or its release for Clinton to celebrate. The issue of her personal email, which is the subject of a pending Justice Department probe that may never have happened if not for the Benghazi inquiries, still casts a long shadow on the campaign, to say nothing of the foreign-policy questions raised by the deadly attack.
In terms of public perception, though, judgments are hard to shake. Polling suggests a strong majority of voters disapprove of Clinton’s handling of Benghazi, but also that they believe GOP inquiries into her conduct are politically motivated.
Many of the same political forces that led to the creation of the committee have limited the inquiry’s political impact. Benghazi will likely never fade as a conservative talking point, but neither is it likely to become much more than that again.
from ABC News: Politics http://ift.tt/291kVwf
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