Later this morning House Republicans on the Benghazi Select Committee will release their long-awaited report on the events surrounding the 2012 Benghazi terror attacks that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.
According to a committee member and staff who have seen it, the report says there was intelligence leading up to the attacks that the diplomatic consulate and CIA annex there were not safe, and that top officials in the U.S. State Department, including Hillary Clinton and Under Secretary Patrick Kennedy , should have realized that.
“It is not clear what additional intelligence would have satisfied either Kennedy or the Secretary in understanding the Benghazi mission compound was at risk short of an attack,” says the report, according a source who has seen it.
Eighty new witness accounts, including nine eyewitnesses never interviewed before, will be included in this final congressional report on Benghazi. In all, the committee logged over 16,000 pages of transcripts.
Sources on Capitol Hill say the report will refute some findings of the previous investigations and focus on the fact the administration initially blamed the attack on an anti-Muslim video.
"Benghazi, Libya was a terrorist haven and so those folks who were involved in not protecting these Americans certainly should be held accountable," committee member Congressman Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kansas) told ABC News in an interview. "The folks who told a wolf tale, a lie in the aftermath of the attacks who told the American people a political tale about a YouTube video ought [to] also be accountable."
Democrats on the committee were not allowed to co-author this new report, but issued their own findings Monday: a 339-page report they say dispels "conspiracy theories" about the attack. In it, they quote former CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus, who testified to the committee he was still uncertain of what exactly motivated the attackers to storm the diplomatic compound.
The select committee, formed just over two years ago, is the eighth congressional committee to investigate the attacks. Its investigation is the twelfth on Benghazi.
The panel has attracted partisan controversy since its formation. It was approved in a near party-line vote in the House in May 2014.
It is credited with uncovering Clinton's use of a private email server as secretary of state, which was discovered as the committee looked into correspondence between Clinton and her team following the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi.
That discovery, first reported by The New York Times, prompted an FBI investigation into Clinton's handling of classified information on the server, which has overshadowed her presidential campaign.
Democrats -- who have long criticized the 2 year, $7 million investigation (the cost of which they partially contributed to) -- have accused Republicans of using the panel to target Clinton because of her White House run, seizing on comments made by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-California, last fall as he considered a run for House Speaker.
"Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee. A select committee," he said in a Fox News interview, comments he later walked back. "What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable."
Following McCarthy's comments, Gowdy said in an interview with CBS he told Republican colleagues and friends to "shut up" about the investigation. In the panel's 11-hour interview of Clinton, he told the former secretary of state that the investigation was not about her, but the four American victims of the terror attack.
Republican Reps. Mike Pompeo of Kansas and Jim Jordan of Ohio have authored a supplement to the committee's report with Gowdy's approval that accuses Clinton and top administration officials of knowingly misleading the public about the nature of the attack ahead of the 2012 presidential election. The members also claim that the administration "never launched men or machines" to Benghazi during the attacks.
"We cannot say whether the military could have saved lives in Benghazi. We can say with certainty that our nation’s leaders did not move heaven and earth to send military help with the urgency that those Americans deserved. We will never know if a more vigorous, comprehensive, and urgent response could have saved lives," their appendix reads.
Previous investigations into the attack have determined the military did all it could that night given the constraints of time and distance.
Accusing the majority of shutting them out of the drafting and interview process, Democrats released their own report Monday, which "debunks many conspiracy theories about the attacks." The report found that administration officials did not "make intentionally misleading statements" about the origins of the attack, but were relying on information provided under "fast-moving circumstances."
Democrats have also determined Clinton did not personally deny requests for additional security on the ground in Libya leading up to the attack.
Republicans say their panel questioned more witnesses than any other probe into the attacks -- including 81 that were never questioned by Congress and nine who witnessed the 2012 attacks.
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