The editorial board of a national newspaper that has not been all that supportive of Hillary Clinton, on Wednesday called for the House Select Committee on Benghazi to be disbanded, or “at the very least [to] rename their laughable crusade, which has cost taxpayers $4.6 million, ‘the Inquisition of Hillary Rodham Clinton.’”
Citing GOP Representative Kevin McCarthy’s acknowledgement last week that bringing Hillary Clinton’s “numbers” down, “was the point of burrowing into the details of the 2012 attacks on government facilities in eastern Libya that killed the American ambassador and three colleagues, the editorial board says:
Lawmakers have long abused their investigative authority for political purposes. But the effort to find Mrs. Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time of the Libya attacks, was personally responsible for the deaths has lost any semblance of credibility. It’s become an insult to the memory of four slain Americans.
And adds:
The deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and his colleagues have been exhaustively investigated by several other congressional committees and an independent panel of experts commissioned by the Department of State. The reviews found systemic failings at the State Department. But they found no evidence that Mrs. Clinton was directly responsible for the security lapses, which, of course, is the goal of the Republicans who want to derail her presidential bid. The possibility that all those investigators have somehow missed a crucial, damning piece of evidence seems negligible.
The Times summarizes the work of the Benghazi committee as trudging on, “summoning a seemingly endless list of witnesses who have offered little new substantive information about the attacks” and as having spent “more than critical congressional committees, including the House Intelligence and Veterans’ Affairs Committees, which have oversight over bureaucracies with multibillion-dollar budgets.”
The Times notes that Hillary Clinton is scheduled to testify before the committee on Oct. 22, giving “Republicans another chance to attack the credibility and trustworthiness of the leading Democratic presidential candidate” without making “American embassies abroad safer or help the relatives of the four killed in Libya.”
“The hearing should be the last salvo for a committee that has accomplished nothing. If the Republicans insist on keeping the process alive, the Democrats should stop participating in this charade,” the New York Times editorial board concludes.
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