DEMS Release Benghazi Report Ahead Of GOP

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GOP Set To Release Their Own Committee Report Soon

WASHINGTON – House Democrats today moved to pre-empt the findings of a two-year Republican-led investigation into the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans were killed, by issuing their own 339-page report that cast the inquiry as a politically motivated crusade that wasted time and money.

The release of the Democrats’ report came amid signs that the House Select Committee on Benghazi, led by its chairman, Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina, was nearing the release of its official findings.

In the face of intense criticism, Mr. Gowdy has repeatedly defended the committee’s work as the most comprehensive examination of the attacks in Benghazi, which occurred on Sept. 11, 2012, and resulted in the deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens; a State Department official, Sean Smith; and two Central Intelligence Agency contractors, Tyrone S. Woods and Glen Doherty.

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The move by Democrats on the panel was designed to debunk the conclusions of the committee’s majority report that is expected to be highly critical of Clinton.

“We have been hampered in our work by the ongoing Republican obsession with conspiracy theories that have no basis in reality,” said the Democratic report, which underscored the fierce political divisions between Republicans and Democrats over the attack on a U.S. consular post and a CIA annex in the Libyan port city. “Rather than reject these conspiracy theories in the absence of evidence — or in the face of hard facts — Select Committee Republicans embraced them and turned them into a political crusade.”

“We hope our report will put to rest the conspiracy theories about Benghazi once and for all and return the focus to where it belongs—on the goal of improving the security of Americans serving abroad,” the report continued.

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The Democratic report was released as the general election heats up. It argues that the Pentagon could not have done anything on the night of the attacks in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, that would have saved the lives of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Republicans have accused the Obama administration of failing to deploy military assets to rescue the Americans.

The report concludes that State Department security measures in Benghazi were “woefully inadequate” but that Clinton never personally denied any requests for additional security in Benghazi. It denies the intelligence community was influenced by politics in its response to the attacks and that its evolving explanations on its causes were the result of evolving information in fast changing circumstances, not meddling by administration officials.