House Benghazi Report Finds No New Evidence of Wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton
WASHINGTON — Ending one of the longest, costliest and most bitterly partisan congressional investigations in history, the House Select Committee on Benghazi issued its final report on Tuesday, finding no new evidence of culpability or wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton in the 2012 attacks in Libya that left four Americans dead.
The 800-page report, however, included some new details about the night of the attacks, and the context in which they occurred. And it delivered a broad rebuke of government agencies like the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department — and the officials who led them — for failing to grasp the acute security risks in Benghazi, and especially for maintaining outposts there that they could not protect.
The committee, led by Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina, also harshly criticized an internal State Department investigation that it said had allowed officials like Mrs. Clinton, then the secretary of state, to effectively choose who would investigate their actions. In addition, it reiterated Republicans’ complaints that the Obama administration had sought to thwart the investigation by withholding witnesses and evidence.
The report, which includes perhaps the most exhaustive chronology to date of the attacks and their aftermath, did not dispute that United States military forces stationed in Europe could not have reached Benghazi in time to rescue the personnel who died — a central finding of previous inquiries.
Still, it issued stinging criticism of the overall delay in response and the lack of preparedness on the part of the government.
“The assets ultimately deployed by the Defense Department in response to the Benghazi attacks were not positioned to arrive before the final lethal attack,” the committee wrote. “The fact that this is true does not mitigate the question of why the world’s most powerful military was not positioned to respond.”
But the lack of any clear-cut finding of professional misconduct or dereliction of duty was certain to fuel further criticism of the length the investigation — more than two years — and the expense, estimated at more than $7 million, in addition to Democrats’ allegations that the inquiry was specifically intended to damage Mrs. Clinton’s presidential prospects.
Her campaign was quick to respond. “After more than two years and more than $7 million in taxpayer funds, the committee report has not found anything to contradict the conclusions of the multiple, earlier investigations,” Brian Fallon, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said in a statement.
In a sign that Mr. Gowdy was also facing pressure from the right, two of the committee’s conservative members, Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio and Mike Pompeo of Kansas, wrote a 48-page addendum including somewhat harsher criticism of the Obama administration, its response to the attacks and its subsequent public explanations.
“Officials at the State Department, including Secretary Clinton, learned almost in real time that the attack in Benghazi was a terrorist attack,” Mr. Jordan and Mr. Pompeo wrote. “With the presidential election just 56 days away, rather than tell the American people the truth and increase the risk of losing an election, the administration told one story privately and a different story publicly.”
Technically, the report is not final until the full committee formally votes to accept it, which is expected as early as July 8. Still, some changes are possible, if they are accepted and approved by a majority vote.
By far, the committee’s most significant disclosure, even by Republicans’ own account, was unintentional and not directly related to Benghazi: that Mrs. Clinton had exclusively used a private email server during her four years as secretary of state. That revelation has spurred separate investigations into whether classified material was mishandled.
The Democrats on the committee said that the Benghazi effort had dragged on longer than far more important congressional inquiries like the ones into the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the attack on Pearl Harbor and the response to Hurricane Katrina.
In a Benghazi report that Democrats issued on Monday, they also complained that they had been excluded from the development of the panel’s conclusions.
House Republicans added, inadvertently at times, to the general sense that the committee was focusing too intently on Mrs. Clinton. Democrats seized on comments by the House majority leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, who boasted on Fox News in September that the committee’s work had put a dent in Mrs. Clinton’s poll numbers.
“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 investigation.
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, a hearing that was widely perceived to have backfired on Republicans, as Mrs. Clinton answered their questions and coolly deflected their attacks.
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, Ambassador J. Christopher 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.”
At the time the select committee was created, 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.
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.
“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,” Mr. Gowdy said.
