The 5 most serious accusations from Republicans’ Benghazi report

By Amber Phillips, Washington Post, June 28, 2016

Remember that heated hearing in the fall when Hillary Clinton sat in front of Congress for 11 hours and defended her handling of the Benghazi terrorist attacks? Well, a report from that investigation (of which Clinton’s testimony was just one part) is out, capping the two-year process that is the ninth overall investigation into the Benghazi, Libya, incident.

There is no smoking gun, but the report does conclude that Clinton and the Obama administration more broadly should have realized how endangered U.S. outposts in Libya were at the time of the 2012 attacks and done more to protect them and the four Americans–including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens–who were killed.

Or, more accurately, the Republicans on the special Benghazi committee concluded that. Democrats on the committee called this whole thing a partisan witch hunt to bring down Clinton’s presidential run and released their own, much softer report on Monday. But those two reports aren’t even the sum total of the committee’s work; two of the committee’s most conservative lawmakers released a more critical report, which was not signed off on by the rest of the GOP members.

For our purposes, we’re going to focus exclusively on Republicans’ main report, since Republicans are the ones in control of the committee and Congress, and this is the report a majority of the committee members signed off on. It’s also the one that will be at issue in the 2016 presidential race.

Clinton said Tuesday she’d “leave it to others to characterize this report but I think it is pretty clear it is time to move on.” Her campaign had no trouble characterizing it for her, calling it “a partisan sham” and full of “discredited, conspiracy theories.” Clinton has rebutted many of the report’s key findings in the past.

This one brings several new details about that night that Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), the Benghazi committee chairman, says should “fundamentally change the way you view Benghazi.” The State Department disagrees there’s anything new in this report, and The Washington Post’s Karoun Demirjian writes “there’s no significantly new information” about the U.S. response to the attacks.

Still, the report is big news in the political world. Here are the five most serious findings from it, according to reviews of the report from The Washington Post’s Karen DeYoung and Adam Goldman, NBC News’s Andrea Mitchell, Politico’s Rachael Bade, CNN’s Stephen Collinson and a news conference House Republicans on the committee gave Tuesday:

1. The State Department failed to protect U.S. diplomats in Libya.

This is the report’s bottom line. It doesn’t necessarily lay the blame at Clinton’s feet–Gowdy had said he wanted to keep the report focused on the facts, not personalities–but the conclusion is clear: Clinton and the Obama administration should have realized the risks.

To back up this conclusion, CNN’s Collinson reports that requests for more security in Benghazi leading up to the attacks went unheard or were refused.

Even House Democrats’ version of their report acknowledges that “security measures in Benghazi were woefully inadequate,” pointing the finger at the security and law enforcement arm of the State Department rather than Clinton. Ambassador Stevens was at the diplomatic compound in Benghazi with only two official bodyguards even after other Western diplomats had left the country.

NBC’s Mitchell notes the report finds that the then-vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a pretty big player in national security crises, did not join an emergency video conference because “he had left to return to his residence to host a dinner party for foreign dignitaries.” Mitchell reports he received one update on the attacks during the dinner.

2. The CIA missed warning signs.

The report says the agency misread how dangerous Libya, in the midst of a revolution after overthrowing its longtime dictator a year earlier, was at the time. Recall the attacks took place on Sept. 11 and 12, 2012.

“One section of the report seems to allege that U.S. officials fundamentally misunderstood who their allies were at the time,” writes NBC’s Mitchell.

To illustrate that point, the report details how there was confusion in U.S. intelligence circles about who ultimately came to the Americans’ rescue. Previous reports concluded it was a “quasi-government militia.” This report says it was a military unit loyal to the country’s former dictator.

3. The Defense Department failed to rescue Americans in time.

Or at least, it was late in deploying help, waiting until well after the initial attack had begun even though President Obama had authorized the military to do whatever it needed to hours earlier. U.S. military forces didn’t reach Benghazi until 2 p.m. the day after the initial attack on the diplomatic compound. The report blames a breakdown in the chain of command for this, including a debate among U.S. Marines about whether they should wear their military uniforms or civilian attire.

4. The Obama administration “stonewalled” the investigation.

The administration engaged in what Gowdy described as “intentional,” “coordinated” and “shameful” stonewalling of his investigation. The report says the State Department, Pentagon and CIA refused to turn over all of the agencies’ records and delayed getting others to Congress, a process that Republicans said delayed their investigation by months.

At the heart of this accusation is Clinton’s use of a private email server exclusively while she was secretary of state. A hacker had revealed a year before this investigation that Clinton used a private email account to conduct some of her business, but it wasn’t until the Benghazi committee asked the State Department for some of her emails in 2014 that everyone realized just how much she used her private account: The State Department realized there were no records of emails sent or received on an official State Department email account set up for Clinton.

Since then, of course, thousands of her emails have been released, but Clinton was first allowed to delete emails on her server she considered private.

The report blasts that, saying it “makes it impossible to ever represent to those killed in Benghazi that the record is whole.”

5. A Clinton aide influenced the State Department’s review.

As noted above, Congress isn’t the only branch of government that reviewed what happened in Benghazi. The State Department did its own inquiry, which was intended to be internal but independent.

But according to a section of the Benghazi investigation that Politico’s Bade obtained, the report “was consistently influenced by” Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s former chief of staff. Mills has said she offered suggestions on drafts, but they were merely that: suggestions.

What the report doesn’t answer.

Among the most prominent areas the report doesn’t shed light on are allegations that the United States was helping get weapons to Libyan rebels. Any such operation, which Bade reports Clinton herself supported but the administration never confirmed or denied, would have been top-level secret. (Recall the 2012 attacks happened a year after a successful uprising against Libya’s longtime dictator, Moammar Gaddafi.)

Apparently the government still refuses to answer questions about whether the operation existed; the report says the administration refused to let anyone who might have knowledge of such a program testify.