Final Benghazi report details administration failures

Republicans have denied those accusations and, on Tuesday, Chairman Trey Gowdy’s committee will offer new details about how Clinton’s State Department failed to protect the diplomatic outpost in Libya. It will also show how the CIA missed the looming threat despite warnings and wrote faulty intelligence reports after the attack. The findings will also indicate that the Defense Department did not meet its response times to deploy military assets to Benghazi and follow up to ensure Americans were rescued in a timely fashion…

For example, the final report digs into allegations that the U.S. was delivering or overseeing the transfer of weapons to Libyan rebels. The panel spoke to at least one individual who raised the possibility that the U.S. was overseeing some sort of weapons shipping. Multiple news reports in the past year have cited unnamed State or intelligence officials saying the president approved a covert operation to ship weapons to Libyans to arm rebels trying to oust Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi — a proposal Clinton herself supported but that the administration has never acknowledged…

“Over the course of nearly a dozen interviews with the State Department, the Defense Department and CIA personnel, witnesses consistently refused to answer questions related to certain allegations with respect to U.S. activity in Libya even though the House specifically gave the committee access to materials relating to intelligence sources and methods,” the report reads. “Most of these questions related in some way to allegations regarding weapons.”

The panel also found that former senior officials in the defunct Qadhafi regime helped evacuate Americans to safety, a surprising finding given that the U.S. was backing the rebels fighting against the regime. The GOP committee staffer noted that the rebel forces State had worked to befriend did not come to the Americans’ aid.