In case you were worried that the Benghazi investigation had gone away entirely, fear not. It hasn’t. Not only is the select committee on Benghazi still hard a work in Washington, the media continues to try to discredit their work in what can only be interpreted as an effort to hedge Hillary Clinton’s bets in November. That tradition carried on during Friday night’s MSNBC lineup, where Steve Kornacki repeated a long discredited line about how this is “the longest running investigation of its kind” while implying that it was somehow stalled or not producing results. Both of those claims are beyond simply dodgy… they’re not true, as the committee members themselves noted this week.
On Friday night, MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki became the latest casualty of Committee Democrats’ campaign of misinformation. Conveniently ignoring the giant trove of documents the committee finally received from the State Department just the week before, Kornacki “reported” that the Benghazi Committee is “the longest investigation of its kind in American history,” and used a chart depicting it as the “longest special congressional investigation ever.”
Kornacki is apparently good at regurgitating the material fed to him by Democrats, but there isn’t much in the way of analysis or questioning of sources going on here. First of all, as to the claim about this being an unusually long investigation… horse hockey, pure and simple. But rather than listening to me or some other outlet of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, why don’t we let Politifact field that one.
The clearest way to measure this is to look at when a special congressional committee dedicated to a specific investigation officially began and ended. By this measure, this claim is wrong. While the Benghazi investigation has lasted about 17 months, we found other investigations that lasted 30, 40 and even 90 months. And the number of longer investigations only goes up once probes by permanent committees are included. We rate the claim False.
Perhaps we should cut Steve some slack because math is hard. Hey… 14 months or 90 months. Who’s really to say which one is longer in the era of Common Core maths?
As to the suggestion that the investigation is somehow stalled and nothing new has been discovered all this time, we’re left wondering if Kornacki was aware that he made these claims barely a week after the State Department finally turned over more than 1,000 pages of documents which the committee had been requesting since last summer.
Select Committee on Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy (SC-04) released the following statement after the committee today received from the State Department a production of more than 1,100 pages of records, including files stored on network folders used by senior employees within the Office of the Secretary, and emails from Cheryl Mills, Jake Sullivan, Huma Abedin, Susan Rice, and Patrick Kennedy:
“It is deplorable that it took over a year for these records to be produced to our committee, and that our Democrat colleagues never lifted a finger to help us get them. Shame on them and everyone else who has demanded this committee to give up before gathering all of the facts. This investigation is about a terrorist attack that killed four Americans, and it could have been completed a lot sooner if the administration had not delayed and delayed and delayed at every turn. For example, the committee still does not have records we requested over a year ago, and we are still waiting for some witnesses to be made available for interviews. As soon as possible, we will release our report and interview transcripts so everyone can see the evidence for themselves, and I’m confident the value and fairness of our investigation will then be abundantly clear to everyone.”
It’s a good thing Hillary Clinton has so many members of the press on her side to keep these fantastic tales coming. There’s an election to be won and we wouldn’t want any inconvenient truths getting in the way of a good campaign advertisement, would we?
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