Democrats on the Select Committee investigating the Benghazi attack released their own report on the matter Monday. The report is intended to undercut the forthcoming report by the majority on the select committee which is expected to be released this summer. CNN reports:
“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.”
[…]
The Democratic report was simultaneously an indictment of the work and structure of the committee, set up by former House Speaker John Boehner in 2014, as much as a look into the events in Benghazi. All along, Democrats have branded the probe as nothing more than a partisan witch hunt targeting Clinton rather than another attempt to establish the facts about Benghazi.
The report is 339 pages but fully 50 pages of that is dedicated to attacking the Republicans on the committee directly. The report offers 12 recommendations, 3 of which are aimed at the select committee itself.
The Democrats do agree with previous reports that indicate there was a serious lapse in security at the Benghazi mission. The report places that failure directly at the feet of Charlene Lamb. An entire section is devoted to demonstrating that Secretary Clinton had no role in the decisions to refuse additional security. In short, the buck stopped somewhere else.
A spokesman for the committee’s majority released a statement in response to the Democrats’ report:
Benghazi Committee Democrats’ obsession with the former Secretary of State is on full display. For over two years they refused to participate in the Majority’s serious, fact-centered investigation. The dishonest Democrats on this committee falsely claimed everything had been ‘asked and answered.’ They said the committee had found ‘absolutely nothing new.’ If that’s changed, they should come clean and admit it. If not, everyone can ignore their rehashed, partisan talking points defending their endorsed candidate for president.
As Chairman Gowdy has said, this is not about one person. This investigation is about the four brave Americans we lost in Libya: Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods, and Glen Doherty. That is how the Majority has conducted its thorough investigation, and we look forward to revealing the new information we have uncovered to the families and the American people.
The spokesman also released a tally of the number of times various words were used in the report to back up the claim that it was focused on Hillary Clinton:
334 – Number of times “Clinton” appears
200 – Number of times “Republicans” appears
85 – Number of times “Stevens” appears
55 – Number of times “Blumenthal” appears
36 – Number of times “Smith” appears
23 – Number of times “Trump” appears – ?????
15 – Number of times “Doherty” appears
12 – Number of times “Brock” appears
8 – Number of times “Correct the Record” appears
6 – Number of times “Woods” appears
Democrats have apparently produced exactly what they have accused Republicans of attempting to produce, a completely politicized Benghazi report.
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