Benghazi Probe: Not a Witch Hunt

The House Select Committee on Benghazi, which has been hearing Hillary Clinton’s testimony on Thursday, is under fire from her and other Democrats who are characterizing its probe as a partisan witch hunt.

But, in fact, the panel has already uncovered some important information and has serious matters to investigate. Chief among them is why four Americans, including the ambassador, were killed by a huge mob of heavily armed terrorists on Sept. 11, 2012, in Benghazi, Libya, while neither the U.S. military nor special forces were deployed to save them.

Here are seven things to know about the Benghazi Committee.

1. The panel is responsible for uncovering Clinton’s secret home email server, used while she was secretary of state. Although she turned over thousands of emails, Clinton also destroyed thousands and thousands more. Reports are now emerging that some messages moved over the server were “classified.”

2. Clinton flat-out lied when she first spoke at Andrews Air Force Base. “We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful internet video that we had nothing to do with,” she said two days after the attack. The panel, though, has uncovered documents that show both the White House and State Department knew it was a terrorist attack from the very night it occurred, and had nothing to do with a YouTube video.

“These protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.”

3. The panel has exposed White House emails showing that Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, wrote that one of the goals before top Obama aide Susan Rice went on five Sunday talk shows was to “underscore these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.”

4. Questions initially arose about where the president was the night of the attack. The Benghazi Committee put together a timeline as a part of its work, but the White House has never divulged a tick-tock of what he did throughout the night (the initial attack occurred after 3 p.m. Eastern time but lasted for hours). Clinton and Obama talked at 10 p.m. the night of the attack, but Clinton never talked to top intelligence officers or the Secretary of Defense that evening, testimony before the Committee revealed.

5. Four Americans died in the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, information management officer Sean Smith, and two security officers, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, who were former Navy SEALs. Just how Stevens died remains unclear, although the Associated Press reported that a Libyan doctor who attended to Stevens said the cause was severe asphyxiation from smoke. The panel is still trying to find out the details.

6. The State Department turned over reams of new email communications to the Benghazi Committee just two days before Clinton was set to testify. Why there are now 1,300 additional pages of emails from the scene that evening — after three years of investigations — has raised new concerns.

 Rep. Mike Pompeo, who serves on the committee, called Benghazi “worse than Watergate.”

7. Stevens feared for his safety and sought at least 13 security officers for his travel inside Libya as he worked to establish a permanent U.S. operation there. He wrote in July 2012, “Overall security conditions continue to be unpredictable, with large numbers of armed groups and individuals not under control of the central government, and frequent clashes in Tripoli and other major population centers.” According to reporting by Fox News chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge, a congressional source said Undersecretary Patrick Kennedy, who was a deputy to Clinton at the State Department, turned down Stevens’ request.

Rep. Mike Pompeo, a Kansas Republican who serves on the committee, called Benghazi “worse than Watergate.”

“We still have many unanswered questions. We have an active FBI investigation still ongoing trying to uncover the scope of the risk of national security,” Pompeo said Wednesday.