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House Benghazi report faults military response, not Clinton, for deaths

Panel chair Trey Gowdy concludes $7m investigation with 800-page report that accuses US of being slow to respond after 2012 attack was already under way

House Republicans investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, have found no new evidence to conclude that Hillary Clinton, who served as secretary of state at the time, was culpable in the deaths of four Americans, according to the committee’s final report released on Tuesday.

The 800-page report released by the Republicans on the House select committee on Benghazi brought to a close a bitterly partisan, two-year, $7m investigation. The report revealed new details about the night of the attack and concludes that the Obama administration failed to recognize that the possibility of an attack.

“When the select committee was formed, I promised to conduct this investigation in a manner worthy of the American people’s respect, and worthy of the memory of those who died,“ said committee chairman Trey Gowdy, a Republican from South Carolina.

“That is exactly what my colleagues and I have done. Now, I simply ask the American people to read this report for themselves, look at the evidence we have collected, and reach their own conclusions.”

The committee’s Democrats, who have long derided the investigation as politically motivated, on Monday released their own report on the committee’s findings.

“Although the select committee obtained additional details that provide context and granularity, these details do not fundamentally alter the previous conclusions,” the Democrats’ report said.

Donald Trump has used the incident to discredit Clinton’s time at the helm of the state department. In a speech last week, he said Clinton “spread death, destruction and terrorism everywhere she touched. Among the victims was our late ambassador Chris Stevens. I mean, what she did with him was absolutely horrible. He was left helpless to die as Hillary Clinton soundly slept in her bed.”

The report was released less than a month before the Democratic national convention, where Clinton will accept the party’s nomination.

Clinton’s spokesman, Brian Fallon, dismissed the Republican report as the predictable conclusion to a politically motivated investigation.

“The committee report has not found anything to contradict the conclusions of the multiple, earlier investigations,” Fallon said. “This report just confirms what Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and even one of Trey Gowdy’s own former staffers admitted months ago: this committee’s chief goal is to politicize the deaths of four brave Americans in order to try to attack the Obama administration and hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”

He also added that the partisan process by which the committee both conducted and concluded the investigation undermined its integrity, charging that the “Republican members are clearly seeking to avoid any fact-checking of their discredited, conspiracy theories”.

In October, Clinton endured 11 hours of questioning by the House select committee, and was roundly commended for her performance during the marathon hearing while the chairman was criticized for failing to produce any new information about the 2012 attack.

The hearing was a turning point for Clinton’s campaign. On the trail, Democrats still refer to her grace-under-fire performance as a testament to her endurance and ability to withstand and overcome partisan attacks.

The report faults the military for its slow response sending resources to the Libyan city during the deadly 2012 attacks on a US outpost, despite clear orders from Barack Obama and the then US defense secretary Leon Panetta.

Gowdy said “nothing was en route toLibya at the time the last two Americans were killed almost eight hours after the attacks began”.

He said the Libyan forces that evacuated Americans from the CIA annex in Benghazi were not affiliated with any of the militias the CIA or state department had developed a relationship with during the previous 18 months.

Gowdy said on Tuesday that the report documents that the US was slow to send help to the Americans in Benghazi “because of an obsession with hurting the Libyans’ feelings”.

He said the report was not aimed at Clinton, but portrays “series of heroic acts” by Americans under attack “and what we can do to prevent” other assaults.

The Libya attacks became immediate political fodder, given their timing in the weeks before Obama’s re-election, and that has not abated despite seven previous congressional investigations. There has been finger-pointing on both sides over security at the US diplomatic outpost in Benghazi and whether the White House initially tried to portray the assault as a protest over an offensive, anti-Muslim video, instead of a calculated terrorist attack.

The Democrats’ report released on Monday saying that while the state department’s security measures in Benghazi the night of 11 September 2012 were “woefully inadequate”, Clinton never personally turned down a request for additional security. Democrats said the military could not have done anything differently that night to save the lives of the Americans.

On Tuesday, the panel’s Democrats denounced the Republicans’ report as “a conspiracy theory on steroids – bringing back long-debunked allegations with no credible evidence whatsoever”. The statement added: “Republicans promised a process and report that was fair and bipartisan, but this is exactly the opposite.”

The state department also issued a statement on Tuesday, saying that the “essential facts” of the attacks “have been known for some time”, and have been the subject of numerous reviews, including one by an independent review board.

Spokesman Mark Toner said the department had implemented most of the recommendations of the independent review board and was continuing to expand security at its facilities and improve its threat assessment.

“We have made great progress toward making our posts safer since 2012,” Toner said in a statement. “Our priority continues to be carrying out our national security mission while mitigating the risks to our employees.”

Toner said the department cooperated extensively with the House panel, providing more than 50 current and former employees for interviews and over 100,000 pages of documents.

Jim Jordan, a Republican congressman from Ohio who helped write the Republican report, told CNN that “too little effort was made to protect” Stevens and the others. “We didn’t move heaven and Earth to get help to the people who were fighting for their lives,” he said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

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