Longest investigation

Benghazi panel now longest congressional investigation

By Julian Hattem

The House’s committee investigating the 2012 terror attack on a U.S. facility in Benghazi, Libya, has been running longer than any other special congressional inquiry in the nation’s history.

As of Monday, the committee has been in existence for a total of 72 weeks, surpassing the 1970s effort to investigate the Watergate scandal — the previous longest special investigatory committee, which ran for just less than one year and five months.

News of the milestone was bemoaned by Democrats, who have long chided the panel as a purely political exercise intent on doing little more than dragging down former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the current Democratic presidential front-runner.
Rep Elijah Cummings (Md.), the panel’s top Democrat, said that the committee had become “a political punchline... at the expense of being taken seriously and being able to take effective, bipartisan actions to improve the security of our diplomats abroad.”

Republicans, meanwhile, pointed the blame squarely at the Obama administration. If Clinton and other current and former officials had merely responded to their requests in a timely manner, they say, the investigation would have ended long ago.

House Democrats “are right back where they have always been—complaining about process and procedure rather than lifting a finger to help complete the task,” committee spokesman Jamal Ware said in an emailed statement.

“Maybe if committee Democrats had sent one request to the executive branch, or signed onto a letter, instead of running a rearguard action for the Clinton campaign, perhaps the administration would have hastened its cooperation,” he added. “Instead, the Democrats do what they always do, issue a press release citing some arbitrary milestone and claiming some Democrat strawman has not been proven.”

In surpassing the Watergate Committee, the Benghazi investigation has become the longest-running special committee tasked with evaluating a specific topic. Other congressional investigations — such as the probe into the CIA’s use of “waterboarding” and other brutal interrogation methods that many consider to be torture — lasted for much longer.

In any case, the Benghazi panel shows no signs of letting up anytime soon.

In fact, the intensity is only likely to mount in the weeks leading up to Oct. 22, when Clinton is scheduled to testify in an open hearing, an occasion likely to be marked by fireworks on Capitol Hill.

Last week, the State Department acknowledged that it had discovered “a small number” of Clinton’s emails that related to the 2012 violence in Libya that it had failed to give to the committee earlier in the year. Those emails will be headed to the Benghazi panel as part of a broader set of 925 emails about the attack.

Meanwhile, House Republicans announced this weekend that they are launching a new special committee to investigate controversial videos about Planned Parenthood.

Democrats criticized the newest panel as part of a similar politicization of major issues in Congress.

“The proliferation of unnecessary special committees to score political points sets a dangerous precedent that both parties will come to regret in the years to come,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) — a member of the Benghazi panel who has called for it to be dismantled — said in a statement on Monday.