Benghazi report is nothing more than political warfare

The timing of the release keeps the issue alive at a crucial point in Hillary Clinton’s campaign, says Rupert Cornwell

The US consulate in Benghazi was attacked on September 11, 2012, setting fire to the building and killing four Americans (Getty) (Getty)

“This report is not about one person,” Trey Gowdy, the Republican chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi. It was “about four people”: the Americans who died in the attack on the US diplomatic mission in the Libyan city in September 2012.

In reality, however, it does revolve around one person, just as has the entire two-year existence of the panel. From the outset it was motivated by the desire of Republicans to discredit Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State during the episode, and even back in May 2014 the potential Democratic candidate for the White House they feared most.

No matter that seven previous Congressional investigations had already examined the affair, or that this 800-page report, that has consumed $7m (£5.3m) of public money, adds little to what was already known. What matters is timing.

Benghazi has been one of the main Republican lines of attack against Ms Clinton’s performance as America’s top diplomat. The report is basically one more chunk of meat tossed into the grinder of what is set to be the most brutal presidential election of modern times. It will change few minds.

It essentially restates, with the addition of a few more details, what is already known: that there was a woeful lack of security at the Benghazi mission; that the world’s pre-eminent military had no forces near enough to stop the eight hour-long attack; and that the Washington bureaucracy, once the crisis erupted, moved with inexcusable sloth. It’s also a reminder of the Obama administration’s misleading initial portrayal of the episode as a spontaneous protest, rather than a planned terrorist attack that would cut the ground from under the president’s claim terrorism was on the retreat, just as he sought a second term.

But there’s no smoking gun. The report declares Ms Clinton should have recognised the danger far earlier. But like the previous investigations, it produced no evidence that she herself rejected a request for added security. That would have been devastating. In fact, such requests were made, but were lost in the lower reaches of the department.

So battlelines will not change. Democrats will continue to insist the whole thing is a partisan witchhunt, “a conspiracy about a conspiracy theory”, as one puts it. For Republicans it is proof of Ms Clinton’s poor judgement, and unfitness to be entrusted with keeping the country safe.

The House Select Committee report failed to find anything that further discredited Hillary Clinton (Saul Loeb/Getty)

What really matters is the report’s timing. It keeps the issue alive at a pivotal moment of the campaign, when she seems to be pulling ahead of Donald Trump. And not just Benghazi, but awareness of the wider policy debacle Benghazi epitomises. Ms Clinton was an enthusiastic backer of the campaign to topple Muammar Gaddafi. Today Libya is a failed state and a north African outpost of Islamic State, just 400 miles from Europe. Mr Trump won’t let Americans forget that.

But the committee’s biggest contribution to Election 2016 has been accidental – its stumbling across the fact that Ms Clinton used a private email server for official business, already object of a scathing report by the State Department’s own inspector-general and currently under investigation by the Justice Department.

If Ms Clinton’s campaign comes to grief, it won’t be because of Benghazi. It will be thanks to the FBI.