Dem's Show no Respect for Benghazi Dead

DID THE DEMS WALK? [WITH COMMENTS BY JOHN]

We reported that, with two exceptions, the Democratic members of the House Oversight and Government Reform
Committee walked out on Patricia Smith and Charles Woods, the mother and father respectively of two of the men
who were killed by terrorists in Benghazi. The walkout supposedly occurred in connection with their testimony
before the committee on Thursday. In fact, only two Democratic committee members (including execrable ranking
Democrat Elijah Cummings) stuck around for the testimony, and the 15 other Democratic members were off
pursuing other interests.

John wrote about the walkout here. I wrote about the walkout here. I even explained — I thought pretty persuasively
— why the Democrats walked.

In reporting on the walkout, we relied on tweets by Chairman Darrell Issa and a post by Katie Pavlich, who also
relied on Issa’s tweets. Accounts of the walkout appeared on Fox News and elsewhere on the Internet. With the two
exceptions we noted, Democratic committee members did not stick around. But did a walkout take place?

Democrats have pushed back on reports of an alleged walkout. See, for example, this Slate post by Dave Weigel and
this Media Matters summary. Weigel observes that only six of 24 committee Republicans stuck around for the
testimony of the parents.

Linking to Weigel’s post, Pavlich has now added an update walking back her account of the alleged walkout in a
circumlocutory fashion. At least that’s how I interpret her update. It appears to me that the reports of a walkout,
including our own, were not mistaken, but (John may disagree with me and I do not purport to speak for him) they
were inconclusive if not overblown. I would at the least like to draw readers’ attention to the additional information
on offer in Weigel’s post and the Media Matters summary.

JOHN adds: I don’t find the Democrats’ self-exoneration particularly persuasive. It is true that Congressional
committee hearings are chronically underattended by members of both parties, and in Issa’s photo is is obvious that
the Republican side of the room is thinly populated, too. Still, there are quite a few more Republicans than

Democrats present, some of them staffers. One thing we don’t know is how many Democrats and Republicans were
there for the first part of the hearing, on the Accountability Review Board. Issa says that before the parents testified,
Democrats “excused themselves” and “only two decided to stay.” That implies a walkout by at least some Democrats,
and no one, to my knowledge, has rebutted Issa’s observation.

Is my perspective on this colored by the fact that Democrats have studiously ignored, when they have not slandered,
critics of the administration’s performance on Benghazi, including parents of the slain Americans? Well, yes. As it
should be.



BENGHAZI SCANDAL MANAGEMENT


Last night John commented on the behavior of the Democrats during the House Oversight Committee hearing
yesterday on Benghazi. Democratic committee members walked out on the testimony of Patricia Smith and Charles
Woods, the mother and father respectively of two of the men who were killed by terrorists in the Benghazi assault.
John observed that the Democrats on the committee didn’t even have the decency to listen to what these victims of
the Obama administration’s gross negligence had to say.

Why would the Democrats do that? They would say that they were protesting the politicization of Benghazi. Their
thesis is that looking back at events in order to assess fault and allocate responsibility. Assessing fault and allocating
responsibility is political in this case because fault and disgrace run up a chain of Democratic officeholders ending in
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The thesis that applies to account for the Democrats’s behavior in this case is the
one from A Few Good Men: They can’t handle the truth.

John focused on the second half of the House Oversight Committee hearing yesterday. The first half of the hearing
was previewed in good stories by Sharyl Attkisson and Josh Rogin earlier this week and also deserves attention.

Following Benghazi then Secretary of State Clinton convened an Accountability Review Board to conduct a a phony
baloney investigation leading to phony baloney findings to protect Clinton and Barack Obama in their phony baloney
jobs. The ARB never got around to interviewing the four mid-level employees it found at fault in connection with the
Benghazi assault. The unclassified version of the ARB report is posted online here.

The unwritten mission of the ARB was to designate a few mid-level employees to serve as scapegoats for more senior
officials including Clinton and Obama. The ARB duly designated four such employees who were placed on
administrative leave on the basis of the ARB report findings. Secretary Kerry has now (rightly) reinstated all four
employees who were disciplined as a result of the ARB report. I wrote about the reinstatement of Ronald Maxwell
here.

The first half of the House Oversight Committee hearing yesterday was devoted to the ARB. ARB leaders (former
Ambassador) Thomas Pickering and (former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs) Michael Mullen appeared before the
committee as witnesses. How Hillary Clinton got these distinguished gentlemen to lend their good names to the ARB
farce is beyond me.

The Weekly Standard’s Steve Hayes attended the hearing. Steve reports that the testimony validated the skepticism
of ARB critics and raised new questions about the independence of its work as well as the reliability of their
conclusions. Steve concludes that the testimony of Pickering and Mullen discredited the ARB. Among the revelations
in the testimony at yesterday’s hearing:

 *Secretary of State Hillary Clinton handpicked the two leaders of the ARB who were given the job of
investigating her department.

*Cheryl Mills, the chief of staff and senior counselor to Secretary Clinton, was intimately involved
with the ARB panel from the beginning. She called the leaders at Clinton’s behest to ask them to serve,
she was briefed regularly on the investigation as it unfolded and she received a draft copy of the
report before it was finalized.

*Several senior Clinton advisers were provided draft copies of the ARB report before it was released
to the public.

*The vice chairman of the ARB testified that he called Mills to warn her that an impending
appearance of Charlene Lamb before Congress would be problematic for the State Department.
Lamb had done poorly in her interview with the ARB, Mullen said, and he called Mills because he
was worried that a poor performance before Congress would cause problems for the State
Department and its leadership. When Representative Jim Jordan asked Mullen if he would have
placed the call to Mills if Lamb had performed well, he said no.

*The chairman of the panel acknowledged at least one instance in which language in the report was
softened after an early draft was sent to Clinton and her top aides. “The draft, as I believe it went to
her, said the security posture was grossly inadequate for Benghazi, period. And we made the
editorial correction recognizing that there was certainly a very real point that ‘grossly’ was probably
not applicable to Benghazi in light of the changes that the State Department had made, but it was
clearly applicable to dealing with the specific circumstances of the attack.”

*The vice chairman testified in his deposition that the ARB received “very specific tasking from
Secretary Clinton on her expectations with respect to this board” and that nobody on the board had
any input on the scope of their work.

*The panel was largely staffed by current and former State Department officials and worked out of
State Department offices.

*The ARB did not speak with nine key military officials on the ground in Libya or Germany who
were deeply involved in the US response to the attacks. Among those who was never interviewed: Lt.
Colonel Steven Gibson, who was on the ground in Tripoli and whom State Department official Greg
Hicks has testified was on the receiving end of the “stand-down” order that Obama officials have
repeatedly disclaimed.

*Although the ARB did not interview Secretary Clinton as part of its investigation, they provided her
with a two-hour briefing about the details of the report before it was finalized and released to the
public.

*The board did not interview either Cheryl Mills or Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Nides, another
close adviser to Clinton.

*None of the interviews the ARB conducted were recorded in any fashion – no audio, no video, no 
court reporter. The only record of those sessions is in notes taken by a staff member. According to the
vice chairman: “The staff would put a summary of the interview together. We would – the members
would be able to review that summary shortly after the interview.” (Those summaries and the notes
that produced them have not been provided to Congress).

*The ARB did not investigate the Obama administration’s public response to the attack or the role
that senior State Department officials played in shaping that narrative. That response included the
highly misleading claim that the attacks had come as a reaction to an anti-Islam video and many
other claims that were later shown to be false. Emails between top State Department officials and
others in the Obama administration, first reported by TWS last spring, revealed that several top
State Department officials were involved in crafting the administration’s post-attack talking points.
And Susan Rice, then US Ambassador to the United Nations, a top State Department official,
famously blamed the video in her appearances on the Sunday talk shows shortly after the attack. The
ARB wasn’t interested.

Steve begins and ends his report with comments regarding the media’s lack of interest in the proceedings. If the
media were not a Democratic protection racket, of course, this would all be big news. But they are and it’s not.