"This Benghazi investigation is taking too long" has always been an odd complaint from the Left, particularly because Democrats on the panel have done next to nothing to advance any fact-gathering whatsoever. They frame this gripe as an act of tax-dollar stewardship -- for which Democrats are famous, right? -- while ignoring their own conduct, which Republicans credibly describe as negligent, partisan obstructionism. The price tag of Elijah Cummings and friends' Hillary protection racket so far? North of $2 million. But what about the specific claim that this special Congressional investigation is "the longest" in American history? Here's MSNBC repeating that Clinton campaign talking point over the weekend:
Left-leaning fact-check organization Politifact examined that very same assertion late last year and rated it "false." The bottom line conclusion:
Clinton’s campaign said the Benghazi probe is "the longest-running congressional investigation ever." The clearest way to measure this is to look at when a special congressional committee dedicated to a specific investigation officially began and ended. By this measure, this claim is wrong. While the Benghazi investigation has lasted about 17 months, we found other investigations that lasted 30, 40 and even 90 months. And the number of longer investigations only goes up once probes by permanent committees are included. We rate the claim False.
Even tacking on the six intervening months doesn't alter or impact the veracity of this claim. Not even close. Politifact cites examples ranging from a three-year investigation into the assassinations of JFK and MLK in the late 70's to a probe of the National Defense program, which ran from 1941 to 1948. As for the Benghazi committee, Democrats have pushed their pre-determined "witch hunt" narrative from the onset, insisting that no new information could come to light as a result of this cynical GOP fishing expedition. In reality, the committee has interviewed dozens of witnesses who'd never testified before other Congressional committees on the matter, and it is still unearthing new documents. Just 11 days ago, the Obama administration finally released more than 1,100 pages of emails the committee had been seeking for more than a year. So even as liberals mock and demean the panel's work as useless and dragging on needlessly, previously-undisclosed information has slowly but steadily bled out into the official record. Perhaps the committee could have wrapped up its investigation much sooner if it hadn't been fighting to break through a series of stonewalls at every turn.
Four Americans, including a sitting ambassador, were murdered by jihadist terrorists in a coordinated, premeditated attack on the US diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012. The Obama administration, having ignored and declined numerous requests for increased security measures on the ground, falsely blamed the bloodshed on spontaneous protests arising from an online video. This was untrue. The record definitively shows that Hillary Clinton and others knew it was untrue virtually immediately, yet she and her colleagues continued to peddle the politically-expedient fictional version of events for weeks -- including, in her case, to the faces of grieving Benghazi families, whom she has subsequently accused of lying. I'll leave you with House Oversight Committee member Jason Chaffetz discussing the forthcoming report, which Trey Gowdy and his colleagues are expected to release in the coming months:
Remember, the Gowdy commission report will include a substantial trove of information gleaned from never-before-seen documents and never-before-interviewed witnesses. The State Department's officially-sanctioned review failed to call the Secretary of State herself to testify, and its final product was reportedly accessed ahead of its public release by Mrs. Clinton's chief of staff, who requested changes. A bipartisan Senate report published in 2014 concluded that the Al Qaeda-linked attacks were preventable, and that the State Department failed to heed multiple security concerns and triggered "trip wires" as the security situation on the ground disintegrated into violent, unstable chaos. That document, produced by the then-Democrat-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee, also criticized the Obama administration for "unnecessarily hamper[ing]" the investigation.