Democrats Short Circuit Bogus GOP Scandal By Demanding State Dept. Release Clinton Emails

House Democrats who sit on the Benghazi Select Committee has taken the air out of the Republican attempt to turn Benghazi into something by demanding that the State Department make public all Clinton emails related to Benghazi.

In a brief two-paragraph letter to Sec. of State John Kerry, all five Democrats on the Benghazi committee wrote, “Since the Department has already produced approximately 850 pages of these documents to the Select Committee on Benghazi, we request that the Department begin its review for public release with this subset of 850 pages of Benghazi-related documents in order to make them available to the public first without waiting for the full review of all 55,000 pages of documents.”

Democrats are calling the Republican bluff on the Clinton emails. If the Republicans think that there is anything in the 850 pages of emails related to Benghazi, why won’t they release them? If Republicans had any evidence of wrongdoing by former Sec. Clinton, they would have made the information public. Since they won’t release the emails, it is a safe bet that the Republicans have nothing.

By tying the emails to Benghazi, House Republicans are looking for a way to take a scandal that no one cares about outside of Republicans and the chattering Beltway media and inject it into the mainstream. Republicans know that people don’t care about emails, so they are trying to invent a Benghazi “smoking gun.”

The Democrats on the Benghazi Select Committee aren’t going to play along with this ruse. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), who is the ranking member of the Select Committee, spent years calling out Darrell Issa’s endless stream of lies and mythmaking during his time as the ranking member on the House Oversight committee. Cummings and his fellow Democratic members are stopping the Republicans dead in their tracks.

Democrats are putting the brakes on the Republican attempt to link the Clinton emails to Benghazi. It is put up or shut up time for Republicans. Since they don’t have any evidence to back up their claims, the Clinton emails are looking like another empty path down the Benghazi conspiracy road.