Democrats caught Republican Benghazi Select Committee members in a
stone cold lie when Gowdy and Westmoreland claimed that
Congress did not have access to Amb. Ted Stevens’ emails.
Select Committee Chairman Gowdy (R-SC) said on
Face The Nation, “none of the seven previous committees bothered to access the emails of our Ambassador.”
Republican Select Committee Member Pompeo said on
Meet The Press,
“How on earth could any of the other committees have completed their
work properly without access to the senior person on the ground’s
emails?”
Today on
CNN,
Committee Member Westmoreland said on CNN, “Wouldn’t you want to
know the emails of the guy that was there that was murdered and what he
had asked for as far as help from the people he worked for? We’ve just
now gotten those emails. We have just now gotten them. Nobody else had
requested them. I haven’t had a chance to read them. We didn’t get
them until the day before yesterday.”
The Democrats on the Benghazi Committee responded by crushing this Republican lie:
C
ontrary to Republican claims, multiple committees of
Congress—including the Oversight Committee on which Chairman Gowdy
serves—had access to many of Ambassador Stevens’ emails for years. On
November 24, 2014, and December 9, 2014, the State Department produced
to the Select Committee approximately 25,000 pages of documents that had
already been “previously produced to Congress.”
Some of these emails from Ambassador Stevens included:
– an August 19, 2011, email exchange between Special Envoy Stevens
and the Deputy Director of the Office of Maghreb Affairs about the
logistics of providing security for a temporary duty officer to be
assigned to eastern Libya (C05392462);
– a September 6, 2011, email from Special Envoy Stevens explaining
why he felt it was important to maintain a U.S. presence in Benghazi
(C05389447);
– a June 12, 2012, email exchange between Ambassador Stevens and the
Director of the Office of Maghreb Affairs about the security situation
in Benghazi (C05409960);
– a June 13, 2012, email exchange between Ambassador Stevens and
State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland about the Department’s
public statements in light of recent violence in Libya (C05391866);
– an August 30, 2012, email exchange between Ambassador Stevens and
the Principal Officer in Benghazi discussing a press report about the
security situation in Benghazi (C05397290); and
– a September 8, 2012, email exchange between Ambassador
Stevens and the Political Officer in Tripoli discussing a schedule for
Ambassador Stevens’ upcoming travel to Benghazi (C05395356).
Political observers have witnessed this behavior during other
debunked Republican scandals. House Republicans ignored reality when
they were investigating the IRS scandal. Republicans have pulled this
same stunt during the other Benghazi investigations.
House Republicans have nothing new to investigate, so they are
reviving old lies, and pretending that the previous investigations never
happened.
The lies are piling up, and House Republicans have nowhere to go but
down. Democrats are shredding the Benghazi investigation before Hillary
Clinton sits down to testify.
