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The Benghazi Debacle Should Have Ended Hillary Clinton’s Career

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Instead, with an assist from the media, she’s going to get off scot-free.

Do failures and lies matter any longer? If you are a prominent Democratic politician, what exactly is the level of wrongdoing that will end your career?

Reading the long-awaited report from the House Select Committee on Benghazi and the associated media coverage, I was struck by the sheer scale of the failures and the deceptions surrounding the terror attack on the Benghazi compound, and by the mainstream media’s dismissiveness. Here’s the opening paragraph of the New York Times’s story on the report:

Ending one of the longest, costliest and most bitterly partisan congressional investigations in history, the House Select Committee on Benghazi issued its final report on Tuesday, finding no new evidence of culpability or wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton in the 2012 attacks in Libya that left four Americans dead.

And here’s the Washington Post on the report:

A final report issued by the Republican majority that investigated the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, found fault with virtually every element of the executive branch response to the attacks but provided no new evidence of specific wrongdoing by then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. This is an extraordinary response to a report that comprehensively details one of the most shameful episodes in recent American diplomatic and military history.

This is an extraordinary response to a report that comprehensively details one of the most shameful episodes in recent American diplomatic and military history.

Clinton’s State Department failed to adequately protect its diplomats in Libya, with the Obama administration so intent on avoiding “boots on the ground” in the aftermath of its Libyan air war that it left Americans dangerously exposed even as the jihadist threat was plainly and clearly ramping up. The report details at least ten previous terror attacks in Benghazi, including two IED attacks on the American compound, yet the State Department had decreased its security there in the months before Ambassador Chris Stevens and four others were killed.

Obama’s Pentagon failed to mobilize assets to protect those same Americans even as they endured an hours-long assault on September 11, 2012. One of the most painful elements of the report is its description of exactly how difficult it was for the Pentagon to ramp up even the quick-strike elements of the most powerful military in the history of the world. Fighters were in one location, tankers in another. Ground assets were in one place, air transport in another. It took hours for clear commands from the White House and Pentagon to filter sufficiently far down the ranks to spur actual military activity.

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Source: David French, nationalreview.com