The Patriot Post® · Coming Soon: The Benghazi Select Committee

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) will chair a select committee tasked with investigating the terrorist attack in Benghazi and the subsequent cover-up by the Obama administration. In announcing the decision, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said that the administration’s continued stonewalling “compel[s] the House to take every possible action to ensure the American people have the truth about the terrorist attack on our consulate that killed four of our countrymen,” including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens.

Last week’s bombshell report on internal White House emails proves that the narrative after the attack was cravenly political, and a select committee is the necessary next step. Boehner called the revealed emails “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” For Democrats who complain of GOP political games, the only reason this is political is that the administration made it so.

State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf blasted Boehner’s move, saying, “We’ve produced tens of thousands of documents. We’ve done nine hearings, 46 briefings. How many more taxpayer dollars are we going to spend trying to prove a political point that in 18 months they haven’t been able to prove?” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) chimed in, similarly complaining, “For Republicans to waste the American people’s time and money staging a partisan political circus instead of focusing on the middle class is simply a bad decision.”

So Democrats are suddenly concerned with how taxpayer dollars are being spent?

Reid also brought it all back around to his new favorite pastime – bashing the Koch brothers. He said, “Republicans care more about defending billionaires like the Koch brothers and trying to rekindle debunked right-wing conspiracy theories than raising the minimum wage or ensuring women receive equal pay for equal work.”

Gowdy, a former prosecutor, is just the man for the job of heading the select committee. He’s a no-nonsense conservative whose aim is to uphold Rule of Law, and choosing him means this committee may actually produce results. He demonstrated this already over the weekend, saying, “I have evidence that, not only are they hiding it, there is an intent to hide it. I can’t disclose that evidence yet, but I have evidence that there was a systematic, intentional decision to withhold certain documents from Congress.”

He added, “If you want to have [former Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli] Greg Hicks and the station chief from Tripoli and Hillary Clinton all sitting at the same table, you need to have a committee that has the power to do that. And a select committee would have that power.” It may be “political” to say so, but Clinton should be disqualified from being president of the United States after her disgraceful performance in this whole fiasco.

Of course, it remains to be seen if the select committee can successfully hold the Obama administration accountable – as in heads rolling at the very least – for its failed immediate response to the attack, the subsequent lies to cover-up that failure, and the further lies to cover the lies.