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Muftic: The firecracker duds: Benghazi investigations and a private email server

Felicia Muftic
My View
Felicia Muftic
Courtesy Photo |

A lesson for voters: where there is smoke there is not always fire and a lit fuse does not necessarily mean fireworks follow.

Like firecracker that failed to go off, the $7million House Select Committee Ben Ghazi investigation and report failed to blast Hillary Clinton out of the race. The eighth report on Ben Ghazi was issued in two partisan reports by a “bi partisan” House subcommittee, but Clinton herself was not fingered with guilt in any of them.

In addition, the attacks against Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server grew out of the Ben Ghazi hearings and Tuesday, the FBI director announced he would recommend to the Justice Department not to prosecute her for intentionally conveying classified information on it or for being guilty of gross negligence in handling of such sensitive material. The reason, there was not enough evidence for any reasonable prosecutor to prove a criminal case. The State Department was criticized for sloppy handling, but in a criminal case a prosecutor must be able to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt of intent and criminal negligence. One other outcome was that there was no evidence the private server had been hacked by anyone, though it could have been possible.



This is becoming a pattern: Donald Trump or the GOP Congress to make charges to tarnish Clinton and then find out later they were not true or lacked sufficient proof. Over a year ago the House Select Committee dominated by Republicans set about to dig into the Benghazi incident once again, even after other investigations preceding it had found no guilt to pin on Clinton herself. Democrats saw it as a witch hunt to try to damage Clinton. The political purpose was inadvertently confirmed on September 29, 2015, when Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy said the following during an appearance on Hannity: “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought.” (McCarthy tried to back peddle a few days later). Donald Trump had also made accusations against Clinton that Clinton was asleep during the attack and decision making. That charge was so outrageous and without proof, even he backed down the next day.

Regarding Benghazi, the select committee did discover that administration SNAFUs resulted in miss spoken, missed opportunities, lack of security planning in the face of CIA warnings about the dangers of going to Benghazi , the failure of the military to execute orders, and erroneous public statements issued in its aftermath about the details and causes fed by White House staff to spokespeople. What is clear, though, the death of the Ambassador and three Americans with him was a tragedy that did not need to have happened.



What we can now expect is that conspiracy theorists will go to work trying to find the proof that the FBI did not find everything or some sort of collusion. FBI Director James B. Comey took unusual public pains to be transparent about the investigation. As he said, what matters are the facts, so let us see what facts theorists present.

For more, visit http://www.mufticforumblog.blogspot.com


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