Editorial: Clinton hearing shows it’s time to strike the tent on the Benghazi circus

Thursday’s hearing of the House Select Committee on Benghazi will be remembered mostly as a political coup for the star witness on the hot seat, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

There is poetic justice in that fact because House Republicans’ not-very-ulterior motive in authorizing an eighth congressional investigation into the attacks was to bloody Clinton, the likely 2016 Democratic presidential nominee. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) implicitly acknowledged as much when he boasted that Clinton’s “numbers are dropping” because of the committee’s work.

But in several hours at the witness table, Clinton provided a deft defense of her stewardship while remaining composed in the face of sometimes haranguing questioning. At other moments she sat mutely as Democrats on the panel (accurately) accused the Republican majority of politicizing the inquiry into the September 2012 attacks at a U.S. diplomatic compound in Libya, which claimed the lives of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

Clinton also benefited from the fact that, after 17 months and $4.7 million spent, the committee has failed to adduce any incriminating information to which she would have to respond.

In his defensive opening statement, committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) boasted that the panel had identified witnesses and documents unknown to previous probes. That’s true, just as it’s likely that a few new documents related to Watergate or Iran-Contra might be generated by further investigations of those scandals. The question is whether the new information undermines the established narrative about what happened before, during and after the tragic events in Benghazi. It doesn’t.

Republicans used Thursday’s hearing to replow old ground, from the obviously inadequate security at the State Department complex in Benghazi to the notion that Obama administration officials concocted a cover story linking the Benghazi attack to outrage over a video that mocked the prophet Muhammad, not to terrorism. (In fact, an early CIA assessment suggested the attack was inspired by a protest over the video at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.) There was also an odd excursion into whether Clinton paid more attention to emails about Libya from Sidney Blumenthal, a former aide to Bill Clinton, than to advice from Stevens conveyed through other channels.

The failure to secure the complex at Benghazi was a blot on the Obama administration and the State Department for which Clinton ultimately was responsible. It’s also true that administration officials in an election year may have clung too long to the idea that the attacks were driven largely by outrage over a video. But the Republican obsession with Benghazi conspiracy theories — including the myth that U.S. military forces were ordered to “stand down” rather than launch a rescue mission — has discredited the party.

When this committee was announced, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) promised that it wouldn’t become a sideshow or a circus. Thursday’s hearing showed how wrong he was. It’s time to fold the tent.

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