Democrats: Enough with Benghazi, already
Republicans continue to demand more information from the Obama administration on the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, with House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, blasting the administration Thursday for its "remarkable arrogance" on Benghazi and other controversies.
The continued criticism prompted Democrats to respond in unison Thursday: Enough, already.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said on the Senate floor that the 100 pages of emails released by the White House Wednesday night, relating to the talking points the administration used to characterize the attack, "prove there simply was no cover-up."
"Yet Republicans, with full knowledge of these emails, claimed the White House was hiding the truth," Reid said. The senator noted that the White House released the emails following some misreporting on the evolution of the talking points -- which some suggest came from Republican sources. Reid blasted the misreporting "based on an email fabricated by a Republican aide."
"It's a sad commentary that Republicans are so dead set on embarrassing the president that they would actually lie to a news organization about the contents of an email and let that news organization report their lies as facts," he said.
Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., also took to the Senate floor to point out that the Foreign Relations Committee has held four hearings on the Benghazi attack.
"I rise as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, outraged at the implication that we - in the Senate -- have not done enough to investigate what happened in Benghazi, that we have not investigated it thoroughly, that we have not looked at the details, that we have not analyzed the information - classified and unclassified - that has come before us," he said.
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House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told reporters Thursday that Republicans are using Benghazi and other issues because they "fear" the president's visionary leadership.
"They make so much of these issues because this president is such a great president. He's a visionary," she said. "They fear that. And so any issue that comes up, they will try to exploit. And some of them are legitimate issues, but they should not dominate everything. And so what I think is that they had used talking points on Benghazi. They will use the IRS. They will use the A.P. They will use these as, again, subterfuges, evasions of what the American people want us to do here. They want us to create jobs."
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, on Thursday insisted the House GOP is working on job creation but also rightly concerned with conducting oversight of the executive branch.
"Jobs is our primary focus, but while we are focused on that we are also focused on holding this administration accountable," he said. Committees are "working overtime to uncover the truth," he said, about Libya and other scandals like the political discrimination coming out of the IRS.
"When Americans are killed abroad, the government should tell the truth, not shade it or stonewall it for partisan purposes," he said. "Nothing dissolves the bonds between the people and their government like the arrogance of power here in Washington -- and that's what the American people are seeing today from the Obama administration, remarkable arrogance."
Boehner added, The administration can make this a lot easier by doing what they started to do yesterday, turning over emails from Benghazi, but they can make this a lot simpler by being upfront with the congress and being upfront with the American people."
Meanwhile, former Ambassador Thomas Pickering and former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen, co-chairs of the Benghazi Accountability Review Board, on Thursday refused a request from House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., for a closed, transcribed interview on Benghazi.
In a letter to Issa, Pickering and Mullen said they will only agree to a public hearing on the issue. They dismissed the request for a closed-door hearing as "highly unusual in the context of senior officials" and said that Issa has taken "liberal license" to call into question the board's work. They reassert that both are willing to appear before the House Oversight Committee in the context of a public hearing on May 28 or June 3.
