The Benghazi Cover-up Matters - It Changed the Course of History

The Benghazi matter - it has been called a cover-up and an affair - can now be called a congressional investigation. Democrats accuse Republicans of 'playing politics' over the 2012 Benghazi attacks, but Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the Republicans who has never given up on finding out what actually happened in Benghazi - and at the White House on that fateful night and in the following weeks - said that anyone who tries to use the tragedy for political gain will get burned, be they Republicans or Democrats. "So if we're (the GOP) playing politics with Benghazi, then we'll get burned...If our Democratic friends are shielding the administration and trying to protect them, and if the administration tried to protect themselves - the re-election - because they couldn't stand the truth about Benghazi, then they'll get burned," Graham told a weekly political TV program on Sunday. Republicans say President Barack Obama's White House blamed the attacks on a spontaneous protest over an anti-Moslem video, but intelligence officials found no such protests in Benghazi, where four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, were killed. Republicans have long charged that the White House hid the fact that terrorism was the cause because Obama was weeks away from a tight re-election and he was campaigning on the line that al-Qaida was "on the run." However, new email evidence surfaced last week when Judicial Watch obtained an email written and circulated by White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes to advise then-UN Ambassador Susan Rice to focus on the video in the five Sunday show appearances she made the Sunday following the attack. The email had been withheld from congressional panels investigating the attack, but was obtained by Judicial Watch after a Freedom of Information Act request ruling by a federal judge. Senator Graham said : "If it were up to the White House you would have never known about this email....Congress subpoenaed all documents related to Benghazi in August. So 20 months later they're hiding things. And when they say this email doesn't matter, these are the same people that tried to hide it," referring to White House spokesman Jay Carney, who insists that the email referred to protests in the Arab world as a whole, and not specifically to the Benghazi attack. Graham's response to Carney's comment : "Let's call Ben Rhodes, the author of the document, and ask him what it was about and use common sense. Do you think they were worried about property damage to the embassy in Cairo from a protest? No. they were worried about the four dead Americans in Benghazi. What did Susan Rice get asked about on Sunday television? Benghazi and the four dead Americans. The third goal of the email is to reassure the American people that we will bring those to justice who harmed Americans. Well, nobody was harmed other than in Benghazi so the document itself clearly demonstrates they were worried about Benghazi. To suggest otherwise is insulting and disrespectful, but that's the way they've been. And they've generally got away with it. The email is important because it shows that they're not trying to explain what happened in Benghazi because all the evidence was of a coordinated terrorist attack and the story they wanted Susan Rice to tell was of a protest caused by a video." ~~~~~ Today, House Speaker John Boehner named South Carolina Representative Trey Gowdy to head the special committee that will investigate the Benghazi attack. Boehner made the announcement in a statement, calling the two-term congressman - who is a former prosecutor - dogged and focused. Democrats have said the Benghazi investigation is over - pointing to multiple investigations, including a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee probe, and insist that GOP plans for a select committee is designed to engage GOP voters ahead of the mid-term elections. Gowdy, who defeated Republican incumbent Bob Inglis in a primary and then went on win his House seat in 2010, has impressed Republican leaders with his aggressive questioning of administration officials. Gowdy said Friday that he has evidence of a "systematic, intentional" effort by the Obama administration to withhold documents from Congress about the 2012 Benghazi attacks. "I have evidence that, not only are they hiding it, there's an intent to hide it," he told Fox News. "I can't disclose that evidence yet, but I have evidence that there was a systematic, intentional decision to withhold certain documents from Congress - and we're just sick of it." Boehner, until recently, had resisted appointing a special committee. He told Fox News on April 8 that such a panel might be needed at some time but “at this point, it’s not.” The emails changed that, according to unnamed aides. Boehner was furious that the emails were withheld, the aides said, and is irritated by what he considers evasion and obstruction by the White House. Boehner last week announced he was forming the committee amid charges that the administration has been obstructing the truth about the Benghazi attack : “Four Americans died at the hands of terrorists nearly 20 months ago, and we are still missing answers, accountability, and justice,” Boehner said in a statement. House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa said the State Department withheld White House emails related to the attacks that he demanded both in writing and by subpoena. Issa has issued a subpoena to Secretary of State John Kerry to testify about the administration response to congressional investigations. Democrats in Congress dismissed the Benghazi focus as a witch hunt. Hillary Clinton was US Secretary of State at the time of the attacks and Democrats have accused Republicans of using the Benghazi investigations partly to focus criticism on Clinton, a possible presidential candidate in 2016. But, Representative Peter King, a New York Republican, told Fox News on Sunday that if the House Democrats boycott the House vote and committee on Benghazi, it would make Democrats appear to be covering up something and seem not to be taking the investigation seriously. "And mostly it's going to show that they re afraid to confront the issues when the public is watching," King said. "They would prefer to have it done in the Situation Room of the White House maybe, but not in the light of public debate." ~~~~~ Dear readers, after almost two years of Republican searching and subpoenas to demand documents and accountability from President Obama and his White House staff, as well as from Hillary Clinton and her State Department, it now seems clear that there was an attempt, led by the White House, to cover up the facts surrounding the Benghazi attack and its aftermath. The cover up appears to have been driven by the need to keep Obama's 2012 re-election campaign on course by protecting the lies imbedded in his rhetoric about al-Qaida having been dismantled on his watch. The American people can thank three Senators - John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire - who never let the attacks of the pro-Obama media and the Democrat congressional leadership led by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelozi deter them. Their instincts and sources stood them in good stead, and America will finally get all the Benghazi facts and an accounting from the President's men and women. The Democrats say this new investigation is "politics " BUT...CONSIDER : IF Barack Obama had had to admit that al-Qaida affiliates killed American Ambassador Chris Stevens...IF Mitt Romney's growing lead would have continued...IF Romnay had won the presidency in 2012. Then there would have been the American up-front leadership in the Middle East that would have changed the Syria outcome...There would have been a tougher stand against the North Korean and Iranian nuclear weapons programs...There would have been a more realistic approach to Russia and Putin that might have avoided the growing civil war in Ukraine. AND there would have been the tax and federal regulatory reform, the budget control, the business support, the energy initiatives, the job programs...that would have put America on the fast track to recovery and Americans back to work. Benghazi does matter. It matters fundamentally. Because the Benghazi cover up allowed Obama to be re-elected, thereby distorting the last 3 years and making America, Americans and the world suffer because of an incompetent and illegitimate President who should never have won a second term.