Krauthammer: New Benghazi Committee Hard for Dems to Ignore

A fair and impartial House Benghazi probe will undermine Democrats' efforts to paint the hearings as an election-year stunt by making the truth of the Obama administration's conduct on Sept. 11, 2012, "impossible to ignore,"  Charles Krauthammer wrote in The Washington Post.

The former prosecutor chairing the House Select Committee on Benghazi, Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, must steer the panel away from speculation and focus on uncovering facts behind the White House's response to the assault that killed four Americans, the columnist wrote.

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"Questions only, no speechifying," Krauthammer wrote. "Every sentence by every GOP committee member must end with a question mark. Should any committee Republican instead make a declarative statement ending in a period, the chairman should immediately, by button, deliver an electric shock through the violator's seat."

With some Democrats considering a boycott of the hearings, and the "Obama-protective media," Krauthammer argued that even the most fair-minded investigation poses political risks for Republicans.

"Going into the 2014 election, they stand to benefit from the major issues — Obamacare, the economy, chronic unemployment — from which Benghazi hearings can only distract," he wrote. "Worse, if botched like previous hearings on the matter, these hearings could backfire against the GOP, as did the 1998 Clinton impeachment proceedings."

But the White House's efforts to conceal security and intelligence failings demand a serious investigation, the columnist opined.

Krauthammer cited the email that took eight months and a court order to uncover: Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes urging then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to blame the violence on spontaneous rage over an inflammatory anti-Islam video.

"We've already seen what a single piece of new evidence can do in reviving interest in a story that many (including me) thought the administration had successfully stonewalled," he wrote.

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