The Incredible Shrinking Benghazi Hearings

Something has been missing from the latest round of calls for President Obama’s impeachment. It’s was barely mentioned in Sarah Palin’s red meat screed on the POTUS last week and seems to play little or no role in House Speaker John Boehner’s planned law suit.

That something is Benghazi. That magical place in Libya where four Americans lost their lives seems to have taken a back seat after two years of dead horse flogging. The promised House hearings, headed by South Carolina Representative Trey Gowdy are also yet to materialize.

This begs the question: is the GOP finally moving away from the attack as an issue or are they simply saving their so-called “best for last” in a bid to time the hearings for better political gain?

In his blog, yesterday in Roll Call, columnist David Hawkings takes the second point of view.

Don’t expect to be able to tune in to the Benghazi hearings anytime soon. No air date for the premiere has been announced, because the pre-production work is off to a deliberately slow start.

The reason is that the impresario, Rep. Trey Gowdy, is much more experienced as a prosecutor than as an executive producer. And district attorneys, at least as much as studio moguls, are trained to refrain from going public if they have any doubt about their work being ready for prime time. . .

Besides, pursuing the inquiry for a while longer before any hearings works to the Republicans’ strategic advantage in several ways.

This period of deliberative quiet helps rebut Democratic criticism that the committee’s only purposes are to spur GOP fundraising, and to give the party one more shot before Election Day at selling the public on discredited conspiracy theories.

It gives the committee’s staff (only about half of the expected 30 have been hired because of security clearance backlogs) time to search for unanswered questions or undetected smoking guns in the 25,000 pages of records generated by six previous congressional investigations.

It provides some breathing room to the GOP’s campaign message-makers, who believe they’re having some success with lines of attack on other fronts: President Barack Obama’s handling of the throngs of undocumented children at the border, his implementation of the health care law and his muscular use of executive powers.

And it preserves the option for the Republicans to take their last best shots on Benghazi after the midterms, when political talk will turn nearly exclusively on the presumed presidential candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the secretary of State when the attack happened.

The same delay, though, brings decent risks for Gowdy’s side. Not generating news for more than two months has provided room for other Benghazi-related stories to get attention, and none of that coverage has helped the GOP’s cause….

The chairman is promising this month will be a time of intense activity at the committee, packed with interviews and briefings from several corners of the administration. He’s promising the five Democrats will be included every step of the way. But he’s also conceding that, by design, virtually all the work is supposed to remain invisible to the public for the indefinite future. (The panel’s bare-bones website doesn’t even list its phone number or Longworth Building address.)

The implicit message is a tough one to buy, because it runs counter to almost every norm at today’s hyper-combative, super-partisan Capitol: Trust us.

By: Eric Trommater

A liberal living in Northern Virginia. Father of Two great kids. Former sports writer and movie critic.