A BOYCOTT OF THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON BENGHAZI? For Democrats, Party Always Comes Before Country

Guest post by Investor's Business Daily

Scandal: A Democratic member of the House intelligence committee called Sunday for his party to boycott the newly announced select committee that will probe the Benghazi terrorist attacks, calling it "a colossal waste of time."

Almost as soon as "Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi" had fallen from the lips of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — a reprise of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's "What difference at this point does it make?" — Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., told Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday" that he thinks the planned select committee to investigate the 2012 Benghazi attack is a "colossal waste of time" and suggested that Democrats not participate in it.

The congressman responded to Speaker John Boehner's announcement that a special committee to investigate Benghazi, and the cover-up that followed, by dismissing claims that new emails were "smoking gun" evidence that the inflammatory video excuse was concocted to safeguard President Obama's re-election and Hillary's future candidacy.

Calling the yet-to-be-approved committee a "tremendous red herring," Schiff said: "I don't think it makes sense, really, for Democrats to participate." After all, we got the maker of the video, as Hillary Clinton promised the parents of the dead while their son's casket arrived at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, D.C.

Former White House adviser David Plouffe, speaking on ABC's "This Week," called the committee "bogus." He was one of the recipients of a Sept. 14, 2012, email from Ben Rhodes, an assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, discussing the prepping of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice before her whirlwind tour of five Sunday talk shows to specifically and emphatically blame an Internet video for the attack.

Imagine if Republicans had boycotted the Watergate panel in 1973. Instead it was a Republican, Sen. Howard Baker, who asked the iconic question, "What did the president know and when did he know it?" Nobody died in Watergate; four Americans died in Benghazi. And we don't even know where the president was the fateful night of Sept. 11, 2012, much less what he knew.

The question before us is: What is the president hiding and why is he hiding it? The emails provided to Judicial Watch under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit were different in the amount of redaction from similar emails reluctantly provided to Congress.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, told former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson the government apparently tried to keep the Rhodes email from Congress and the public by classifying it after the fact. "They retroactively changed the classification," Chaffetz said. "That was an unclassified document, and they changed it to classified."

Added Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., likely head of the special committee: "If you want to have Greg Hicks (deputy chief of mission in Libya) and the station chief from Tripoli and Hillary Clinton all sitting at the same table, you need to have a committee that has the power to do that. And a select committee would have that power."

For the parents of the Benghazi dead, who were among the first lied to by this administration, it's about time.

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