by Nomad
After searching in vain since in March of last year, wasting time and spending millions, the Republican Party still expects to find something on about Hillary Clinton's emails. They've already admitted the investigation were politically-motivated.
Too bad these tireless and principled investigators were not around when Vice President Dick Cheney was fighting to keep his secrets classified.
Things have a dreadful habit of backfiring for the Republicans. The more they blustered about President Bill Clinton's adultery the higher his approval rating climbed. By and large, the public thought it was a case of too much about too too little.
It seems like the party has learned absolutely nothing. Take the fruitless email investigation and the search for.. what are they searching for?. Does anybody remember?
We do know how it began.
Investigation Ad Nauseum
The Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee Investigation started out, as we all know, as a search for culpability in the deaths of State Department officials in the Benghazi attacks, which left four dead.
After two agonizing years (filled with unsupported but damaging leaks to the press) the committee found that the CIA and the military acted properly in responding to the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and asserted no wrongdoing by Obama administration appointees. (Presumably, that would include the appointed Secretary of State.)
On the Benghazi investigation, more than $3,500,000 was thrown away. That figure exceeds the budget of the entire House Intelligence Committee. and does not include "significant expenditures made by the State Department and Defense Department to find and declassify material requested by the committee or the expense of witness travel for those who work for the government."
A miserable flop of a smear. So, what to do now, they asked? Why not a start a new investigation into Democratic candidate's use of a private email server? With the help of the media, the new so-called scandal investigation dragged on and on.
It didn't go smoothly.
In October, false accusations by Chairman Trey Gowdy forced the CIA to step in with a rebuttal.
Gowdy’s accusation was that Secretary Clinton had sent an email containing "some of the most protected information in our intelligence community, the release of which could jeopardize not only national security but human lives.”
Totally untrue. No apology or clarification. The investigation pressed on as it does today.
How much will be spent on this investigation is anybody's guess. It won't be cheap. As one source noted:
Rep. Gowdy now states the committee will continue its work into 2016 raising its cost to taxpayers to more than $6,000,000, casting his inaction as the result of the Obama administration’s slow pace at producing requested documents, a questionable premise.
Critics of the committee (and the numbers are growing) have called the investigation as nothing short of a taxpayer funded witch hunt of a leading presidential candidate.
Supporters of the Republican-led investigations say Hillary must be guilty of something. However, many in the GOP seem to forget when it came to keeping secrets. nothing could surpass the overt duplicity of former vice-president Dick Cheney.
