The Biden Impeachment Is Benghazi All Over Again

Think back to 2014 - 2016 and one will recall all the breathless Republicans wringing their hands an saying "Benghazi," a long investigation of Hillary Clinton that ultimately found no wrongdoing and became almost a joke.  Indeed, after an eleven hour grilling, Clinton was the one in command of the situation.  The true purpose of the farcical investigative circus, of course, was never really about exposing wrongdoing but instead had as it sole aim harming Clinton in the public's view and lessen her election chances.  Seven year later we see a similar charade unfolding as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy - a man who makes tawdry hookers look virtuous - launching an impeachment inquiry against Joe Biden even though Republican investigations to date have turned up nothing.  Sadly, rather than tend to the nation's business, including avoiding a government shutdown in less than two weeks, all McCarthy and other amoral and spineless Republicans care about is putting on performances that thrill the ugliest elements of the GOP base and right wing extremist Republicans in the House of Representatives.  Tellingly, Republicans care nothing about the corruption and self-enrichment that were the hallmarks of the Trump regime.   A piece in The Atlantic looks at the parallels between Benghazi and the current Biden witch hunt:

Once upon a time, presidential impeachment was a rare event. But with four of the five inquiries in U.S. history coming in the past 25 years, people seeking to understand and explain the impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, launched Tuesday, have looked to the 2019 impeachment of President Donald Trump as an analogy. Both center on allegations of using elected office for personal gain, and both have been divided sharply along partisan lines.

The comparison is understandable, especially because some Republicans have explicitly framed their inquiry as a response to Trump’s impeachment, as Jonathan Chait writes. But the more useful comparison is to the House investigation into Benghazi from 2014 to 2016. Both inquiries are based far more on vibes and political machinations than they are on hard evidence. Kevin McCarthy’s longstanding ambition to be speaker of the House sit at the center of both. And the fate of the Benghazi investigation offers some indications about how this one could turn out.

Like the current impeachment inquiry, the Benghazi story began with U.S. involvement in a foreign country—in this case, Libya, where the Obama administration was reluctantly drawn into the toppling of Muammar Qaddafi. On September 11, 2012, Islamist attacks on two U.S. facilities in the city of Benghazi killed the U.S. ambassador, a Foreign Service officer, and two CIA contractors. Republicans blamed Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, for failing to prevent or respond quickly to the attack. Then-Speaker John Boehner initially resisted calls for a special committee to investigate the attack but eventually agreed.

The point of the Benghazi committee was to hurt Clinton’s chances at winning the presidency in 2016. We know this because Republicans were not subtle. As McCarthy, then the House majority leader, said in a September 2015 TV interview: “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.

That frank confession that a congressional inquiry had been used as a tool of partisan warfare helped cost McCarthy the speakership. The same month, Boehner announced his retirement. McCarthy had been the clear favorite, but amid fallout from the interview, he suddenly dropped out, saying he couldn’t unite the caucus. He eventually got the gavel in January of this year, but now his speakership is once again on the line. As my colleague Russell Berman wrote Tuesday, McCarthy is a hostage of the far-right flank of his party, which forced him into announcing the impeachment inquiry. McCarthy’s ability to manage the process will in part determine whether he keeps his job.

The basis for the first Trump impeachment was clear from the start. A whistleblower alleged that Trump had tried to extort an investigation into (wait for it) Hunter and Joe Biden over dealings in Ukraine, using funds appropriated by Congress as leverage. The White House released a transcript of the call the same day that Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced an impeachment inquiry. The rest of the inquiry turned up lots of new information about Trump’s attempt to use Ukraine as a pawn in his reelection campaign, but the basic allegation was clear from the start, and the question was not whether Trump had done it but whether it was a “perfect” call, as he insisted, or a serious breach of his oath of office.

In both Benghazi and the Biden impeachment, by contrast, it isn’t entirely clear what precisely the misconduct is. In the Benghazi investigation, everyone agreed that something bad had happened—Americans died. But Republicans had no clear theory of why that was Clinton’s fault. In the Biden case, a consensus has emerged that Hunter Biden engaged in brazenly unethical behavior (separate from his legal woes in the United States), but that doesn’t amount to wrongdoing on his father’s part. McCarthy’s stated rationales for the impeachment inquiry are flimsy, unproven, and incorrect, . . . .

Nonetheless, Republicans seem absolutely certain that Biden is wildly corrupt, and they would prove it if only they could get all the pieces of the investigation to come together, and if only they could find their witnesses, and if only those witnesses weren’t facing federal charges, and so on. This is a view propounded not just by the far right in Congress, but also by prominent voices in the supposedly sober and serious conservative press. Well, perhaps: Evidence of serious misconduct by Joe Biden might still turn up, but for the time being, the exercise looks like a transparent attempt to hurt Biden’s chances at reelection.

Much like Benghazi. For a time, the Benghazi committee looked like nothing more than a big fishing expedition. Despite more than two years of work, the committee did not find any wrongdoing by Clinton. Her own testimony before the committee, an 11-hour slog, was widely viewed as a victory for her, because she was in command of the facts and Republican committee members didn’t land any real blows on her. By the time the election rolled around, “Benghazi” was more of a punch line—against Republicans—than a live campaign issue.

One can easily imagine the Biden impeachment following that path. James Comer, the House Oversight Committee chair, who has been leading investigations into Hunter Biden, has appeared bumbling and ineffective. So far, no evidence suggests offenses that reach the historical threshold for impeachment. Moderate House Republicans show little appetite for impeachment, and getting a full House vote—much less a successful impeachment—looks very challenging for McCarthy.

But the Benghazi experience points to another possibility, too. Although the Benghazi committee couldn’t nail Clinton, one byproduct of the investigation was the revelation of Clinton’s private email server, which turned out to be a defining issue in the 2016 presidential election, and arguably cost her the presidency. Just because an investigation fails in its putative goal doesn’t mean it will fail in its actual goal.