Milbank: There’s still no smoking gun on Clinton, Benghazi

Had he proved that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acted on political motives? “I don’t have a background in the ‘why,’ ” Gowdy demurred.

Do his findings support the allegation on bumper stickers and T-shirts across the land claiming “Clinton lied, people died”? “You don’t see that T-shirt on me, and you’ve never seen that bumper sticker on any of my vehicles,” Gowdy replied.

Gowdy went out of his way not to mention Clinton in his opening statement at a news conference Tuesday. He said he would be “shocked” if people concluded the report is about her.

Unfortunately, at least two of the six committee Republicans sharing the stage with Gowdy had a dissenting view. Rep. Mike Pompeo of Kansas, who wrote a separate report with Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, proclaimed Clinton’s actions during the Benghazi attacks “morally reprehensible” and said relatives of the slain “have every right to be disgusted” with the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

If having a legitimate probe was the goal, Gowdy was probably doomed from the start. He launched with a show of fairness. But Republicans, including Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, eventually confessed the panel’s political aims. Democrats grew more antagonistic, and Gowdy, after promising his report was “not going to come out in the middle of 2016,” released it just before the political conventions.

Gowdy apparently lost hard-liners on his own panel. Pompeo and Jordan, in their rival report, alleged that Clinton’s State Department was “seemingly more concerned with politics and Secretary Clinton’s legacy than with protecting its people in Benghazi,” and they said the Obama administration was “so focused on the next election that it lost sight of its duty to tell the American people the truth.”

If Republicans leveled wild accusations, Democrats went the other way, issuing their own report categorically asserting that the Pentagon “could not have done anything differently” to save those killed, that “Secretary Clinton never personally denied any requests for additional security in Benghazi,” that intelligence assessments “were not influenced by political considerations” and that officials “did not make intentionally misleading statements.”

Sounded like an excuse

Between the reckless accusations and the nothing-to-see-here defenses, there was one obvious truth: “There does not appear to be a smoking gun,” CNN’s Dana Bash informed her viewers before Gowdy entered the room.

Nor even a warm slingshot.

Gowdy, with slicked gray hair, lavender tie and fitted suit, offered what sounded like an excuse for the absence of a bombshell. “It is always better to be the first committee to investigate, and it is always better to investigate as contemporaneously to an incident or to an event as can be done,” he said. “Our committee did not have the luxury of either one of those.”

Too bad they didn’t think of this two years and $7 million ago.