RIGHT-WING SKEPTICISM ABOUT THE BENGHAZI REPORT: A REPORT FROM DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

The House Intelligence Committee has issued a report on Benghazi that rejects much of what the right-wing base believes about the incident. Shortly after I wrote about this, I found an old post of mine being linked in a right-winger's tweet:

The BASE of the GOP has hated @RepMikeRogers for a while.... "he was trying to SHUT DOWN Benghazi investigation" http://t.co/wCp2IlXTqK

— oBoLa cRaCkA (@HouseCracka) November 22, 2014

That's going to be the reason that at least some righties dismiss this report: they don't trust Mike Rogers, the outgoing chair of the Intelligence Committee. He's made the list of "top ten RINOs" in the House, based on ratings from the American Conservative Union. He's specifically loathed by many on the right for past votes to raise the debt ceiling, and to renew the Patriot Act. The latter sticks in the craw of those conservatives who use "neocon" as a pejorative; the tweeter quoted above is one of those:

The NEO CON's cover up Benghazi to protect Hillary and Obama with the Mike Rogers whitewash report last night. #Disgusting @Gop @NRSC

— oBoLa cRaCkA (@HouseCracka) November 22, 2014

The old post of mine that this guy linked was from March of this year; in it I noted that Rogers was very much against Rand Paul's drone filibuster. I also noted that he was getting criticism for his work with regard to Benghazi -- a Free Republic thread at the time was titled "Joe diGenova tells WMAL GOP Congressman Mike Rogers (MI-8) is trying to kill Benghazi Investigation." And I quoted an interview Rogers gave to The Washington Post, in which he responded to criticism of his committee's work by saying,

Part of the problem has been that there are conspiracy theorists who wanted us to find conspiracy A, B, and C, and I ran a very aggressive fact-based investigation. I didn't go into it -- as an old FBI agent you don’t get into it with a conclusion, but a premise.

As I wrote,

If he's actually bragging about not working backward from the conclusion that Hillary Clinton is an anti-American Antichrist, no wonder the base hates him.

So now we have his report, and we can go to The Conservative Treehouse to get a sense of what has some right-wingers ticked off:

• Both Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger are members of the Congressional Gang of Eight....

• Both Rogers and Ruppersberger would have been briefed on the CIA operations in Benghazi during 2011/2012 as the covert operation began....

• Rogers, Ruppersberger along with Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner, Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, Saxby Chambliss and Diane Feinstein would have been notified of the presidential authorization. In 2011 they were the congressional Gang of Eight. Their lack of oversight reflected a willful blindness to the operation....

..."The committee also found no evidence that the CIA conducted unauthorized activities in Benghazi"...

...The word emphasized is "unauthorized", meaning all of the activity was known, active, and authorized....

The belief is that there's a cover-up of covert arms shipment from Libya to Syria, a cover-up of which Rogers is a part. He has been an advocate of arming Syrian rebels, for which some on the right despise him.

I'm just scratching the surface of anti-Rogers anger on the right. Some think he actually has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, citing the fact that he spoke at a dinner honoring Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who tried to establish the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" and who's believed on the Pam Geller right to be dangerously close to the Muslim Brotherhood.

So, long story short, some wingers aren't going to buy this report. For them, Benghazi will never truly die.