Rem Rieder

USA TODAY

Years ago, a Democratic-oriented communications firm was worried that the GOP was about to seize power in Washington. So it began to assiduously court Republicans all over town. But in the end the Democrats prevailed.

So much wasted groveling.

Last Friday, the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee issued its report on the 2012 attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others.

The report concluded that the U.S. military and the CIA had performed properly and that there was no evidence of misconduct by the Obama administration.

So much wasted noise.

For the last three years, the right has worked feverishly to turn Benghazi into a major scandal, a cudgel with which to batter President Obama and former secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It was, some asserted, worse than Watergate. And not just a little worse. In fact, fulminated Rep. Steve King, R.-Iowa, it was 10 times worse than Watergate and Iran-contra combined!

That's truly bad. So bad, some on the right muttered darkly, that President Obama could well be guilty of treason, and that could lead to his impeachment.

Benghazi was such nefarious business that it threatened to replace -gate as the suffix applied to scandals and "scandals." You remember when a top aide to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie decided it was time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee? There seemed to be some tension as to whether that kerfuffle should be dubbed "Bridgegate" or "Bridgeghazi." (The saga lost steam when the massive traffic snarls at the end of the George Washington couldn't be directly linked to the irascible governor.)

Benghazi became a major obsession for Fox News and other right-leaning news outlets. Yet it got plenty of attention in the mainstream media as well. Not enough, however, to satisfy some Benghazi enthusiasts, who endlessly complained that the issue was being covered up. The Atlantic in August 2013 declared, quite accurately, that the notion that the MSM had ignored Benghazi was the "whopper of the year."

But despite all the sound and fury, there simply was no "there" there, the House Intelligence Committee, chaired by Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., concluded. It found no evidence of an intelligence failure before the attacks. It praised the security efforts and bravery of CIA personnel, and found no evidence that a CIA team at the compound had been ordered to "stand down." It said there was no missed opportunity for a military rescue. It rejected the idea that the CIA in Libya was involved in any unauthorized activity, including running guns to Syria. And it found no evidence anyone had been intimidated from talking about what went down in Benghazi.

In other words, like six investigations before it, it found that the allegations of the Benghazi-is-worse-than-Watergate crowd were pretty much the stuff of fantasy.

Despite the forceful and unequivocal rejection of the Benghazi allegations by a Republican-dominated panel, the report was not exactly a big newsmaker. It didn't help that it was released Friday afternoon, the traditional time for dropping material destined for oblivion.

Fox, the Rosetta Stone of Benghazi, made a few mentions and moved on. But the conclusions weren't exactly showered with page-one splashes, massive airtime or homefront domination elsewhere.

It reminded me of the collective yawn back in 2006 when the identity of the person who outed Valerie Plame as a CIA operative was revealed. Plame was married to Iraq War critic Joseph Wilson, and there was endless speculation in the media that Karl Rove or Scooter Libby, a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, had done the deed. When it turned out that the disclosure had come from then-secretary of State Colin Powell's deputy, no great fan of the war, the news was widely ignored.

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., a member of the House Intelligence Committee, says he hopes "that this report will put to rest many of the questions that have been asked and answered yet again."

Amen.

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