Bradley Podliska: Benghazi Committee Staffer's Accusations a Gift to Hillary Clinton | [site:name]

Former Benghazi-committee staffer Bradley Podliska, an intelligence officer in the Air Force Reserve and a self-described conservative Republican, didn’t set out to save Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. But his public fight with the committee may be the best thing to happen to Clinton since House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy boasted that the committee’s work had damaged her political prospects.

In an interview that aired this afternoon, Podliska told CNN’s Jake Tapper that unnamed senior members of the committee’s leadership had asked him to stop investigating how the Obama administration came to blame the Benghazi attacks on an anti-Islam YouTube video. He claimed the committee members told him “only right-wing nut jobs” cared about that now-discredited explanation for the attacks, and that by “right-wing nut jobs” they meant Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio. Podliska said he thought highly of Jordan and he found the characterization unfair.

The committee called Podliska’s new accusation another “false, unsubstantiated claim.”

Tapper understandably bristles at the suggestion that his reporting on Podliska’s accusations is a gift to Clinton’s campaign. But the first words from Podliska in Tapper’s Sunday CNN report were, “I’m scared. I’m going up against powerful people in Washington. I was fired for trying to conduct an objective, nonpartisan, thorough investigation.”

EDITORIAL: The House Select Committee on Benghazi, Holding Government Officials Accountable

To Clinton’s camp, Podliska provides eyewitness confirmation that Trey Gowdy’s committee is biased, partisan, and unfair.

Podliska’s closing comment with Tapper is likely to be cited by Clinton’s fans, unless the final report completely exonerates her of any wrongdoing:

Tapper: Do you think that the results of the committee, based on what you saw, will be fair, comprehensive, thorough, professional, honest?

Podliska: No. It’s not possible. The victims’ families are not going to get the truth. And that’s the most unfortunate thing about this. And I know this because the nine months of research I had done is now lost — I have no idea where it is. And I know I could give those victims’ families an explanation, a pretty thorough explanation, of why they were told that this attack was due to a video.

In between, Podliska offered a more nuanced perspective on Clinton’s responsibility for what occurred in Benghazi, but those cautionary notes are likely to be quickly forgotten. He said he doesn’t want the committee’s investigation ended, just “refocused” and added, “I honestly do not believe [the committee] was set up to go after Hillary; I believe it shifted that way.” Clinton and her allies will undoubtedly ignore Podliska’s statement that the former secretary of state “has a lot of explaining to do.”

#share#Podliska’s complaints come in two varieties: odd and unverifiable.

First, the odd: Podliska contends the Gowdy committee has a “hyper-focus” on Clinton and the State Department. Given the facts of the case, no amount of focus on Foggy Bottom and the woman who then led it seems unjustified.

On September 11, 2012, U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and U.S. Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith were killed in an American diplomatic compound in Benghazi. Two CIA contractors were killed in another compound later the same night. Earlier in 2012, the State Department had rejected Stevens’s requests for additional security and actually reduced the amount of security personnel available in the country.

Clinton and her allies will undoubtedly ignore Podliska’s statement that the former secretary of state ‘has a lot of explaining to do.’

The night of the attack, Hillary Clinton issued a statement declaring, “Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet.”

At the transfer of remains ceremony, Clinton repeated that explanation. “We’ve seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men,” she said. We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful internet video that we had nothing to do with.”

Charles Woods, the father of slain Tyrone Woods, claimed that at the funeral, Clinton told him, “We’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video.”

In light of all that, why wouldn’t the committee focus intensely on Clinton and the State Department?

Podliska told CNN that the committee trained its sights almost exclusively on Clinton after the revelation last March that she used a private e-mail server during her tenure as secretary of state.

Again, while intelligent people can disagree on just how much attention the private e-mail server warrants, it is indisputable that Clinton’s e-mails represent a major piece of (likely withheld) evidence in the Benghazi investigation. For all we know, there may no better way to get the full story of what happened before, during, and after the attack, than reading the then-secretary of state’s contemporaneous communications. So of course Hillary’s off-the-books server and use of political hatchet-man Sid Blumenthal as a Libya-policy advisor are of interest to the Benghazi committee.

#related#Podliska’s unverifiable complaint is that the committee has dropped or de-emphasized investigations of “different organizations, different agencies, and different individuals” in the service of its “hyper-focus” on Clinton. For those of us outside the committee, it’s hard to tell which aspects of the investigation are getting the right amount of attention and which ones are getting too much or too little. We likely won’t be able to formulate an informed assessment until we see the committee’s final report. But even if one were to accept on faith that Trey Gowdy is a relentless partisan, why would he take it easy on other Obama administration officials such as Susan Rice, Leon Panetta, and Tom Donilon? Is the desire to damage Clinton’s presidential bid so powerful that Republicans would let other members of the administration escape any opprobrium?

Today Tapper said CNN offered Gowdy multiple opportunities to appear on camera to rebut Podliska’s accusations, and that the invitation remains on the table. Either there’s an astonishing lack of communication within the committee and Gowdy hasn’t received Tapper’s entreaties, or the South Carolina congressman has failed to seize a valuable opportunity to counter Podliska’s claims.

In the meantime, the country is left with Podliska’s odd account — that a GOP-led committee gave one of its staffers difficulty about taking time off to serve in the Air Force reserves, that they dismissed the administration’s anti-Islamic–video talking points as the sole interest of “right-wing nut jobs,” and that they de-emphasized certain avenues of investigation to engage in their own cover-up of the facts of the Benghazi attacks.

That might sound good to the Clinton campaign, but it’s unlikely to satisfy anyone else.

— Jim Geraghty is the senior political correspondent for National Review.