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GOP Discuss Findings on New Benghazi Report. Aired 10-10:30a ET

Aired June 28, 2016 - 10:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


[10:00:00] CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Thank you so much for joining me.

Two years after the Benghazi investigation was first launched, we're just moments away from hearing more on what that investigation has revealed. House Republicans led the investigation, they're about to hold a news conference on the terror attack that killed four Americans.

The full report coming out just two hours ago. It does not provide a smoking gun to directly implicate Hillary Clinton who was secretary of state at the time. But it does say Clinton should have recognized the grave danger the Americans faced in Libya.

This investigation and the results of the investigation comes just over four months before the presidential election.

Chief political correspondent Dana Bash is covering this for us this morning. Good morning.

DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Good morning. And because of what you just said, the timing of this, the context in which this is coming out, just a few months before the election, understandably a large focus has been on Hillary Clinton who, of course, was secretary of state during this deadly attack in Benghazi. And so the question has been, how much of a focus is this report going to have on her?

The answer largely is what you said in the lead-in, Carol, that there certainly does not appear to be a smoking gun. Nothing that is new that reveals that Hillary Clinton had culpability here. And Trey Gowdy who is going to appear here momentarily, he's the chair of this select committee who's been working for two years at the cost of about $7 million, taxpayer dollars, is going to argue that that wasn't his plan. That he intended all along to deliver a narrative with witness interviews, with e-mails that people have not yet seen, with all kinds of information he will insist that needs to be out there for the public to see, just broadly to make sure that this kind of attack doesn't happen again.

And in reading some of this, this is 800 pages, so we are still going through the parts that we hadn't been given exclusively before, it really does just tell a tale of a bureaucratic mess that is the State Department and the Defense Department, intelligent agencies, that allowed this to happen. That allowed a U.S. ambassador to be in a place as dangerous as Benghazi without the proper funding and more importantly the proper security to be there.

Now there are, of course, lots of other discussions in this report, political question that have been asked since pretty much after this happened, very close to the 2012 presidential election, about whether or not the administration was trying to cover up the fact that it was a terror attack because it was bad politics for the president and his re-election. The Republicans who -- Trey Gowdy who put this together, does not make that conclusion. But there's a lot of evidence that there are a lot of Republicans who are pressuring him to be more political because two of the GOP congressmen we will see here, they have their own report making those conclusions and have a very sharp determination that Hillary Clinton and the broader administration tried to sweep this under the rug because of politics -- Carol.

COSTELLO: All right. Dana Bash, I'll let you get back to it. Thanks so much, Dana Bash reporting live for us this morning.

Of course, the Clinton camp is getting ready to respond to this report. So I want to bring in CNN national politics reporter MJ Lee. She's in Denver where Clinton is going to hold an event a little bit later this morning.

Good morning, MJ.

MJ LEE, CNN POLITICS CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Carol. As you know, this is a report that Hillary Clinton has been anticipating for more than two years now. And the timing of the release of this report, of course, has potentially enormous consequences for Hillary Clinton and her political campaign this year.

The Clinton campaign is forcefully pushing back on this report. We got a statement from spokesperson Brian Fallon just a few minutes ago, and I want to read the statement in its entirety. The statement says, "The Republicans on the House Benghazi Committee are finishing their work in the same partisan way that we have seen from them since the beginning. In refusing to issue its report on a bipartisan basis, the committee is breaking from the precedent set by other congressional inquiries into the Benghazi attacks.

"And in leaking out select portions from their report in the middle of the night without even allowing some of the committee's own members to see it, the Republican members are clearly seeking to avoid any fact- checking of their discredited conspiracy theories."

And the statement continues, "After more than two years and more than $7 million in taxpayer funds, the committee report has not found anything to contradict the conclusions of the multiple earlier investigations. This report just confirms what majority leader Kevin McCarthy and even one of Trey Gowdy's own former staffers admitted months ago. This committee's chief goal is to politicize the deaths of four brave Americans in order to try to attack the Obama administration and hurt Hillary Clinton's campaign."

[10:05:06] Now so what this statement means is that the Clinton campaign is determined to make this -- paint this report, rather, as a political witch hunt. And this is something that Democrats have been saying as you know, Carol, for months that this is not about really a truth-seeking report and this is more about really trying to cast Clinton and the Obama administration's role in the aftermath of the Benghazi attack into essentially a political witch hunt.

Now Hillary Clinton is campaigning --

COSTELLO: OK. I'm going to interrupt you --

(CROSSTALK)

COSTELLO: I'm going to interrupt you, MJ, and I want to bring our viewers back to Washington. This is Congressman Trey Gowdy, the chair of the Benghazi Committee.

REP. TREY GOWDY (R), CHAIRMAN, HOUSE SELECT COMMITTEE ON BENGHAZI: Their families and loved ones for their service and ultimately the sacrifice that they made on behalf of our country. Also want to express our collective appreciation for the Americans who fell so valiantly that night and uncontrovertibly saved other lives.

This service and sacrifice and desire to protect and defend fellow Americans in our interest abroad truly represents the best of what our country has to offer.

After more than 100 witness interviews, including more than 80 with witnesses no other committee of Congress talked to, and tens of thousands of pages of documents, that is the single greatest impression that we are left with, that there are men and women who love this country enough and what it stands for, and how it can inspire others to serve in dangerous places under dangerous circumstances.

So I will respectfully ask my citizens to simply do this. Read the report. Read the report. And if you do read the report, I think what will become manifest to you is what has become manifest to us, which are two different images. The image on the one hand of what was happening in Benghazi during the relevant time period. And the image on the other hand are the decisions made and not made in Washington during that same time period.

You will see the urgency shown by the GRS agents at the annex as they went to the mission compound to try to save American diplomatic security agents' lives. You will see the franticness with which they entered and reentered burning buildings in an attempt to locate and save Sean Smith and Ambassador Stevens. You will see the ingenuity of the team in Tripoli who got their own aircraft and deployed themselves from Tripoli to Benghazi because fellow Americans needed their help.

You will see the firefights at the compound. You will learn about the ambush from the compound to the annex. And you will learn about the firefights before the final lethal border attacks. There are only three assets that ever made it to Benghazi. Two unarmed drones and the team from Tripoli who deployed themselves. They weren't ordered to go, they deployed themselves.

Glenn Daugherty was on that plane from Tripoli to Benghazi and Glenn Daugherty not only flew from Tripoli to Benghazi but he negotiated at the airport with Libyans that were supposed to be our friends to get to the annex so he could help defend that facility and he got there just in time to join his fellow Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods minutes before they both died.

It has been said nothing could have reached Benghazi before the lethal border attacks. And I suppose what is meant by that is nothing other than the two unarmed drones and the team from Tripoli that deployed itself.

What is missing in that analysis but is pretty simple and straightforward to those of us who have been investigating for the last two years is nothing could have reached Benghazi because nothing was ever headed to Benghazi. No U.S. military asset was ever deployed to Benghazi despite the order of the secretary of defense at 7:00 that night.

So Washington had access to real time information but yet somehow they thought the fighting had subsided. Washington had access to real time information but somehow they thought these fighters were going to evacuate. Even without the remains of the ambassador. And without asking how is that evacuation supposed to be effectuated? How are you supposed to get from the annex to the Benghazi airport because it took you almost three hours to get from the airport to the annex. Who was supposed to take you?

So those are the decisions being contemplated and discussed in Washington, and this mistaken belief that there was an evacuation that was imminent without asking the pretty fundamental question of how do you -- how do you expect us to effectuate this evacuation?

[10:10:16] Washington had access to real-time information. But that real-time information did not inform and instruct the decisions made in Washington. After Secretary Panetta ordered assets deployed to help our men, the White House convened a two-hour meeting and perhaps nothing shows the contrasts between what was happening in Benghazi and what was happening in Washington than that two-hour sit-in White House meeting.

And for some reason the read-outs that came from it. So it is true, nothing could have reached Glenn Daugherty and Ty Woods before they were killed because nothing was ever going toward Glenn Daugherty and Ty Woods. And it is worth noting that that statement would be true had the mortar attacks taken place at 7:15 a.m. or 9:15 a.m. or even at lunchtime on the 12th. Because at the time those two Americans were killed, not a single wheel of a single U.S. had even turned toward Libya.

Our report starts with the attack and there is a section on the post attack communication between government and the American citizenry. And there is a section on pre-attack decisions made and not made that led to the environment which made our facility vulnerable. 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. Our committee did not have the luxury of either one of those. We

began a year and a half after the incident. But collectively and individually all seven of us believed that there were more questions to ask, that there were more answers to acquire, more witnesses to interview, more documents to access. And this report validates that belief.

There is new information on what happened in Benghazi. And that information should fundamentally change the way you view what happened in Benghazi. And there are recommendations made to make sure it does not happen again.

So in conclusion, with respect to my remarks, I want to thank the House of Representatives for giving us the honor of investigating four of our brave courageous fellow citizens and those that were injured and those that fought so valiantly that night.

And I want to thank the six members who are standing up here with me who took on this assignment, not in lieu of their other committee assignments, but in addition there, too, and the women and men on our staff who took on what proved to be an incredibly difficult challenge. And they did so out of a singular motivation of honoring four people whose political ideations none of us know or think about, and gave their lives in Benghazi.

And lastly, I want to thank our fellow citizens for bearing with our committee as we went through the process of uncovering new information and accessing witnesses and documents.

I hope my fellow citizens will read this report, not for me, but for those who sacrificed and those nameless, faceless Americans who uncontrovertibly saved other American lives that night. I hope you will read the report with them in mind. And I would hasten to add, you can read this report from pillar to post in less time than our fellow Americans were under attack in Benghazi.

So what I'm asking you to do is a fairly small investment given what others were willing to do on our behalf. And with that, I would recognize the gentleman from Georgia.