GOP lawmaker uses impeachment hearing to lie about Benghazi

A Republican lawmaker on the House Judiciary Committee spent his five minutes of questioning at Wednesday’s impeachment hearing to push false smears from the seven-year-old Benghazi conspiracy theory.

Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) used his time to ask the GOP’s one witness on the panel about hypotheticals that could lead to presidential impeachments. One such hypothetical included the attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, which Republicans investigated for four years and spent millions of taxpayer dollars on, only to find no wrongdoing by former President Barack Obama or former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“How about when a president directed his national security adviser and the secretary of State to lie to the American people about whether the ambassador to Libya was murdered as a result of a video? Or was murdered as a result of a terrorist act? Would that be an abuse of power for political benefit?” Buck asked George Washington University Law professor Jonathan Turley.

Buck was bringing up a favorite GOP talking point during the yearslong Benghazi probe about how the Obama administration reacted to the attack in Benghazi.

And he was doing it seven years after the attack, at a totally unrelated hearing about Donald Trump’s possible impeachment.

Turley — the GOP witness whose testimony included falsehoods — said Buck’s hypothetical would not rise to the level of impeachment.

Buck, for his part, was one of the few GOP lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee to ask any questions at all during their individual five-minute time allotment for witness questions. Most of the GOP lawmakers present made speeches about their objections to the process of impeachment rather than asking any questions of the Constitutional scholars that sat before them.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.