Just when Charles Krauthammer thought he was out, they pull him back in.
The columnist and conservative patriarch said last month that it was time for Republicans to abandon their Benghazi crusade. “Politically speaking,” Krauthammer declared, “the administration has won.”
“They ran out the clock,” he said, lamenting that the GOP never set up a select committee to investigate the deadly attack the killed four Americans including Ambassador Chris Stevens.
But in a right-wing miracle, an email emerged this week to embolden conservatives in their never-ending quest to prove that the Obama administration engaged in some kind of cover-up of the attack.
The email shows a top Obama aide instructing then-United Nations ambassador Susan Rice to use CIA-fashioned talking points attributing the attack to an anti-Islam video. Now Krauthammer believes Benghazi might be another Watergate, after all.
“[The email is] to me the equivalent of what was discovered with the Nixon tapes,” Krauthammer said Thursday on Fox News.
But he still thinks the GOP blew it.
“The point is that Republicans have done a terrible job in building the case,” he said. “Even today I have to say, the questioning was disjointed, it was not organized. If they had appointed a special committee [a] long time ago the way it was done in Watergate, you would have had answers on this and the country wouldn’t be tired.”
His wish is the GOP’s command. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) announced Friday that he will set up a select committee to investigate the Benghazi attack.
Krauthammer believes this week’s email is a watershed moment, and journalists now wish they had followed the example of Fox News.
“But what I did say was the reason it would not go anywhere is because the lack of interest of the other media,” he said. “And what’s changed now, and we saw it in the briefing room, is I think the other media are somewhat embarrassed by the fact that unlike Fox they allowed themselves to be stoned and spun and rolled for a year-and-a-half and now the memo appears and it’s obvious they missed the story.”
