Charles Krauthammer asserted Monday that the New York Times was driven to conduct a months-long investigation into the deadly attack in Benghazi, Libya solely to give political cover to Hillary Clinton and her fellow Democrats — a year after the influential conservative bemoaned the lack of media coverage on the attack.
Krauthammer was backing a baseless claim floated by Reps. Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA). Westmoreland accused the Times of “laying the groundwork” for a Clinton presidential bid, while Rogers said he found the timing of the report “odd.”
The complaints by the lawmakers prompted Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal to fire back and make clear that the newspaper hasn’t endorsed Clinton or any candidate. Moreover, Rosenthal said he “knew nothing about the Benghazi investigation article,” which concluded that al Qaeda had no role in the attack.
But Krauthammer thinks the editor doth protest too much.
“Well, I think he gave the game away,” Krauthammer said on Fox News Channel’s “Special Report.”
“By being defensive about this, he’s making it quite obvious the reason that the Times invested all the effort and time in this and put it on the front page is precisely a way to protect the Democrats, to deflect the issue, to protect Hillary, who was exposed on this issue as almost no issue in her tenure in the administration. It is obviously a political move.”
A year ago, it seemed that Krauthammer would have welcomed an exhaustive investigation into the attack. During an online segment on “Special Report” in October of 2012, Krauthammer said the lack of media coverage on Benghazi was “really a journalistic scandal.”
