Democrats ramped up efforts Monday to tarnish the Benghazi investigation as former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton prepares for a momentous public hearing before the panel Thursday, insisting that she will cooperate despite a firm belief that the investigators have little more than her political destruction on their minds.
Congressional Democrats released a report clearing Mrs. Clinton of some of the most pointed accusations about her handling of the 2012 terrorist attack in Libya’s second city, and the White House said the Republican-led investigation committee is struggling to separate itself from partisanship.
“I think the pressure will really be on them, frankly, to justify their own existence,” press secretary Josh Earnest said. “That very existence has been called into question by at least two Republican members of Congress. We’ll see if they’re able to do that when Secretary Clinton is before the committee later this week.”
The report argues that there is no evidence that Mrs. Clinton ordered a military stand-down the night of the attack, nor that she was responsible for the security situation in Benghazi in the run-up to the attack. Democrats said the evidence suggests Mrs. Clinton was trying to navigate a tricky intelligence picture in the hours and days after the attack.
“After seventeen months and millions of taxpayer dollars spent, the Select Committee on Benghazi has uncovered nothing that alters our core understanding of the facts as revealed by the other eight investigations,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff, California Democrat and a member of the panel. “When you consider the committee’s obsessive focus on attacking Secretary Clinton, the reason becomes quite clear: the majority has little interest in the events in Benghazi except to the degree they can be used to diminish her standing in the polls.”
The Democratic report releases excerpts from some of the more than 50 interviews the committee has conducted so far. In each of those snippets, the witness denies some of the harsh accusations against the State Department and Mrs. Clinton, including that she told the military not to mount a rescue mission.
“None of the 54 individuals interviewed by the Select Committee identified any evidence to support this Republican claim against Secretary Clinton,” the Democrats concluded.
Democrats also seized on a report in The Washington Post that Rep. Trey Gowdy, South Carolina Republican and chairman of the investigative committee, returned campaign contributions last week from three political action committees tied to a man who is treasurer for the Stop Hillary PAC.
Rep. Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the panel, said the revelations further undercut the Benghazi committee’s independence.
Mr. Gowdy has defended his panel’s work, saying his investigators have obtained more than 50,000 pages of documents never before seen by Congress, including some emails from Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens that show concern about the level of security of U.S. facilities in Libya.
Mr. Gowdy said Mrs. Clinton needs to answer for why she didn’t take steps at that point to shore up resources or pull the mission out of Benghazi, and why Mr. Stevens wasn’t able to send messages to Mrs. Clinton directly at her unique email account, while Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal was able to.
Jamal Ware, a spokesman for Mr. Gowdy, said the Democrats’ latest report shows it’s Mrs. Clinton’s own allies who are making the inquiry all about her.
“This is further proof of the Democrats’ obsession with covering for Hillary Clinton instead of investigating the Benghazi terrorist attacks,” Mr. Ware said. “For the majority members of this committee, they will continue to wait until after hearing from all witnesses, up to and including the very last one, before drawing conclusions, because that is what serious investigations do.”
Democrats have been emboldened in their criticism by several self-inflicted wounds from Republicans.
Two Republican lawmakers have portrayed the panel in political terms. One of them, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, said Mrs. Clinton’s poll numbers have sunk chiefly because of the Benghazi investigation.
He later tried to walk back those comments as inartful, but Democrats said he publicly acknowledged what they had long suspected.
Mr. Gowdy has given Democrats ammunition by claiming his committee interviewed 50 witnesses who had never before been contacted about the 2012 attack. The real number is closer to 30, and Democrats said the exaggeration is another sign of politics.
This weekend, Mr. Gowdy and Mr. Cummings exchanged testy letters accusing each other of bad faith.
Mr. Gowdy said Democrats have shown little interest in getting to the bottom of any details surrounding the attack and instead are using the committee to defend Mrs. Clinton.
In a letter to Mr. Cummings, Mr. Gowdy said he was struck by how quickly the CIA responded to a request for information from Democrats while Republicans have been repeatedly blocked in their own records requests.
Mr. Cummings said Mr. Gowdy falsely accused Mrs. Clinton of emailing the name of an intelligence operative from her nonsecure server.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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