Here is brief excerpt from an article Amy Davidson for The New Yorker. To read the complete article, check other material, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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The release, on Tuesday [June 21, 2016], of the proposed report by the House Select Committee investigating the 2012 attack on the American diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, was, if nothing else, a reminder that people in Washington pay a lot of attention to who their political enemies are. It is too much to say that they make good or practical use of this knowledge. This investigation, led by Republicans, wasn’t the first thorough, and politically charged, congressional investigation into the attacks—this one makes it eight, and, at a cost of seven million dollars, it is the most expensive yet. The goal of finding out what happened in Benghazi has long been subsumed in the task of producing an indictment of Hillary Clinton, whose Presidential aspirations are its real target. That task is not any better realized in the eight hundred pages of the proposed report (which still has to be approved by the full committee) than it was before, which may be a source of frustration to Republicans.

It is a small sign of the political pique involved that, earlier this month, the committee issued a statement with the title “#DishonestDems can’t keep their misleading claims straight,” in which it took issue with Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings’s comment that the committee had been at it for three years—even though the Democratic committee members’ own Web site said that it had been at it for seven hundred and sixty-four days. “As anyone with a calculator can easily determine, that’s only two years and 34 days,” the committee noted. Case closed. The report it took that time to produce is similarly marked by a petty triumphalism that, for all the Republicans’ talk of the heroism of the four Americans who died in Benghazi, does not honor their memory. (The sister of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who was one of those casualties, made this point in an interview with Robin Wright.)

Someone on the Republican staff also made an effort to count the number of times that Donald Trump’s name was listed in a competing, minority-proposed report that the Democrats, who have said that they were shut out of the process, released on Monday. (There will also be a bonus report by two Republicans who feel that Clinton wasn’t attacked enough in this one.) There were twenty-three “Trumps,” a number that the Republican statement annotated with the wordless note “?????” The point seems to have been that the Republicans were absolutely floored by the charge that Presidential politics might have played a role in their investigation, even though, at the press conference in which they presented the report, they found time to rail against Sydney Blumenthal, a friend of the Clintons’. As it happens, one of the mentions of Trump in the Democrats’ report involved his critical tweets about how Trey Gowdy, the Republican chair of the committee, had handled the questioning of Hillary Clinton last October, which had lasted a full day and yielded exactly nothing new. “Face it, Trey Gowdy failed miserably on Benghazi,” one read. In another, Trump described the congressman as “Benghazi loser Gowdy.” Trump coined that nickname in December, after Gowdy endorsed Marco Rubio in the Republican primaries. On Tuesday, after the proposed report came out, Trump tweeted, “Benghazi is just another Hillary Clinton failure. It just never seems to work the way it’s supposed to with Clinton.”

One of the stranger examples of the partisan distortion field around Benghazi is that what is presented as one of the key, damning insights of the report, highlighted in a video narrated by Representative Peter Roskam, of Illinois, depends on a note stating that, as Roskam put it, as soon as President Barack Obama was briefed on the situation on the ground, “he gave very clear directions: do everything possible to save Americans.” (And, as Leon Panetta, who was then the Secretary of Defense, is quoted saying in the report, “to use all of the resources at our disposal” to do so.) The problem was that there were no forces easily positioned to do so, and it is reasonable to ask whether there was wishful thinking involved in determining how secure the situation in Libya was. At the same time, this assessment conflicts with earlier insinuations that, if only Obama and Clinton had made a single call, the four Americans could have been saved. And yet it is presented not as praise for the President but as a signpost pointing to vaguer culprits, such as “the White House,” “the Pentagon,” “State.” “Washington was acting like it was someone else’s family under attack,” Roskam said on CNN. “That’s the scandal we need to focus on.”

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Amy Davidson became a staff writer in 2014. She has been at The New Yorker since 1995, and as a senior editor for many years focused on national security, international reporting, and features. Davidson helped to reconceive newyorker.com, where she served as the site’s executive editor and now edits “Daily Comment.” She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.