On Tuesday, the House Select Committee on Benghazi released an 800-page report summarizing its cumulative findings. After two years, $7 million, and an eight-hour kangaroo court interrogation that produced a few awesome GIFs and little else of interest or lasting value, the committee uncovered no evidence that Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state at the time of the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, had done anything wrong or criminal. Even the infamous White House talking points were determined to be “flawed but not deliberately misleading,” according to the The New York Times.
The report could be read as good news for the Clinton camp, if only because it isn’t bad news. But it’s hard to see how the findings—or lack thereof—matter in any meaningful sense. Benghazi is more of a conjuring word than a specific accusation. That hazy aura of malfeasance never had much concrete basis in the first place, and it’s not going to dissipate just because a document no Benghazi-truther will read anyways confirms as much. Why would they, when they can watch Thirteen Hours—aka Beard Team Six—instead?