Issa says Lois Lerner waived her right against self-incrimination...

... by making an opening statement before invoking her Fifth Amendment privilege. She asserted: “I have not done anything wrong.... I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations, and I have not provided false information to this or any other committee.”

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), a former federal prosecutor, said Lerner lost her rights the minute she started proclaiming her innocence, and that lawmakers therefore were entitled to question her. But Ranking Democrat Elijah Cummings of Maryland said hearing rules were not like those of a courtroom.

During the incident, Issa did not flat-out say whether or not Lerner had indeed waived her rights but instead tried to coax her into staying by offering to narrow the scope of questions.

By the afternoon, Issa was taking a harder stand. “The precedents are clear that this is not something you can turn on and turn off,” he told POLITICO. “She made testimony after she was sworn in, asserted her innocence in a number of areas, even answered questions asserting that a document was true … So she gave partial testimony and then tried to revoke that.”

"ABC News, which acquired 12 different drafts of the [Benghazi] talking points, disclosed that the State Department requested that the CIA scrub references to an Al Qaeda-linked group, Ansar Al-Sharia."

"A State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, specifically asked the CIA to delete a paragraph citing warnings prior [to] attacks because that 'could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either?' according to email reviewed by ABC. The paragraph was struck entirely."

Meanwhile, Elijah Cummings — the key Democrat in this week's committee hearings on Benghazi — said:

“I have not seen the e-mails... But I do know for a fact that our intelligence committee, [the] House Intelligence Committee, has seen every single one of the changes and they have concluded that there was no manipulation for political reasons.”

The political manipulations, he says, are on the other side — a premature attack on his party's presumptive 2016 candidate, Hillary Clinton.

Meanwhile, here's the ad the Republican National Committee made, exploiting the Benghazi story, to attack Obama before the election. Powerful, and you can say now — now that you know Mitt Romney lost — that it should have been used:



I think it's easy to see why this was not run. You can say with hindsight that you think it might have worked, now that you know that what was done did not work, but you need to picture the outcry from the Obama campaign — the ugliness, the damage to national security interests, Romney's unreadiness to play on the international stage, the disrespect for the dead and their mourning families, and — it worked against Hillary's original 3 a.m. ad — the dog-whistle racism.

"I said that death is a part of life, but so often we have to find a way to make life a part of death."

Yesterday at the Benghazi hearings, Elijah Cummings saw fit to quote something he'd said recently at a family funeral. Why was this member of Congress, sitting through a committing hearing going into what happened before, during, and after the Benghazi attacks, reminiscing about remarks he himself made the other day to help grieving people come to terms with a death in the family?

Is it that he admired his own words? That would take some strange self-regard, because the words  are no special wisdom, but the generic stuff of funerals. In the midst of life we are in death....

It must be that he equated the witnesses at the hearing to the mourners at a funeral, who experience the abrupt upheaval of a death in the family and need a way to pull themselves together and continue with their lives. A funeral is decidedly not the time to ask questions about why the death occurred. Leaders at a funeral set about tending to the emotional and spiritual lives of those who must keep living and who are at risk of becoming despondent or obsessed with questions about how it could have happened.

Cummings was on message with the Democratic Party talking point on Benghazi: It happened. Move on. Hillary Clinton chose an indignant, accusatory "What difference, at this point, does it make?" Cummings assumed the pose of the family elder, comforting the suffering, as if the witnesses emotionally were weak mourners who don't know how to let go of the painful memories and go forward to live productive lives.

The analogy is telling and quite outrageous.

IN THE COMMENTS ddh said: "Can someone explain to me how we can make life a part of death?" Ah, yes. My post is about the first part of Cummings's quote, a standard sentiment at funerals. The second part of his quote "life a part of death" is puzzling. Maybe at the funeral he talked about the afterlife. Maybe he talked about the fact that living people are spending some of their alive time in the company of a corpse. What that has to do with a congressional hearing... who knows? Maybe he's thinking: I'm alive and yet I must spend some of my precious time with this corpse of a political issue.