You know Media Matters is going to take up for Hillary. That’s not really the story here. The story is that its vice-president Ari Rabin-Havt is actually citing the State Department’s Inspector General report on the Benghazi Accountability Review Board (ARB) as evidence the ARB was not biased.
Rabin-Havt: Laughable defense of ARB.
This is the line from the IG Report that Rabin-Havt points to in an effort to assuage any inclination you may have that the ARB Report, which found no one accountable (except Christopher Stevens), wasn’t biased:
The Accountability Review Board process operates as intended–independently and without bias–to identify vulnerabilities in the Department of State’s security programs.
Rabin-Havt then goes on to bemoan the fact that the IG Report didn’t get any real media coverage. If that’s all he’s got, it’s quite pathetic because if the ARB were subject to bias, so too would the IG be.
When it comes to the Benghazi attack, regular readers to our site know that we have been building the case against Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (led by Mohammed Mursi at the time) and that it played a significant role in the attack; we continue to update our “Ironclad Report”.
That leads to the author of the report Rabin-Havt cites. Acting Inspector General at State is Harold W. Geisel, who has an interesting history of ignoring requests to investigate the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S.
Geisel: Acting IG at State.
On June 13, 2012, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and five other congressmen sent Geisel a letter (Hillary Clinton was cc’d). While the naming of Huma Abedin – then Deputy Chief of Staff to Clinton – was the subject of controversy, the letter highlighted multiple, valid examples of potential Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of the State Department. One such example was a request for answers about why Clinton overturned a ban on allowing Tariq Ramadan – the grandson of the Muslim Brotherhood’s founder – to enter the U.S.
Geisel was given 90 days to respond to the letter; he did not. This was either dereliction of duty, complicity in protecting the Brotherhood from scrutiny, or intimidation from the office of Secretary Clinton.
Go figure. His report that defends the ARB smacks of the same thing.
If that’s all Rabin-Havt has, he doesn’t Havt anything.