During an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) was asked at the end of his exchange with Candy Crowley, about his Committee’s recently released report on Benghazi.

Perhaps most notably, Rogers denied claims that his committee’s report is the final word on the investigation and touts the work of the House Select Committee, chaired by Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC). This is inconsistent with what Rogers has said in the past. First, here is what Rogers said at the end of his interview which seemed to indicate his support for the Select Committee:

“There are a lot of unanswered questions in the State Department and the White House. That’s where the Select Committee, I think, can get answers.”

The relevant portion of the exchange begins at the 2:10 mark:

Last April, after former Deputy CIA Director Mike Morell testified in front of Rogers’ committee, the chairman appeared on Fox News and was asked by Brian Kilmeade about the need for a Select Committee. Citing concerns that a Select Committee might just re-hash the work of the House Intelligence Committee while expressing silly concerns over cost (based on the amount of wasteful spending Congress is already engaged in), Rogers downplayed the need for such a Committee. It was clear he didn’t want one:

That Committee was ultimately formed about one month later.

More recently, in an extensive article by Stephen Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn at the Weekly Standard, it was reported that Rogers never really wanted to get to the bottom of Benghazi, even in his capacity as House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) Chairman:

Rogers had long been reluctant to commit more time and resources to investigating Benghazi. At a meeting of intelligence committee Republicans in early 2013, just four months after the attacks, Rogers laid out his priorities for the new Congress. Not only was Benghazi not on that list, according to three sources in the meeting, he declared to the members that the issue was in the past and that they wouldn’t be devoting significant time and resources to investigating it. Whatever failures there had been in Benghazi, he explained, they had little to do with the intelligence community, and his intelligence committee would therefore have little to do with investigating them.

There’s another noteworthy quote from Rogers in his exchange with Crowley, when he said:

“Here’s the problem when I—that I learned as a young FBI agent in Chicago. If somebody loves your investigation, best to start over. And what happened is, we decided that we were only going to use facts and then corroborate those facts to come to a finding and a conclusion.”

That’s actually quite laughable and grossly misplaced because it presupposes that those responsible for conducting the investigation are themselves pure, without bias, devoid of conflicts of interest or otherwise have no agenda.

When it comes to Rogers, there are two potentially huge conflicts of interest. One involves his wife’s work with Aegis, which received government contract work in Libya in 2011 as Shoebat.com reported. The other involves the former majority staff director of the HPSCI, J. Michael Allen, who went to work at Beacon Global Strategies with close Hillary Clinton confidante Philippe Reines and Morell.

All of this says nothing about the admission by Rogers that Ambassador Stevens met with him and his committee in the days before his murder:

Among other things, Rogers denied that his Committee’s report was the final word on the investigation and said he found it…

“…troubling that (critics) would spend so much time looking for a partisan angle on this.”

Obviously lost on Rogers is that his loudest critics have not been partisan; they’ve been from his side of the aisle.

h/t AIM