Nov 24, 2014 3 min read

Anyone who is around age 40 or older will undoubtedly recall the lavishly hyped opening on live television of a Chicago vault alleged to have been used by gangster Al Capone.

It happened in the spring of 1986, with Geraldo Rivera breathlessly suggesting that there could be all kinds of loot silently waiting within the long-sealed vault.

Maybe even bodies. So don’t change that channel!

Turns out, after an hour or two of hyperventilation, all that Rivera and his crew uncovered were a couple of dusty old glass bottles.

No doubt many far-right partisans who have come to believe that both President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could be undone thanks to an alleged cover-up surrounding the 2012 attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya, are feeling the same sense of coal-in-the-stocking letdown following the release of a report Friday by the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee.

It stated, as similar studies have, the administration did not intentionally try to mislead the public when it issued talking points for officials to use in television interviews in the days after the attack that turned out to be inaccurate.

The conspiracy theories that were woven around Benghazi had it that officials were trying to deceive the public when they suggested the attackers were part of a mob enraged by crudely anti-Muslim videos that were circulating on the Internet, and not the handiwork of al-Qaeda. The committee found, however, that offering that explanation for the assault on the embassy, which killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, was not a deliberate bid to spread misinformation, but merely officials serving up intelligence that was murky and inconclusive, as such things tend to be in the fog of battle.

In the fevered speculation of the Benghazi conspiracy theorists, Obama and Clinton deliberately wanted to hide the presence of al-Qaeda in Libya weeks before the presidential election, out of fear that a resurgence by the organization would diminish Obama’s terrorism-fighting bona fides.

The uncertainty still lingers, the report said: “Much of the early intelligence was conflicting, and two years later, intelligence gaps remain … the intelligence was and remains conflicting about the identities, affiliations and motivations of the attackers.”

Also, there was no order for any reinforcements to “stand down” in trying to save anyone within the embassy, according to the report.

Will the lawmakers and zealots who believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that there’s more to Benghazi than meets the eye themselves stand down due to this report’s findings? We should be so lucky. U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican of South Carolina, proclaimed Sunday that the report was “a bunch of garbage” and “full of crap,” while a special House committee is due to conduct yet another investigation, at a cost to taxpayers of $3.3 million.

Speaking of crap, the determination of Obama’s most frenzied opponents to keep digging and digging in the hope that something – anything – from Benghazi will incriminate him and Clinton, kind of reminds us of the boy who, the story has it, kept digging and digging in a manure pile in the hope that there was a pony buried in there somewhere.

But the House’s report should, at long last, convince them there’s no pony to be found. If anything, just a bunch of old bottles.