House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said on Wednesday that he does not think there needs to be a special select committee to investigate the Obama administration’s handing of the terror attacks in Benghazi, Libya last year.

Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) is leading the House Republican effort for a select committee and Boehner has said in the past that the lower chamber’s established committees can handle Benghazi oversight. On Fox News Wednesday night, the Ohio Republican, despite pressure from his own caucus, said he continues to stand by that position:

HOST GRETA VAN SUSTEREN: Would you be in favor of a select committee at this point to try to sort of narrow it, so it’s not several committees that are doing this investigation?

BOEHNER: Four committees that are heavily involved in this. Probably the most significant committee involved would be the Government Reform and Oversight Committee, headed by Darrell Issa. I think Darrell Issa, Jason Chaffetz, Trey Gowdy and the members of the committee, are doing a good job.

I don’t think at this point in time that it’s necessary. Now, we may get to a point where it is. But at this point, I think our committees are doing a very good job, and I’m going to be supportive of them.

The Senate’s top Republican, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), is also starting to back away from “Benghazi-gate” and so are Republican staffers on Capital Hill. “Some of the accusations, I mean you wouldn’t believe some of this stuff. It’s just — I mean, you’ve got to be on Mars to come up with some of this stuff,” one GOP aide told Roll Call this week.

“This issue is not a sure-fire winner politically for the Republicans unless there is some bombshell that can be surfaced through a hearing in a select committee that has not already been surfaced by the multiple hearings that have been held so far,” said Christopher Preble of the libertarian Cato Institute. “If you spend a lot of time and there’s no additional information that comes out through the process, then you have the appearance of having, at a minimum, wasted a lot of time on a fairly insignificant matter,” he added.

However, it doesn’t seem like Boenher’s friends will give up any time soon. Wolf said recently that the House Speaker would be “complicit” in the (now totally debunked charge of a) Benghazi “cover-up” if he doesn’t ok the special Benghazi committee.

Former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice broke with the majority of her party last night on Fox News, as she tried to hit the brakes on the right wing’s politicization of the recent attack in Libya.

Host Greta Van Susteren asked Rice directly and repeatedly about a set of emails uncovered by Reuters. In what has been dubbed “Benghazi-Gate,” the conservative media has jumped on the emails as definitive proof that the Obama administration has been lying about what it knew and when in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attack on a diplomatic mission in Benghazi. Rice’s response was likely not what Van Susteren expected:

RICE: But when things are unfolding very, very quickly, it’s not always easy to know what is really going on on the ground. And to my mind, the really important questions here are about how information was collected. Did the various agencies really coordinate and share intelligence in the way that we had hoped, with the reforms that were made after 9/11?

So there’s a big picture to be examined here. But we don’t have all of the pieces, and I think it’s easy to try and jump to conclusions about what might have happened here. It’s probably better to let the relevant bodies do their work.

Watch Rice’s full interview here:

Throughout the interview, Rice highlighted the difficulty that comes in a “fog of war” situation, with multiple stories coming in which need to be processed and verified. Her statements strongly align with the evolution of the Obama administration’s understanding of what happened in Benghazi. Rice also joined current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in dismissing the big picture importance of the emails from the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, as a small portion of the overall communication between the mission and the State Department.

With her reasoned response, Rice stands apart from other former Bush administration officials, including former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Both Rumsfeld and Bolton have repeatedly insisted that the Obama administration has performed a cover-up of the events in Benghazi.

A new report that the White House knew within hours that an Islamist group had claimed credit on Facebook and Twitter for an attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya has renewed the right-wing’s furor towards the administration’s handling of the incident. Ansar al-Sharia — the militant group now suspected of carrying out the attack — posting on social media is the sole new detail in the emails obtained by Reuters and others. Despite that, the conclusion is being drawn by the right, again, that the Obama administration misled the American people. (A screenshot of the email does not indicate further corroboration of the militia’s claim.)

Soon after the emails’ release, Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren bluntly accused the White House of lying about the attack in Benghazi. And Fox News contributor Liz Cheney joined in this morning, claiming falsely that the Obama administration definitively blamed an anti-Muslim YouTube video rather than saying that an investigation was ongoing. Cheney wanted even more pressing answers as well:

CHENEY: Mr. President, did you go to sleep that night while you knew that attack was underway? Our consulate was under attack, our Ambassador was missing, did you go to bed without any action, doing anything to prevent that attack, doing anything to stop the attack and save those people. And if so, why did you wait seven hours?

Watch Cheney’s interview here:

But the reality is that the new emails reflect the current knowledge on what the administration and the intelligence community knew in developing their response to Benghazi. According to talking points prepared by the CIA for the Obama administration and Congress, initial analysis indicated that the “Innocence of Muslims” played a large role in the impetus for the attack on the mission in Benghazi. More recent reporting has confirmed that the video played at least some role in the genesis of the assault.

Processing raw intelligence into a coherent analysis involves combing through multiple reports, sifting for corroboration between stories and attempting to thread them together into a narrative. The initial report is almost always heavily hedged and changes frequently as more information is acquired. The new emails were likely part of the initial analysis and were deemed unable to be confirmed. It’s worth noting that in one of the emails, Ansar al-Sharia also called for an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, which never materialized. While interesting, the new emails remain a data point, not the start of a new narrative on Benghazi.

Senate Republican hawk Lindsey Graham (SC) said on Fox News last night that the U.S. shouldn’t negotiate with Iran over its nuclear program until it accedes to all U.S. demands and gives up its nuclear program entirely. The remark comes after a week where Congress considered a flurry of hawkish legislation and resolutions about Iran ahead of the next round of nuclear talks next week in Baghdad.

Graham offered his curious take on what it means to negotiate — demanding that Iran accept all U.S. demands prior to negotiation — in a conversation with Fox News host Greta Van Susteren, who indicated that his negotiating tactic was probably a non starter. Graham first emphasized his hawkish bent by noting that the “only way” for an agreement to be reached between the sides was for the U.S. to threaten “a strike by the United States.” He went on:

GRAHAM: Here’s what we should do. We should tell the Iranians, no negotiations, stop enriching, open up the site on the bottom of the mountain, a secret site. Then we will talk about lifting sanctions. You are not going to get to enrich uranium any more, period.

VAN SUSTEREN: I think they will probably stay “go fish” on that one.

Watch the video:

Leave aside that the Fordow site is not “secret” (it’s under U.N. inspections and monitored by camera) and that reports on U.S. and Israeli estimates state that these intelligence agencies don’t believe Iran has made a decision to build nuclear weapons (Graham doubts the intelligence), Graham’s position prompts one to ask: What’s the alternative to negotiations, since Graham is proposing pre-conditions that Iran would never meet? The Senator from South Carolina’s been busy on that front, too — and falsely citing the Obama administration to back himself up. The House yesterday passed a resolution that seeks to shift U.S. “red line” for an attack to an Iranian “nuclear capability” — something Graham mentioned on Fox News — from an Iranian push for nuclear weapons.

While the CIA has laid out a specific definition, the “nuclear capability” language is a complex issue. The word “capability” has a special meaning in the non-proliferation context, but it’s not always clear exactly what. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), one of the Sentae’s most vociferous Iran hawks, said this year, “I guess everybody will determine for themselves what that means.”

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