Republicans on the House Select Committee on Benghazi have implicitly admitted that conservative media were wrong to suggest that a newly-released email contradicted then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's statement that an immediate military response to the September 11, 2012, attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities was not possible.

On Monday, conservative journalists uncritically promoted the conspiracy that a Department of Defense email from the night of the attacks proved that the Obama administration could have helped the Americans under fire during the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, but deliberately decided not to, and that Leon Panetta had lied about the effort during 2013 congressional testimony. Fox News has since declared the email is a “smoking gun” proving that “the only thing standing between the terrorists who overran the compound and the four Americans who lost their lives was a green light from the State Department.” Predictably, they have also used the supposed controversy to attack former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. 

This claim was never remotely plausible, and was completely debunked after the Democratic ranking member of the Benghazi Committee produced an unredacted version of the email that conclusively proved that the forces discussed in the email as “spinning up” to respond to the attack were the very units that Panetta had said during his 2013 testimony had been deployed but had not been able to arrive in time to help.

In fact, even the committee's Republicans apparently won't defend the theory. They responded to the release of the unredacted email by attacking Democrats for supposedly “playing politics” by releasing it. But notably, they did not say that the Democrats were wrong to argue that the conservative media attacks were “baseless” and “debunked.” From The Hill:

Late in the day, Republicans fired back.

The decision to release the email “is further proof that Democrats are focused solely on playing politics and protecting Hillary Clinton,” committee spokesman Matt Wolking said, “not on conducting a serious investigation and getting the truth for the families of the four Americans who lost their lives.”

The Republican response would make more sense if the committee had taken the opportunity to bat down this conspiracy theory when right-wing reporters began asking about the email. Instead, they said only that they had obtained the email, allowing the lies to fester. From FoxNews.com:

Lawmakers investigating the events surrounding Benghazi already had acquired the e-mail, along with tens of thousands of others related to the probe, according to Matt Wolking, spokesman for the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

“The Select Committee has obtained and reviewed tens of thousands of documents in the course of its thorough, fact-centered investigation into the Benghazi terrorist attacks, and this information will be detailed in the final report the Committee hopes to release within the next few months,” Wolking told FoxNews.com. “While the Committee does not rush to release or comment on every document it uncovers, I can confirm that we obtained the unredacted version of this email last year, in addition to Jake Sullivan's response.”