Paul Gigot: This week on "The Journal Editorial Report," dramatic firsthand testimony about the Benghazi terror attack. What we learned and what we still need to find out about the role played by top administration officials. And the Senate moves on a bipartisan immigration overhaul amid a split among conservatives over what the effort will cost and how to proceed. We'll break down the numbers and the politics. And growing GOP opposition to President Obama's labor pick. Could the nomination of Thomas Perez be in trouble?



Riveting testimony this week from veteran diplomats about the deadly assault on the U.S. mission in Benghazi. Gregory Hicks, the deputy chief of mission in Libya, gave an emotional recounting of the night of Sept. 11, 2012, the first public detailing from an on-the-ground official. His testimony draws new attention to the events surrounding the attack and how the administration handled its aftermath.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.): When Ambassador Stevens talked to you perhaps minutes before he died, as a dying declaration, what precisely did he say to you?

Hicks: He said, "Greg, we're under attack."

Gowdy: Did he mention one word about a protest or a demonstration?

Hicks: No, sir, he did not.



Gigot: Joining the panel this week, Wall Street Journal columnist and deputy editor Dan Henninger, foreign affairs columnist Bret Stephens and Political Diary editor Jason Riley.


Henninger: I guess, Paul, it is that there is such a vast distance between what Gregory Hicks described as happening that night and what the administration described for a week. What Gregory Hicks described was an intense fight in Benghazi, lasting all night, involving heavy weaponry. That's Sept. 11. On Sept. 13, Jay Carney attributes it to this California YouTube video. Five days later, Susan Rice goes on television and says the same thing. And in fact, on the following Tuesday, Sept. 18, Jay Carney is still attributing this to a YouTube video. Why was the Obama administration trying to suppress the events that Gregory Hicks--

Gigot: Your conclusion is, based on Hicks's testimony, that they were trying to suppress--

Henninger: Yes--

Gigot: --the story that this was a terrorist attack?


Riley: Oh, and--Hicks himself said during the testimony that he was pressured into keeping his mouth shut by State Department officials. The FBI did not talk to him during their investigation. This is about transparency, Paul. It's a national security failure. And it's transparency in the aftermath. That's the problem here. The--much of the media, particularly the liberal media, want to make this, oh, this is simple partisan bickering in Congress, same old, same old, let's move on. No, this is about an administration not being forthcoming months after the fact about what really happened.

Stephens: Well, this is about an administration that sees the death of an American ambassador and three of his personnel as a political problem, not a national security problem, not a policy problem, but a political problem for an administration that's in the middle of a political campaign.

And one of the stunning things for me coming out of Greg Hicks's testimony was his commenting on the fact that when he was trying to talk to a visiting congressman, Congressman Chaffetz from Utah, the State Department was concerned that there should be a lawyer present at all times present with him.

Gigot: Hillary Clinton's--former Secretary of State Clinton's chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, who some of us remember from the--

Stephens: The impeachment, right.


Stephens: Yes. And afterwards he also felt, as he put it, a chill from Beth Jones, another close aide to Secretary Clinton. You get a sense that here you have a kind of a phalanx surrounding Secretary Clinton, for whom the first priority is make sure that our political bosses aren't touched in any way by a serious policy--


Stephens: Yes, I do blame them.

Gigot: Why?

Stephens: Because they're not campaign officials. They're State Department officials. And there are four dead American. That's a serious problem. That's an inability to separate their role as partisans and as officials of the U.S. government.

Henninger: Well, bear in mind, as well, that that night, Greg Hicks or his aide spoke to the State Department, describing what was going on. They talked to the Pentagon, Joint Chiefs, and they talked to the African command in Stuttgart, Germany, trying to get help. There was a wide array of senior officials in the U.S. government who at least knew what was going on there. And again, the question is, why did the administration--

Gigot: What's your answer, Dan?


Gigot: There's new evidence--I want to get on the record, for our viewers, there's new evidence here that's come out reported by ABC News about the email--not the email, the talking points which were distributed to the government as a matter of routine about what to say about something like this--were altered 12 times, right?

Stephens: Right. And this is a highly important part--point. Early on, we heard from Jay Carney, White House spokesman, that the talking points had all come from--

Gigot: From the intel community.

Stephens: From the CIA, from the intel community. Now we're learning that various departments were getting in their equities, basically bureaucratic coverups where they didn't want to point out that CIA had been warning for months that diplomatic facility and Western diplomats in Benghazi were under increasing threat. And so it was a classic case of bureaucratic and political coverup leading up to Susan Rice's testimony on the 15th of September.

Gigot: Frank Wolf, congressman from Virginia, Jason, has been arguing for the House to put together a select committee instead of the five committees with disparate interests that are looking into this. Do you support that idea?

Riley: I think it's a very good idea. And, look, they may come to the same conclusion as the committee that's already looked into this. We don't know. But an ambassador--

Gigot: You mean the review board, the review board.

Riley: Yes. But, yes, I think a bipartisan select committee. I think this does warrant that it rises to this level.

Gigot: This review board never even interviewed Secretary Clinton, Dan? Do you understand that?

Henninger: It's impossible to explain. The FBI did not interview Gregory Hicks when they were in Tripoli. I do not understand that. And I think that's why--we need a reboot of the national security agencies on issues like that. And they're one of the only mechanisms to do that is a committee of Congress, like they did under Watergate, looks into this, issues the report.

Gigot: Dempsey, as well, chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

When we come back, debate begins in the Senate on a bipartisan bid to reform the nation's immigration system. But a new report is pitting conservatives against conservatives over the true cost of the overhaul. We'll break down the numbers and handicap the politics, next.


Gigot: The Senate Judiciary Committee began its markup of the bipartisan immigration reform bill Thursday amid a battle among conservatives about the true cost of the overhaul. At issue is a Heritage Foundation study released this week that puts the price tag at a staggering $6.3 trillion. But is that estimate fair?

We're back with Dan Henninger and Jason Riley. And Wall Street Journal economics writer Steve Moore also joins the panel.

Jason, what do you make of this Heritage report? Accurate?

Riley: I think it's incomplete. It's an incomplete look on how immigrants impact the U.S. economy and our nation in general, not just the economy, our politics, culture, and so forth. It's just measures--it tries to measure a person's worth by what they pay in taxes versus what they receive in public benefits. I just think that's an overly limiting way of looking at the impact of immigrants. It doesn't take into account how they add to U.S. productivity, add to the flexibility of our labor markets, add to increasing consumer demand, which forces businesses to hire more and produce more goods and services. All of that is left out. That's really the problem with how Heritage has evaluated the impact of immigrants.

Gigot: So it's a static fiscal accounting almost what you pay in and what you get out identify the course of a lifetime.

Steve, you looked at the report in detail. What do you think are the big problems with it, if indeed, you think there are?

Moore: Well, you know, look, I don't think there's a lot of disagreement among economists that immigration is good for the U.S. economy. I mean, you've got all the advantages that Jason mentioned--immigrants start businesses, they are--they come when they are young, they're hardworking. All of those things really add to the American economy. And Heritage really challenges that. What they're basically saying is that the immigrants use more government services than they pay in taxes.

By the way, Paul, if you use the Heritage analysis, unbelievably, what it says is that 70% of Americans were born here are a bad deal. You know--

Gigot: Because they take more out in benefits than the over their lifetimes pay in taxes. That is most of us.

Moore: That's right. That's right. And basically, what it says is, look, people who have a college education are what they call net contributors. And people who don't have a college education are kind of net drains. That's a very dire and grim look at America. And I think it's very problematic.

I'm been working on this issue, by the way, Paul, for 25 years. It's always been an issue that splits the Republican Party and the conservative movement down the middle. What you're seeing here is this fissure between what I call the Jack Kemp optimistic wing of the party, which is the pro-immigration wing, and what we might call the Pat Buchanan wing, and that's what the argument is all about.

Gigot: There are an awful lot of conservatives who support this who didn't the last time--some of them, I assume, for political reasons. But also groups of social conservatives, cultural conservatives in the religious conservative movement, who think, you know, we need to get these immigrants here who are--11 million or so is the estimate--out of the shadows for moral reasons, compassionate reasons. Get them in the workforce. Make sure they can't be exploited by employers. Where do you see the fissure, the breakdowns on the right on this?

Henninger: Paul, I think the breakdown is basically--it does have a lot to do with the one word they have used over and over which is "amnesty." The idea that they were here illegally, jumped the line, and it violates the Constitution.

Gigot: Right.

Henninger: I think we have to understand something here that--as Steve said, it not only goes back 25 years, this issue goes back the entire life of the 20th century.

Gigot: And maybe even the 19th.

Henninger: Well, Mexicans were coming to the United States to do this kind of work back in the 1920s. We had struggled with this. It's basically--

Gigot: In the 19th it was the Chinese, and before that, the Scotch-Irish.

Henninger: Right.

Gigot: It's always been an issue.

Henninger: As far as the Mexicans go, in the 1940s and 1950s, we did create the Bracero Program, which created a legal process or system where they would come in, work, and then they would go back to Mexico. The unions didn't like that, and they killed the Bracero system. So we've never had that mechanism since. The 1986 law--immigration law gave them amnesty, started this fight back then. And we've never quite resolved that. I think that's what this new immigration bill is trying to do.

Gigot: It you look at the evidence, Jason, just to Dan's point, on the mid-'50s, when the Bracero started, it allowed guest agricultural workers to come and go back. Illegal immigration plunged.

Riley: It fell off a cliff.

Gigot: It fell off a cliff.

Riley: We know how to fix illegal immigration. This is a supply-and-demand issue. We have too many immigrants chasing too few visas. If you want fewer people coming in illegally, give them more legal ways to come. But it's not just a law-and-order issue. I think some Americans are anxious about assimilation, for instance. We have more bilingualism today. We have the multicultural--

Gigot: Don't they have a--don't they have a point?

Riley: They absolutely have a point, Paul. But go after the multiculturalists. Leave the immigrants alone. People who come here--they're not the ones pushing bilingual education. It's these interest groups, particularly on the left, doing it in their name, the people pushing for ethnic gerrymandering, for bilingual ballots and so forth. But don't blame the immigrants for that. Blame the Columbia faculty for that.

Moore: By the way, Jason, on that point, the same thing on the, quote, "fiscal costs" of immigrants that Heritage is talking about. They're saying, look, the welfare state is too big, we can't afford these people. Well, go after the welfare state then.

Gigot: I think you have a point, go after cutting the benefits and reforming the entitlement state. All right. When we come back--

Moore: And by the way, that--

Gigot: Steve, we've got to go.

Moore: OK.

Gigot: A vote on President Obama's labor pick is postponed as Republican opposition to his nomination grows. Is there trouble ahead for Thomas Perez?


Sen. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.): By all accounts, Tom Perez is not just a man with a heart for the poor, he is a committed ideologue who appears willing, quite frankly, to say or do anything--anything--to achieve his ideological ends.

Gigot: Tough words from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell about Thomas Perez, President Obama's pick to lead the Labor Department. A committee vote on his nomination was postponed this week amid mounting Republican opposition.

Wall Street Journal editorial board member Mary Kissel has been following the story for us from the beginning, and she joins us now.

Mary, why is this nomination so controversial?

Kissel: Well, several reasons. Mr. Perez is head of the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department. He was using a shaky legal theory to extract settlements out of banks. When the city of St. Paul, Minn., challenged that theory at the Supreme Court, Mr. Perez did a deal with the city to get the case withdrawn--

Gigot: From the Supreme Court docket.

Kissel: From the Supreme Court docket.

Gigot: This was a case that St. Paul had been litigating, for how long?

Kissel: Almost a decade.

Gigot: Almost a decade.

Kissel: And in exchange, the feds didn't enjoin two false claims cases brought by whistleblowers that could have brought home as much as $200 million to taxpayers. But that's just one concern with him. He didn't prosecute Black Panthers in Philadelphia, who were intimidating voters. After South Carolina's voter ID law was confirmed as legitimate by a court, he went back and harassed the state. That's just the beginning, Paul.

Gigot: What about the issue of emails, that he had been using his personal account, personal email account, to conduct government business, which is a violation of the Federal Records Act? Now that has become a source of contention, as well. Explain.

Kissel: Well, the House has been investigating this quid pro quo with the city of St. Paul about a year now, so well before he was nominated for labor secretary. In the course of that investigation, Mr. Perez didn't make himself available to investigators until right before--

Gigot: And we should say, we've asked him to talk to us about this, and he has declined.

Kissel: That's right. But in the course of the nomination, Mr. Perez was asked: Did you ever use your personal email account for official business? He said, "I don't recall." Well, then, separately, the investigators learned that he had. So he--I don't know if you could say he told a fiction to investigators, but he certainly didn't tell the whole story. And now he is refusing to turn over--

Gigot: He did turn over 35 emails.

Kissel: Thirty-four. One more was magically found. And then House investigators subpoenaed him for the rest.

Gigot: Right.

Kissel: We're talking about 1,200, thereabouts, emails.

Gigot: He and the government are resisting the subpoena, is that correct?

Kissel: He still has not complied with the subpoena.

Gigot: Jason, can the Senate really confirm somebody who's resisting a congressional subpoena?

Riley: If they have the numbers, they can. But we don't know if they will have the numbers. But he does deserve extra scrutiny. This theory that he's been using and that the Justice Department has been using is very disturbing, Paul. It's known as disparate impact theory. It's using statistics to prove discrimination, disregarding intent. If you have racially disproportionate outcomes, it ipso facto means discrimination must be taking place. This is very disturbing. And it's disturbing that you have people like Obama and Holder and Perez putting forward this sort of thinking. We've had a long history in this country of people in positions of authority using government powers to favor one group over another. These folks seem to be more interested in making up for the past than in a level playing field for everyone. That's very disturbing.

Gigot: Let's turn to the nomination. Democrats seem still to be backing Perez. How significant is Mitch McConnell's statement on the floor?

Kissel: I think it's very significant. It signals that the Republicans are still going to push to have 60 votes for this nomination. You had some senior members come out against it--Mr. McConnell, Sen. Cornyn, Sen. Rubio, Grassley and Hatch. But Sen. Hatch said something very important this week. He said a lot of people don't feel Mr. Perez has been straightforward with us. This is the first time that you've had a senator identify one of the core problems with this nomination. Mr. Perez has been telling one story to the Senate under oath, and other witnesses in the House investigation and documentary evidence has been telling another story about this St. Paul deal.

Gigot: Do you think he should be confirmed?

Kissel: No. Absolutely not.

Gigot: Do you think he will be confirmed?

Kissel: I don't think--I'm not making those kinds of predictions on this show.

Gigot: All right. We have to take one more break. When we come back, our "Hits and Misses" of the week.



Kissel: I'm giving a big hit to Pope Francis, who this week met a Cuban dissident, Berta Soler, who is one of the founding members of the Ladies in White. These are the ladies who peacefully protest the brutal Castro regime under threat of beatings, jailings or even death. What a shot in the arm for Cuba's democracy movement to have that photo taken. And a really welcome one, given that President Obama and even the previous pope have shunned the ladies. So shame on them and bully for Pope Francis.

Gigot: All right. Bret?

Stephens: This is the Stephens theory of intellectual relativity, which is that great genius does not equal good judgment. Stephen Hawkings, well-known physicist from Cambridge, decided to join an academic boycott of Israel this week. This is the same Stephen Hawking who had no qualms visiting Iran and China, despite their well-known human rights abuses. So while we admire Prof. Hawking for his theory about black holes, I'm afraid he's gone into a black hole all his own.

Gigot: All right. Steve?

Moore: This week the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit 15,000 for the first time ever. Paul, that is great news for investors. It's also a real tribute to the men and women who run American companies, large and small. During the recession, American businesses became lean, mean fighting machines. They cut their waste, they became much more efficient, they deleveraged. Wouldn't it be a wonderful thing, Paul, if American government could become one-half as efficient as American businesses are?

Gigot: All right. Thanks. I sure hope it lasts.

And remember, if you have your own "Hit or Miss," please send it to us at And be sure to follow us on Twitter, @JERonFNC. That's it for this week's show. Thanks to my panel, especially to all of you for watching. I'm Paul Gigot. Hope to see you right here next week.