Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) vehemently defended the House Select Committee’s work on Benghazi and went after House Majority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) saying his comments about the political success of the panel was plain “wrong.”
McCarthy appeared on Fox News’ Sean Hannity last week and bragged that the Benghazi committee had a negative effect on Clinton’s poll numbers.
In an interview with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Gowdy said, “Kevin has apologized as profusely as a human being can apologize. I went back and watched the interview, and what I tell folks back home, no matter how many times you put an earpiece in your ear and stare at a camera, you still screw up. And Kevin screwed up.”
Gowdy continued, “I don’t know if it was Hannity pressing him, I don’t know if he got thrown off by asking to give Speaker Boehner a grade. I can’t unlock the mysteries of that. I can just tell you that if you look at what the members of our committee have done, we were pretty reluctantly brought into the Secretary Clinton aspect of it,” and he added, “It’s because The New York Times and AP and others broke this story that folks’ interest in Secretary Clinton picked up in this regard.”
When Gowdy was asked what his first reaction to McCarthy’s Hannity interview was, he replied that it was, “Kevin, you’re wrong.”
“When Speaker Boehner called me, he never mentioned Secretary Clinton’s name. In fact, we’ve had three public hearings, Joe. I’ve never mentioned her name. If you look at what we’ve done, the 50-some-odd witnesses we’ve already interviewed, not a single one has been named Clinton. The 50,000 documents that we have accessed that no other committee has accessed, less than 5 percent have anything to do with her. She was the secretary of state at all relevant times, so of course you have to talk to her. But we didn’t start with her, and we’re not going to end with her. In fact, I’ve been pretty patient on when she came before the committee. I still don’t have all her emails,” Gowdy told Joe Scarborough.
Gowdy asserted the committee has been “dogged” and “didn’t let up,” but also “in all candor and a little bit of humility, which is unusual in my profession, the media has done every bit as much work as our committee, because number one, you have better sources than I do, and number two, it’s not my job to look into classified information or all aspects of her email. My interest in her email is in making sure that the record as it relates to Libya and Benghazi is complete and full.”
McCarthy, who is expected to replace John Boehner as House Speaker, has forced his Republican colleagues to defend their never ending Benghazi crusade, and continues to call the work of the committee nonpartisan while influential Democrats are calling for the panel to disband.
The New York Times editorial board recently called for the upcoming hearing to be the panel’s last action, or at least for the Democrats to stop participating in the “charade.”
The committee chairman said that Clinton’s Oct. 22 hearing will be “fact-centric, professional and fair.”
When asked about the email gaps around the Benghazi attack, Gowdy acknowledged that was the case and brought up the fact that Sidney Blumenthal, a friend of Clinton, turned over fifteen emails that the former secretary failed to turned over to the committee. “But she deserves a chance to be asked about that in a fair, professional setting, and that’s one of the things we’ll do on the 22nd,” Gowdy said.
Gowdy provided a preview of the kind of question he’ll ask Clinton on October 22:
“My interest is in making sure everything I’m entitled to, I have received. And when you say that the public record is complete and I know that there are 15 emails that you never turned over to the State Department, that is a fair line of inquiry,” he said. “The question is, how did you miss it? You have repeatedly said that you turned over everything. What about these 15? And if there are 15 here, how do you guarantee that you turned over everything when it was your lawyers that did the analysis and not the inspector general?”
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