House Select Committee on Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., said Sunday that he’s bluntly told his Republican colleagues to stop talking about the committee’s proceedings.
“I have told my own Republican colleagues and friends, shut up talking about things that you don’t know anything about,” he said on CBS’s Face the Nation.
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Gowdy was forced to deliver that message to his own GOP colleagues after some have indicated they believe the committee’s real aim is to disparage Hillary Clinton and hurt her chances of winning the Democratic nomination and the White House.
In September, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., noted that Clinton’s poll numbers have been hurt since the committee began investigating her role in the 2012 attack against the U.S. consulate in Libya. Just last week, Rep. Richard Hanna, R-N.Y., said he thinks a “big part” of the investigation was to go after Clinton.
A former staffer on the committee also criticized it as political.
But Gowdy said on CBS there’s no evidence the committee is political, and that the two members who offered those comments aren’t on the committee, and haven’t been briefed on what it’s doing. He said the former staffer left in June and also isn’t up to date.
“Actually there’s no evidence” the committee is political, Gowdy said. “There are three people who don’t have any idea what they’re talking about.”
“These three wouldn’t even be called as a witness in my former job, because they have no first-hand knowledge,” he added, referring to his former job as a prosecutor.
Gowdy also said that when Clinton testifies before the committee on Thursday, his goal is not to tear down Clinton, but to learn what she knows about the days leading up to the deaths of four Americans. He said he thinks Clinton will know more about the security situation in Benghazi before the attack, and said he wants to know why Clinton apparently ignored warnings that the security situation was getting worse.
“While violence was going up in Libya, why was our security going down?” he asked.
Gowdy has said he only wanted to call Clinton as a witness once the committee had all her emails, but said she would testify even though all her emails have not been collected. He said the committee is still missing “large tranches of information” from Clinton.
