Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was the first to suggest it. The New York Times’ editorial agreed it needed to happen. And finally, Democratic lawmakers introduced a resolution to disband the Select Committee on Benghazi.
The move comes shortly after House Majority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., appeared to suggest in an interview this month that the special committee to investigate Clinton’s role in the events surrounding the deadly Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, is little more than a political witch-hunt.
“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable right? We put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee,” McCarthy told Fox News’ Sean Hannity last week. “What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would’ve known any of that had happened had we not fought and made that happen.”
Clinton wasted little time turning McCarthy’s words on Republican lawmakers.
“This committee was set up, as they have admitted, for the purpose of making a partisan political issue out of the deaths of four Americans,” the Democratic frontrunner said Monday in an interview on NBC News’ “Today.” “I would never have done that, and if I were president and there were Republicans or Democrats thinking about that, I would have done everything to shut it down.”
“Look at the situation they chose to exploit, to go after me for political reasons,” she added. “The deaths of four Americans in Benghazi.”
The Times’ editorial board followed Clinton’s lead, referring Wednesday to the committee as “the Inquisition of Hillary Rodham Clinton.”
“[T]he effort to find Mrs. Clinton, who was secretary of State at the time of the Libya attacks, was personally responsible for the deaths [of the American ambassador and three colleagues] has lost any semblance of credibility,” the editorial added. “It’s become an insult to the memory of four slain Americans.”
Repeating that the committee is little more than a GOP-led effort to “derail” Clinton’s presidential campaign, the Times added that the idea that previous investigations into her role in the Benghazi attacks may have missed crucial evidence seems “negligible.”
When Clinton appears before the committee on Oct. 22, it will serve no other purpose than to give Republican lawmakers the chance to undermine her credibility, the Times declared.
“It will do nothing to make American embassies abroad safer or help the relatives of the four killed in Libya,” the editorial read. “The hearing should be the last salvo for a committee that has accomplished nothing. If the Republicans insist on keeping the process alive, the Democrats should stop participating in this charade.”
Not long after the publication of the Times’ editorial, details of a Democrat-drafted resolution calling on Republicans to disband the committee became available online.
The resolution criticized McCarthy specifically for his comments.
“Whereas a widely-quoted statement made on Sept. 29, 2015, by Representative Kevin McCarthy, the Republican Leader of the House of Representatives, has called into question the integrity of the proceedings of the Select Committee and the House of Representatives as a whole,” the privileged resolution reads in part.
“Whereas this statement by Rep. McCarthy demonstrates that the Select Committee established by Republican leaders in the House of Representatives was created to influence public opinion of a presidential candidate,” it added.
McCarthy, who may very well be the next speaker of the House, has scrambled to walk back his remarks. But Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., who is leading the committee, appears to be deeply annoyed and angry at the entire ordeal.
“I heard from [McCarthy] at 6 a.m. the next morning,” Gowdy told the Washington Post on Tuesday. “How many times can somebody apologize? Yes, he’s apologized as many times as a human can apologize. It doesn’t change it. It doesn’t fix it.”
“Kevin is a friend, which makes the disappointment, frankly, even more bitter,” he added. “People should go by what we’ve done. How many people have we interviewed? How many of those people have been named Clinton?”
(h/t Tommy Firth)
