It's Time for Trey Gowdy's Partisan-Hack Committee to End

Congressman Trey Gowdy is a partisan hack. Don't get me wrong, most of the House of Representatives right now are, but he's a special case. He's the leader of the farce known as the House Select Committee on Benghazi. He's the guy who gets to lead the committee today in their questioning of Hillary Clinton. He's the guy who's spun wild conspiracy theories to justify his existence. He's not someone who should be taken seriously for his governing philosophy.

To hear Gowdy's defenders tell it, we should take him seriously, he used to be a prosecutor. Then we listen to him talk, and we hear him say ridiculous things. He claims the ARB, made up of a bipartisan group of national security professionals, wasn't a legitimate investigation. He claims his committee is though, even as they don't interview the Secretary of Defense in 2012 or most of his relevant staff on Benghazi. They don't interview the CIA Director at that time either. They also don't have a hearing until October during the year 2015. Oh, and there's this:

Gowdy and the republican Benghazi committee have been attacking by using a variety of government documents which have been heavily redacted to the point that it’s never been entirely clear just what context they would be in if not for all of the redactions and blackouts. After democrats asked the CIA to declassify the documents so that the public could see what was really being presented, the CIA responded by stating that it had never asked for anything to be redacted. When questioned under pressure, Gowdy admitted that he himself decided to redact large portions of the documents based on his own personal judgment of what information he did or didn’t want the public to know.

This House Benghazi Committee is not a legitimate investigation. Trey Gowdy is not a legitimate investigator. This is little more than an arm of the Republican National Committee, there to try and weaken Hillary Clinton ahead of the 2016 election. The public knows it, three in four say it's partisan-hackery.  Of course Republican voters support it anyway, but don't pretend that even they say it's a real investigation. The truth is that a large percentage of the public isn't paying attention, and a large percentage think this is partisan. Gowdy can complain all he wants, the truth is still the truth:

 The last month of drama is a great example of the way the media regularly forget what they already know, and has to learn it again to great fanfare: in this case, that the Benghazi committee was established to tie the tragedy around Clinton’s neck well into the 2016 presidential campaign, and thus damage her politically. There had already been seven investigations into what happened the night Ambassador Chris Stevens died at the less-than-adequately secured Libyan compound, and while they found fault with State Department process, they cleared Clinton, and the Obama administration, of the worst allegations about what happened. Nobody needed this investigation, which has spent at least $4.5 million and still counting, to learn what went wrong.

But the discovery earlier this year that Clinton used a private e-mail server while at the State Department suddenly gave Gowdy’s partisan crusade new life and, for a time, obscured its intent. Since then, Gowdy and his staff have leaked a steady toxic stream of half-truths about Clinton’s alleged mishandling of classified information, more than once inflating interagency security reviews into “criminal” investigations targeting Clinton herself. The New York Timesalone has had to make multiple corrections to stories that relied on misleading committee leaks.

 Maybe reporters were already getting tired of being embarrassed by Gowdy. Whatever the reason, when Republican majority leader Kevin McCarthy simply stated what he thought everyone already knew—that the committee had a partisan intent to damage Clinton—it was as though he broke the spell that had made the media forget the truth. “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” McCarthy told Fox News. “But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.”

You could almost feel sorry for McCarthy when the ensuing backlash helped blow away his speaker candidacy: How could he get in so much trouble for stating the obvious? 

But the hits kept coming. GOP Representative Richard Hanna unhelpfully defended McCarthy for telling the truth: “I think that there was a big part of this investigation that was designed to go after people, and an individual: Hillary Clinton.” An ex-staffer told The New York Times that the committee had become a “partisan” investigation designed to hurt Clinton, not get the truth of the attacks. In the ultimate unraveling, Gowdy got caught tampering with an e-mail to make it look as though a Clinton associate outed an intelligence agent—which the CIA itself said hadn’t happened—and in the process, Gowdy himself outed the intelligence agent. 

There lies the truth- it's all a partisan witch-hunt. It's time for the Benghazi Committee to end. It's time to stop wasting $4.5 million on a partisan investigation. Gowdy has tried to discredit the ARB by saying State Department staff got to edit that report (which of course they did, there's classified data in there), but he did even worse things with no legal standing for his actions.

Just end this waste of a committee already.