Referring to House Majaority Leader Kevin McCarthy's explicit admission that the Select Benghazi Committee was created to attack former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Representative Richard Hanna (R-NY) told a local radio station that the greatest sin in Congress is telling the truth.
“This may not be politically correct,” Hanna said, “but I think there was a big part of this investigation that was designed to go after an individual, Hillary Clinton.”
Noting that “sometimes the biggest sin you can commit in D.C. is telling the truth,” Hanna said, “After what Kevin McCarthy said, it’s difficult to accept at least a part of it was not. I think that’s the way Washington works. But you’d like to expect more from a committee that’s spent millions of dollars and tons of time.”
Indeed, you'd like to expect more from a taxpayer-funded committee that has wasted millions of dollars and hundreds of hours of time chasing conspiracy theories.
Benghazi Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-SC) issued an official statement in response to Rep. Hanna that I would call comical.
I called Mr. Hanna this morning to find out if he had any concerns since our last conversation and offered him some insights to the committee’s work. Among other things I noted is the fact the Committee recently received emails from Ambassador Chris Stevens, but I also highlighted the fact that we have not rushed out to talk about them, but are instead evaluating them in the serious, fact-centric way evidence should be handled.
Running investigations in a private, fact-centric way is unquestionably the right way to conduct a serious investigation. The pitfall, of course, is that commentators, and sometimes even Members of your own Conference, offer thoughts on matters on which they are not familiar.
No, Trey Gowdy has not "rushed out" to talk about emails. Gowdy usually delegates that responsibility to anonymous aides who pass misleading sound bites and partial transcripts to an eager political press.
Gowdy's repeated insistence that his committee his very serious and "fact-centric" would lead me to say he protests too much.
If the committee has actually uncovered any facts that we didn't already know, I'd love to hear about it.