The Hillary Clinton campaign has placed its first national ad buy and, much to my delight, the ad prominently features House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy explicitly saying the Select Benghazi Committee was created to attack Clinton.
For his part, McCarthy issued another statement this morning denying that the committee is a political animal, but he also confirmed the committee's scrutiny of Clinton emails has nothing to do with Benghazi.
"The mission of the Select Committee on Benghazi is to find the truth -- Period," McCarthy said in the statement. "The integrity of Chairman Gowdy, the Committee and the work they've accomplished is beyond reproach. The serious questions Secretary Clinton faces are due entirely to her own decision to put classified information at risk and endanger our national security."
In McCarthy's own words, the committee is focused on Clinton's use of a private email server which, according to him, endangered our national security.
There's no proof of that and, given what we know, based on recent breaches of government servers exposing everything from Social Security numbers and even the fingerprints of government employees, it's possible Clinton's private server was actually more secure than a State Department server would have been. Just ask Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden.
Furthermore, State Department email servers are not classified servers so, even if Hillary Clinton had not used a private server, the same information would've been present.
With all of that said, what does this have to do with Benghazi?
Nothing. Unless House Republicans are alleging that the parties responsible for attacking our embassy were combing Hillary Clinton's emails for intelligence, it's completely unrelated. Clinton's alleged mishandling of information has nothing to do with the attack that killed four Americans.
The Select Clinton Email Committee is a committee focused on disparaging Hillary Clinton and it always was.