Representative and Select Bullshit Committee member Adam Schiff (D-CA) wrote an op-ed for the New York Times last week calling for the dissolution of the committee which, in his words, has no clear objective aside from smearing Hillary Clinton.
So say we all.
Bullshit Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy's spokesman pushed back over the weekend, however, by accusing Representative Schiff of being a 'member in absentia.'
Ware, who serves as Gowdy’s spokesman for the Benghazi Committee specifically, said Schiff “has only attended one of the more-than-45 interviews conducted to date by the Select Committee on Benghazi.”
“In fact,” Ware continued, “save for voting no to create the committee and then attending a press event on the now well-disproven Democratic talking point that all has been ‘asked and answered,’ Mr. Schiff has largely been a Member of the committee in absentia.”
One could hardly blame a congressman for not attending private interviews which, in most cases, are repeat interviews with former state department staff who've already been interviewed countless times.
It's not as if the Benghazi Committee is uncovering new material or new witnesses. It isn't. Republican-controlled committees conducted their own investigations during the previous session of Congress and interviewed the same people who told them the same things.
Republicans on the Bullshit Committee would tell you they've been forced to re-interview the same set of people because they now have access to Hillary Clinton's emails. Inside those emails, they suspect, is the smoking gun implicating Clinton in some kind of cover-up of something. So far the emails have only established that former Secretary of State Clinton likes milk in her tea -- Impeach! -- and watches Netflix just like the rest of us humanoid beings.
Representative Adam Schiff's spokesman shot back at Trey Gowdy's spokesman with a bit of truth.
“In 16 months, the select committee has held only three hearings and one deposition, all of which Rep. Schiff attended, and two of the hearings were ones that Schiff proposed on the implementation of the ARB report. If the committee would like to increase the participation of members, perhaps it should have held the dozen or more hearings it promised to, but inexplicably cancelled.”
As Schiff's spokesman and ranking committee member Elijah Cummings (D-MD) point out, most of the committee's business has been conducted in private.
The benefit of holding private hearings and interviews rather than public hearings and depositions is Chairman Trey Gowdy and his henchmen can selectively leak material from the private sessions. You can't selectively leak a public hearing.