When John Boehner created this committee a year and a half ago, he was insistent that there was nothing partisan about it, and pointed to the appointment of Gowdy, a former prosecutor, as proof that the investigation would be serious and substantive. I was skeptical at the time about how much sober professionalism Gowdy would bring to the proceedings — his principal qualification seemed to be an eagerness to shout angrily at witnesses during hearings — and nothing that has happened since has proved me wrong.
The Times story is full of juicy details about the committee’s work, or lack thereof (“Wine Wednesdays” sounds like fun), and contains this interesting tidbit:
Mr. Gowdy said in the interview last week that he had pressed Mr. Boehner to have another House committee examine the matter of Mrs. Clinton’s emails, but that Mr. Boehner had rejected the request.
“I would have liked nothing more than for the speaker to find another committee,” Mr. Gowdy said.
Senior Republican officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing confidential conversations, said that Mr. Boehner had long been suspicious of the administration’s handling of the attacks and that Mrs. Clinton’s emails gave him a way to keep the issue alive and to cause political problems for her campaign. But he thought that the task was too delicate to entrust to others and that it should remain with Mr. Gowdy, the former prosecutor.
That’s significant because not only are Democrats talking to reporters about why this committee is a mess, Republicans are too. Any time you see a passage like this, with competing interpretations of what’s going on behind the scenes, it’s a good bet that people are maneuvering to shape public perception to their advantage, and it can become a little hard to know for certain where the truth lies.
But it looks like Gowdy, perhaps with the help of allies, is trying to say, Look, this mess isn’t my fault, it’s Boehner’s.
Maybe it was inevitable that this committee would become either a joke or a scandal in its own right, given the fact that it was established after seven separate investigations had already examined the events of September 11, 2012 in Benghazi and failed to find any administration wrongdoing or support for all the outlandish conspiracy theories conservatives had clung to. In the future, when asked about what the select committee accomplished, Republicans will probably say, “They discovered Clinton’s emails!” And that’s true. But what does that represent, substantively speaking?
Was there something in those emails that told America what really happened in Benghazi? No. Was there something in those emails that finally proved the scope of Hillary Clinton’s villainy? No. I’m not trying to defend Clinton’s use of a private email account, but about the most shocking thing we’ve learned from the actual emails is that Clinton, like every other person on the planet with an email address, got phishing spam, a revelation that when leaked to the press was passed along with lots of “Clinton Email Targeted By Russian Hackers!” headlines.
But what we haven’t learned is anything new that the committee has discovered about — now see if you can follow me here — Benghazi. That was, you may recall, the whole point of this exercise. So
what has Gowdy’s committee found that all the previous investigations didn’t? Anything at all? What do we now know about what happened on that night that we didn’t know before?
The answer so far is: nothing. Now maybe if they take another 17 months and another few million dollars, they’ll finally blow the lid off the conspiracy. But if they’re trying to argue that the committee exists only to learn the whole story about Benghazi, then it has clearly been a failure. If the committee exists only to hurt Clinton, as Democrats have been saying all along and now even some Republicans admit, then it may be turn out to be a failure on that score as well.
Facebook
Twitter