House Benghazi Czar Trey Gowdy won’t be repeating the humiliating-for-him spectacle of his committee’s partisan attempt to humiliate Hillary Clinton. Obviously a committee that was formed to drag down Clinton’s poll numbers and has been blatantly partisan from the beginning isn’t going to do anything extreme like stop being partisan, but they can at least try to keep the public from noticing what they’re doing. That’s Gowdy’s plan:
WOLF BLITZER (HOST): Let me quickly get your thoughts on your investigation into [what] happened in Benghazi, Libya. All of us remember the 11 hours of testimony that Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, provided in open session. You're now having these closed door meetings with others who were involved. The former CIA Director General Petraeus testified yesterday. Leon Panetta, the former defense secretary, will testify tomorrow. Are you making any headway, are you learning new information about what may have happened?
REP. TREY GOWDY (R-SC): Yes, sir, we're actually doing an interview today with a witness named Charlene Lamb. We are up to our sixty-sixth witness interview, the overwhelming majority of which have never been talked to by any congressional committee before. And you're right, Secretary Clinton was in public. But it's the only one that's been in public, and it's the only one that's going to be in public because the private transcribed interviews are so much more effective for gathering information than a public spectacle. So, all the rest of them are going to be in private, and all the rest of them will be productive.
How interesting that, after the plan to go after Clinton directly failed, Gowdy and his committee are doing something they hadn't been doing through most of 2015. Though it sure would be fascinating to know more about what they're asking these people they’re interviewing, given the committee’s questionable record on that front—and its history of selectively leaking information for maximum political advantage.
Also, too, listing the number of people your committee has interviewed is not actually an answer to “are you learning new information about what may have happened?”