Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton
You'd think after two Republican House members had admitted that the Benghazi Committee's purpose was to attack Hillary Clinton, the committee members would be a little more careful about hiding that purpose. But no. The committee is interviewing—behind closed doors, of course—Huma Abedin, a top Clinton campaign staffer who also worked at the State Department under Clinton. And
they're not approaching this interview as they approach most of their interviews:
On Thursday, the committee circulated a background memo that confirmed her appearance and noted that investigators would only ask her about Libya policy and events related to the 2012 attack.
But the campaign accused the panel of playing politics, particularly because the committee rarely announces appearances before they happen — and because Abedin wasn’t at the State Department the night of the Benghazi attacks, they said. The campaign also said Abedin, who was working part-time at State around the time of the attack, has limited “knowledge about the events surrounding Benghazi.”
“The Committee’s focus on Huma (as opposed to numerous intelligence and defense community officials still outstanding) is additional evidence that the actual attack in Benghazi, and its lessons about how we might better protect diplomats serving in dangerous places, are the last things on the committee’s mind,” the campaign said a statement.
Oh, hey, rather than interviewing people in a position to know things about Benghazi that might not be generally known, let's interview one of Hillary Clinton's closest aides even though her involvement in handling Benghazi was extremely limited, then let's break with usual practice and announce it publicly in order to promise not to play politics with our questioning. That should convince people that we're not playing politics in general.
Benghazi Czar Trey Gowdy, for his part, was busy insisting that Republican Rep. Richard Hanna's comment that "I think that there was a big part of this investigation that was designed to go after people and an individual, Hillary Clinton" was "unfortunate" and uninformed, because, not being on the Benghazi Committee, Hanna couldn't possibly know what he's talking about. Because apparently if you're not on the Benghazi Committee, you can't see the nose on Trey Gowdy's face.