Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)
Kevin McCarthy, likely next speaker of the House, gets
a little too honest about what he thinks his party has accomplished with its congressional majority:
“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable right? But we put together a Benghazi Special Committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping," McCarthy said. "Why? Cause she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened had we not fought and made that happen,”
This doesn't come as news if you've been paying attention to how committee Chair Trey Gowdy has dragged out the investigation so that it will continue into the 2016 election year—making it last
longer than the 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina response investigations—or how a series of hearings planned for this year
haven't happened and instead the committee has focused on attacking Clinton, or how they pushed to interview a longtime Clinton friend about his emails to her and then
didn't want to release the transcript, and on and on.
This committee's overwhelming focus is not on what happened in Benghazi, it's on making Hillary Clinton look bad. They've never been very subtle about it, but it's nice to have Kevin McCarthy on the record admitting what the so-called Benghazi investigation is really all about.
7:01 AM PT: Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the Benghazi Committee, responds:
“This stunning concession from Rep. McCarthy reveals the truth that Republicans never dared admit in public: the core Republican goal in establishing the Benghazi Committee was always to damage Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and never to conduct an even-handed search for the facts. It is shameful that Republicans have used this tragedy and the deaths of our fellow Americans for political gain. Republicans have blatantly abused their authority in Congress by spending more than $4.5 million in taxpayer funds to pay for a political campaign against Hillary Clinton.”
