Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD)
Democrats on the Benghazi Committee have apparently had enough of Republican political games. They're fed up with the $4.5 million the committee has spent in nearly a year and a half of "investigating." They're fed up with the fact that "It has held no hearings of any kind since January, and it has completely abandoned its plans to hear public testimony from top defense and intelligence officials so Republicans can focus almost exclusively on Hillary Clinton."
So, in the wake of House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy saying on national television that attacking Clinton is really the Benghazi Committee's big function, the Democrats, led by Rep. Elijah Cummings, are pushing back in a big way: they're planning to release a transcript of the committee's interview with Cheryl Mills, the former State Department chief of staff.
Republicans had told the press that they were treating the interview "as if it were classified." That's despite the fact that, as the Democrats detail, staff without security clearance had been allowed to attend, the interview began with a statement that it wasn't classified, and afterward, Republicans emailed the interview transcript on an unclassified email system. And that's not considering the series of leaks—some of them, naturally, inaccurate—that came from Republicans after they announced that they'd be treating the interview as classified.
How Republicans have dealt with the Mills interview is a great case study in how they're using the Benghazi Committee as a partisan body to attack Hillary Clinton. And it's just one case study of many, with the big picture—the length of the investigation, the lack of "investigating" anything unrelated to Clinton, and, of course, McCarthy's too-honest comments—telling anyone who's paying attention all they should need to know. Now Republicans will have to explain why Democrats would be out of bounds to release this transcript after all of the Republican leaks and blatant treatment of it was unclassified. Of course, too much of the media will probably give Republicans a pass on this, as usual.
