Gowdy’s Dream of an Unsullied Committee Dashed

Fiscal Times

By Rob Garver
October 12, 2015

There’s real disagreement about whether the House Select Committee on Benghazi began as a purely political effort to embarrass former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, widely considered the favorite to win the Democratic presidential nomination, or an honest effort to uncover hidden truths about the attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound that killed four Americans in 2012.

What’s not in question anymore is that the committee and its mission have been pulled into the swamp of presidential election politics in the past two weeks in a way that its chair, South Carolina Republican Trey Gowdy, had made Herculean efforts to avoid during the first year and a half of the committee’s existence.

Things began to go sour for the committee on September 29, when House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy suggested in a Fox News interview that the panel had been put together specifically to damage Hillary Clinton in the eyes of voters.

“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” McCarthy said. “But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known that any of that had happened had we not fought.”

Gowdy was, reportedly, horrified by the comments, viewing them as negating much of the work he had done to maintain the impression that the select committee was focused solely on finding the truth.

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The release of the letter seemed to break some sort of emotional dam within Gowdy, who responded with a 13-page single-spaced letter of his own to the committee’s top Democrat, Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings.

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more than half of the letter is dedicated to an exchange of emails between Clinton and a former Clinton advisor, Sidney Blumenthal, on the subject of the civil war in Libya.

While it is arguable that Clinton’s correspondence with Blumenthal, which seemed to focus on high-level strategies for dealing with Libya is relevant to the Benghazi investigation, it is unclear from the excerpts highlighted by Gowdy that they discussed the attacks specifically.

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he extensive focus on Clinton’s relationship with Blumenthal makes it a bit jarring when, in the final paragraph of the letter Gowdy urges Cummings to “remember why we are here: the promises we made more than a year ago to the families of our fallen heroes.”

However, Gowdy’s problems weren’t over. On Saturday, The Washington Post reported that a former committee staffer, Air Force Major Bradley Podliska, was suing the committee, claiming its leaders had terminated him, in part because he disagreed with what he characterized as an excessive focus on Hillary Clinton.

“My non-partisan investigative work conflicted with the interests of the Republican leadership, who focused their investigation primarily on Secretary Clinton and her aides,” he said in a statement.

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