Kevin McCarthy Inadvertently Tells The Truth About The House Benghazi Committee
The man who will likely be the next Speaker of the House accidentally acknowledged the real motivation behind the Select Committee investigating, yet again, the Benghazi attack.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who will most likely be easily elected to succeed John Boehner as Speaker of the House, caused a bit of a ruckus today when he seemed to admit that the GOP’s motives in launching yet another committee to investigate the September 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi was largely a political effort to discredit Hillary Clinton:
Sean Hannity was pushing hard, asking House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy to name some promises his Republicans had actually delivered on. He scoffed when McCarthy said the party would start undoing the Affordable Care Act — “you have the power of the purse!” He talked over McCarthy when the leader and candidate for Speaker of the House suggested that the party did not need to cut funds for President Obama’s “amnesty,” because courts had taken care of it. Only halfway into the interview did McCarthy finally catch a break.
“Everybody though Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” McCarthy asked. “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 any of that had happened, had we not fought.”
“I give you credit for that,” said Hannity. “I’ll give you credit where credit is due.”
The interview ran late Tuesday night, giving Hillary Clinton’s campaign and allies time to prepare a counterattack. They — and Democrats, generally — had always described the May 2014 creation of the Select Committee on Benghazi as a political fishing expedition. All of a sudden, McCarthy was saying so, just to mollify a partisan conservative TV host. Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon quickly argued as much on Twitter.
The political hatchet job at taxpayer expense that is the current Benghazi investigation in the House has been officially exposed by who else – the future Speaker of the House,” said Brad Woodhouse, president of the pro-Clinton rapid response group Correct the Record. “We have been saying for years that Republicans were exploiting the deaths of four Americans for political gain. Kevin McCarthy just admitted it. Disgraceful.”
McCarthy’s answer was indeed at odds with 16 months of Republican talking points on the investigation, led by Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.). Whenever he was asked if the committee was political, outgoing Speaker of the House John Boehner typically expressed disgust at the mere suggestion. Democrats were talking politics while lifetime prosecutor Trey Gowdy was talking about events that led to the murders of four Americans.
(…)
On the right, Gowdy’s committee isn’t even given full credit for the most damaging revelations about Clinton. Judicial Watch, the watchdog group that obtained Benghazi-era emails about White House talking points — Boehner’s stated justification for creating the committee — greeted the speaker’s retirement by saying he’d largely whiffed.
“We’ve heard from many members of the House who are embarrassed that its committees and oversight have become a joke under Speaker Boehner,” said Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton last week. “Judicial Watch has had more success investigating the IRS, Benghazi, and Clinton email scandals than any House committee under Boehner’s direction.”
In a follow-up interview, Fitton told the Washington Post that the Benghazi select committee was about as unproductive as any creation of Boehner could be expected to be. ”Committees are a way for leadership to allow members to leverage their offices to raise money and stay in office,” he said. “Oversight, accountability, fiduciary responsibility to their taxpayers — it’s often secondary.”
McCarthy’s statement is obviously not what Republicans want the public to hear. For three years now, the GOP has been banging the Benghazi drum and insisting that their numerous investigations into the attack and the Administrations response to it were meant to get to the truth about what happened that night. Behind the claims of a quest for truth, though, is a long history of Republican politicians and pundits who have clearly already made up their mind about the matter and concluded that President Obama and then Secretary of State Clinton were either incompetent in their response to the attack or willfully allowed it to happen for reasons that they can never seem to explain. Even in the days after the attack in the midst of the 2012 Presidential Campaign, Mitt Romney’s campaign and its supporters attempted to use the attack, and especially the Administration’s somewhat confused response to its aftermath, to push back against the President. The tactic failed to work, though, and President Obama went on to easily win reelection. That didn’t stop Congressional Republicans, who immediately convened a series of committees to investigate the affair that included Hillary Clinton’s now famous testimony in her waning days in office. Those hearings, of course, led to the now famous confrontation between Clinton and Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson and in which Clinton utters the now famous line “What difference, at this point, does it make?” Neither that investigation, nor any of the others, have found any evidence of wrongdoing. Perhaps more importantly, an investigation by the House Intelligence Committee that had access to classified information that other committees didn’t found the same thing and concluded that there was no wrongdoing on the part of the Administration, and no evidence of a cover-up as has been alleged by some on the right.
Despite the fact that there clearly doesn’t seem to be any reason for yet another investigation of what happened three years ago in Benghazi, the House went forward with the Select Committee anyway. As I noted at the time the committee was first established in May 2014, it was apparent from the start that the primary purpose of the committee was not to uncover “the truth” about the Benghazi attack but to score political points against Democrats in general and Hillary Clinton in particular. This isn’t to deny that there aren’t legitimate questions arising out of what happened in Benghazi, but those questions are ones that have little to do with the partisan war that Trey Gowdy and his committee are leading, and the answers to those questions would not help the Republicans rile up their base in advance of the Presidential election. The partisan nature of the investigation has become even more apparent as time has gone on. Despite the fact that it has been in operation for more than a year, the committee has held almost no public hearings and announced early this year that a report would not be released until 2016, most likely just in time for the General Election. Now that Hillary Clinton’s scheduled October 22nd testimony before the committee is approaching, and with the committee now seemingly more focused on Clinton’s use of a private email server than the September 11th, 2012 attack in Benghazi the partisan motivations behind the investigation are apparent.
Majority Leader McCarthy committed what political analysts call a “Kinsley Gaffe,” he inadvertently told the truth about something that Republicans would prefer not be publicly acknowledge. For anyone who has been paying attention, though, his admission should not come as a surprise.
It’s a good time to remind ourselves that when the Democrats took over Congress in 2006, they did not start investigating the Iraq War, or reopened the 9/11 reports, or went hard after torture, or made a fuss about the tens of millions of emails that the WH “lost.” But remember kids: both parties are the same!
Hillary testifying before this witch hunt should be amusing…especially so now, armed with bone-heads comment.
For how long have Republicans been investigating the Clinton’s? And all they’ve found is an extramarital hummer.
At least McCarthy finally admitted what we already knew.
Stalin was apparently right — 4 dead Americans in Libya is a crime; 4000 dead Americans in Iraq is a statistic…
Good post, Doug.
“McCarthy’s statement is obviously not what Republicans want the public to hear.”
Oh indeed . . . :))
It comes as no surprise, and the admission will make no difference. The absence of evidence is proof of the deviousness of the conspiracy. But surely the next email…
Ah hah hah hah!
The GOP brain trust strikes again.
@C. Clavin: The plural of Clinton is Clintons. I let it go the first 750 times.
http://www.politicspa.com/turzai-voter-id-law-means-romney-can-win-pa/37153/
If the Democrats regain the Senate in 2016, I would like to see the Democrats convene a special committee on the use of taxpayer funds by the House Republicans to conduct a partisan witch hunt. H3ll, turnabout is fair play and it looks like the Republicans don’t respect anything but the same kind of ratfvcking tactics that they use.
Looking back on things, the Democrats missed a big opportunity in 2009 when they “turned the page” and didn’t go all in Iraq War and 2008 crisis hearings. Obama obviously didn’t expect the public to forget the recent events so quickly and thanks to Fox News etc, the Republicans rehabilitated their image in record time. The Republicans seemed to have taken the Obama Administration’s kindness for weakness and drew from it the lesson that they could screw up the country here and abroad and not be hauled over the coals for it. Major strategic mistake in retrospect.
Hannity will give credit where it’s “due,” and then gives credit to the Republicans anyway….
What a fool.
Also, Wolf Blitzer was just talking to Jason Chaffetz on CNN. He thinks all the money we spend on Planned Parenthood subsidies should be devoted to cancer research.
So if anyone says the mooted shutdown argument was about fiscal restraint, you can just tell them no, it’s about priorities.
@humanoid.panda:
Well, that’s because many of those things were already being investigated. There were multiple inquiries going on into pre-Iraq-war intelligence and pre-9/11 intelligence. And in 2007, there were investigations into the e-mail scandal. In fact, by 2006, there were already a dozen investigations into the behavior of Bush Administration officials, most of which produced nothing.
(And I remember, during Bush I, after two investigations proved the October Surprise conspiracy was nonsense, Democrats saying that the lack of evidence proved it needed to be investigated further.)
I have no time for the Bush people or his garbage presidency. But I also tire of the Democratic Superiority Complex.
@Hal_10000:
Well, not exactly nothing, but the points otherwise are well-taken. Surprised at the downvotes.
Kevin McCarthy: didn’t he used to be an actor ?
The photo: please tell me that creep has been locked up and is not out there loose, running around burning stuff up. The trial for those guilty of thise despicable act should have been rounded up and put on trial long ago. .
Somebody is dragging their feet. Why ?
@Tyrell: Well, we don’t actually know what happened because it isn’t our country.
In Gary Trudeau’s fictional Netflix series “Alpha House”, a Michelle Bachmann-like Congresswoman established a “Permanent Benghazi Committee” so that “our children could continue to examine the tragedy of Benghazi”. Oh, sorry, did I say fiction?
@John Peabody: You joke, but I hear that this farce of a committee has been in place longer than the committees that investigated the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, and Iran-Contra.
On a similar note, it appears that the new speaker-in-waiting has trouble as an actual speaker:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/for-rep-mccarthy-the-likely-new-house-speaker-words-still-fail-him/2015/09/28/67082056-661d-11e5-8325-a42b5a459b1e_story.html
I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he has had a stroke. It probably occurred during his trip to Hungria.
@J-Dub: It did sound like English as a second language, didn’t it? Although I expect English, or whatever this was, is his only language. I generally believe the way one speaks and writes is a reflection of how one thinks. Scary in this case.
I said above that this “revelation” won’t make any difference. And it won’t to Dems, who already knew it was a partisan farce, or to Reps, who are proud that it’s a partisan farce. It should, however, make it harder for the supposedly liberal MSM to continue to pretend to take the Benghazi committee seriously.
@steve s:
Yeah…I know….but the Computer doesn’t.
@Hal_10000:
Actually they produced a lot. Almost none of it was acted on.
There is more than enough information to try Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld et al for war crimes.
@Hal_10000:
I’m amused by your comment regarding the Democratic Superiority Complex.
Given that Republicans are now carrying on hearings and investigations of Planned Parenthood based solely on phony videos and fueled by phony charts…pretty much everyone is superior to the current GOP laughing stock…not just Democrats.
@Hal @Tillman:
I would wager the downvotes are due to the complex crack. True or not, it completely misses the point other posters are making – namely, that Democrats deliberately didn’t play the punishment game via Death By Committee when they had the chance. To tell someone they have a superiority complex demonstrated by them pointing out they intentionally didn’t engage in the continuing douchebaggery their opponent is kinda insulting and unfair. Dems and liberals have superior complexes about many things but on this one, they are in the right.
Otherwise, I agree with you both. If the investigations already in existing were fruitless, there’s no point in engaging in more. The Dems did the right thing by not dragging it out.
Letter from Sens. Reid, Dick Durbin (D-IL), Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Patty Murray (D-WA), and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) to the crybaby:
@James Pearce: May Wolf Blitzer be inflicted with cancer that was not diagnosed until too late.
@Grumpy Realist:
Ouch…don’t be writing karma checks you can’t cash!!!!
@Grumpy Realist :
Not nice grumpy even if the frustration is understandable. Everybody thinks their pet cause deserves all monies. And since Wolf is a guy, he’s probably unaware of how much PP does to help detect cancer in women before it becomes a death sentence.
*sigh* I’ve worked in a cancer hospital. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemies. I’d much rather piss in their coffee and tell them it’s a new lemon-flavored sugar substitute.
According to wikipedia, there’s lots of evidence that there actually was an October Surprise
conspiracy:
Example 1:
At the news conference presenting the report, copies were not made available to reporters until afterwards, and Hamilton published an editorial in the New York Times declaring “case closed” on grounds of Casey’s supposed alibis.
Two decades later, Hamilton conceded that knowledge of a State Department memo withheld from the inquiry might have changed the Task Force’s conclusions.[6] The Task Force had concluded that William J. Casey (Reagan’s campaign manager) could not have attended a meeting with Iranians in Madrid in October 1980, as a key witness had alleged. This conclusion contributed strongly to the overall view. The State Department memo, dated November 1991, referred to a State Department cable from 1980 confirming the presence of Casey in Madrid at the time in question.[6] The memo did not become public knowledge until 2011, when it was discovered at the George H.W. Bush presidential library.[7]
Example 2:
Shamir, who was Israeli foreign minister in 1980, raised the October Surprise issue in an interview in 1993, saying that he had read Gary Sick’s “interesting” book. He was asked “What do you think? Was there an October Surprise?”; “‘Of course, it was,’ Shamir responded without hesitation. ‘It was.'”[52]
The Russians claimed it happened too.
@KM: I would think that a self-professed pundit would at least do some research as to how much PP does in the way of cancer detection before saying hey, let’s get rid of all of it, let’s dump all of it over in this other area.
The older I get, the less tolerance I have for self-identifying “experts” who show that they are clueless idiots.
To be fair to Kevin, he only said aloud what everyone knows to be true – that the repeated Benghazi investigations and the current private email server investigation have very little to do with a search for the “truth” and everything to do with taking Hillary down.
But really – this is bad form – Kevin ought to know better by now, you don’t come right out an say it directly, this is very bad Kabuki.
It’s not a superiority complex if the Democrats properly investigate legitimate scandals. The Democrats were doing their jobs. The Republicans were investigating fake scandals under the PRETEXT of doing their jobs. Kevin McCarthys gaffe confirms it was a pretext all along.
Here is a huge tell. This is the complete list of Republicans who were concerned that HRC used a private server while she was SoS:
When did this become an issue? When she began her Presidential run of course.
@grumpy realist:
Fair enough. But there is a vast difference in detection vs research and Wolf, like so many others, are intent on dumping money down that rabbit hole. Without getting to the morass of it, it’s much easier to saying “Give all the money to research so cancer will go away!” then actually deal with the reality that we will most likely never truly cure cancer and instead will have to slog away at this battle for generations to come with highly individualized treatments. In this, he’s like every other political type suggesting an easy answer to virtually unsolvable problem. “Research!!!!”
Anyways, I wonder if we could just solve this whole thing by renaming PP to something like Whole Lifetime Services to really show that the small portions of their services that the nuts scream about isn’t worth losing the benefits they bring. Rebranding works wonders sometimes….
@KM:
That’s true. Most guys, after all, have no mothers, sisters, wives, girlfriends, mothers or female friends, no women whom they are close to or of whose lives they know anything about. The world of women is completely closed to us!
@KM:
Oh, hell, let’s just rename it The American Motherhood and Apple Pie Institute….
@Rafer Janders:
You can do better then a Not All Men, Rafer.
I said “probably” , as in giving him the benefit of the doubt. Since there is demonstrable evidence that a lot of men are in fact not aware of the full services offered by PP (do you know the exact details of where all the women in your life get their cervical cancer check done? Do you know all the details of any possible PP visits?), there is a chance he genuinely doesn’t know since it get lumped under “Other” in media discussions. Oh he may vaguely be aware they do cancer checks but it gets lost and rendered unimportant in the face of controversy. Like Grumpy said, you’d think they’d do their homework and know these things. However, given the state of cable journalism, I’m not holding my breath.
@al-Ameda: Yeah. I think the real takeaways from this are:
A – McCarthy and his confreres are so deep in the bubble they have no idea how this sounds outside the bubble.
B – McCarthy isn’t bright enough to be playing in the Majors.
C – The supposedly liberal MSM have not, and will not, report A or B.
@Hal_10000:
As was Benghazi, repeatedly, which did not stop the Congress from doing it again. There was never a Select Committee to investigate the Iraq War. We all know that the 9/11 Commission’s mandate was severely limited- and it would have actually been a good practice to do it again and again. The Democratic Superiority Complex is true- not because the Democrats are demigods, but because the competittion is so awful.
@grumpy realist:
I am pretty sure that the “he” in James Pearce’s post about Blitzer refers to Jason Chaffets, no to Blitzer.
@humanoid.panda: In that case I’m mistaken, and I apologize.
It does seem that SOMEONE is clueless (and stupid) enough to not realize that if you take all the money that”s used by PP for cancer detection and other stuff and shove it into cancer research, you’re going to end up with a lot of woman dead of cancer because they weren’t diagnosed in time.
But hey, we don’t have that nasty PP around so everything’s fine!
@gVOR08:
as to A – I honestly believe it’s hubris, conservatives are now at the point where they do not care at all, they’re confident that they’re going to run the table in November 2016.
as to B – out here in CA, McCarthy is recognized as a ‘good guy’ which means he actually speaks with opposition politicians, but he’s thought to be a lightweight, however I’m pretty sure that that’s a deal breaker when it comes to politics.
as to C – the so-called MSM is almost completely cowed by over 3 decades of being accused by the conservative commentariat of being biased liars. That’s why there’s so much “both sides do it” reporting, it’s the equivalent of junk food.
GIven the intensity of the blowback to McCarthy from fellow Republicans; it sounds like there is not a lot of enthusiasm for his rising to the Speakership. Now Pelosi is looking to stir up trouble for the Republicans by running for the Speakership herself. With solid D support, she could win at least a plurality against a split R vote. Won’t last but it will be embarrassing.
@Rafer Janders: “That’s true. Most guys, after all, have no mothers, sisters, wives, girlfriends, mothers or female friends, no women whom they are close to or of whose lives they know anything about. The world of women is completely closed to us!”
Most Republicans certainly act that way.