“But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee“, McCarthy said.
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Nearly all of Clinton’s communications team highlighted McCarthy’s interview on Twitter. They – and Democrats, generally – had always described the May 2014 creation of the Select Committee on Benghazi as a political fishing expedition.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, who chairs the Benghazi Committee and Speaker Boehner have long said the committee was formed to investigate the attack at Benghazi where ambassador Chris Stevens was killed.
A few of the statements blasting him can be found below.
“The Benghazi Select Committee has now become one of the longest and least active congressional investigations in history”, Ranking Member Elijah Cummings, D-Maryland, wrote in a statement. “It is shameful that Republicans have used this tragedy and the deaths of our fellow Americans for political gain”, he said.
A spokesman for Clinton, who’s in the lead for the Democratic presidential nomination, tweeted that McCarthy had let slip the “true goal” of the Benghazi committee. “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“.
Democrats immediately pounced on McCarthy’s remark, saying that the comment laid bare Republicans’ political motivations in launching the investigation.
Committee Chairman Republican Trey Gowdy says the investigation is still ongoing, often citing delays in getting documents including the State Department. And even if one day the committee issues a report and disbands, Politico reports that the House is toying with the idea of forming a committee to probe Planned Parenthood, proving the adage that for every congressional investigation that dies another will grow in its place.
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The investigation into the 2012 attacks in Benghazi has now been existence for 72 weeks. “Kevin McCarthy just confessed that the committee set up to look into the deaths of four fearless Americans at Benghazi is a taxpayer-funded sham”.
