“After meeting with (Minority) Leader (Nancy) Pelosi today, we are calling on Speaker (John) Boehner to immediately shut down this abusive, wasteful, and obviously partisan effort”, they added.
Advertisement
“[Clinton’s] testimony now has gone on longer than all the other hearings that we have held, combined”, Democrat Rep. Ada Schiff said. The panel eventually voted against the release, all five Democrats in favor, all seven Republicans against.
Hillary Clinton opened her speech before the Democratic Women’s Leadership Forum with a dry jab at the House Republicans who grilled her for 11 hours Thursday.
The panel has spent over $4.5 million investigating the September 11, 2012, attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans.
Gowdy’s flare-up with Cummings, among the most dramatic moments of Clinton’s 11-hour appearance before the committee, fueled Democrats’ allegations that the panel’s investigation into the 2012 attacks in Benghazi has devolved into a partisan sideshow. Rep. Susan Brooks admission during the hearing that, “most of use don’t know much about Libya”, doesn’t qualify as new information since the committee has been making that obvious for a few time. We’ll begin with his mention of emails – which were perhaps the most widely discussed topics after the hearing, particularly by the conservative media, including Breitbart, which cited them as conclusive evidence that Clinton knew the attacks were a planned terrorist attack on the anniversary of 9/11 and had nothing to do with the anti-Muslim video that sparked anti-U.S. violence in Egypt and elsewhere.
Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called the committee a “political sham” that dishonors the victims.
This week, the Select Committee on Benghazi finally got its hearing with democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. But she came out of Thursday’s hearing unbloodied, while the legislators sniping at her, and one another, came off like grade-schoolers reenacting HUAC hearings.
The Benghazi tragedy has hovered over Clinton for three years, threatening to upend her White House candidacy, especially after the inquiry launched 17 months ago led to revelations that she used a personal email account and server while she was top United States diplomat. “I can only tell you what the facts were”, Clinton said. “And this little girl stood up and she said ‘If you’re a girl president, will you be paid as much as a boy president?’ I said ‘Well I think so, I think that’s in the law'”.
“I am not shouting”, Clinton told the audience Friday.
Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, the panel’s chairman, rebutted, saying the committee was focused on facts, not politics.
“These questions linger because previous investigations were not thorough”, Gowdy said. She called it a “consequence of a video”.
“We’ve gotta break the stranglehold that the extremist views in the Republican Party have on too many people who are otherwise sensible and try to get them back into the pragmatic problem-solving that should be the hallmark of the relationship between the president and the Congress”, she said.
GOP lawmakers “badgered Hillary Clinton at every turn”. “It’s been quite a week, hasn’t it?” she said.
Advertisement
“Yes. Yes. Yoga always helps”, she said before departing. “Other witnesses have been identified and invited, and we will conduct additional interviews during this timeframe”.
