The professionalism of the Benghazi committee

Excerpts of a column Kimberley A. Strassel writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Kevin McCarthy unexpectedly withdrew from the House speaker’s race on Thursday, a casualty of a fractured Republican conference. The Californian didn’t do much to inspire confidence last week when he suggested that the House Benghazi committee had been designed to attack Hillary Clinton.

One pity of the McCarthy comments is that they tainted the committee’s work with politics. The bigger pity is that they are dead wrong. South Carolina Republican Trey Gowdy is 18 months into the committee that the House purpose-built to investigate the 2012 terrorist assault in Libya that killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens. His Benghazi investigation has been a model of seriousness, professionalism and discreetness.

The statistics alone bear this out. The committee has so far reviewed 50,000 new pages of documents. Less than 5% have anything to do with Mrs. Clinton’s work as secretary of state. It has interviewed 51 witnesses. Forty-one of those were brand-new—no committee had bothered to speak with them before, though seven were eyewitnesses to the attack.

...Keeping the Benghazi committee on the straight and narrow hasn’t been fun. Democrats work with Mr. Gowdy in private but then berate his committee in public. Conservative activists and talk-radio hosts blast him for depriving them of the drama they crave—for not running a get-Hillary committee. The State Department blocks him. And now his own side has made his job that much harder.

Don’t expect Mr. Gowdy to give up. He has run his committee with one goal in mind: finding answers for the families of four dead Americans. Mrs. Clinton flatters herself if she thinks it’s all about her.

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All the Secretary's women (and men)

Remember how the Watergate Hearings started before Nixon's landslide re-election, and then all hell broke loose after the election? I am beginning to think something similar will happen with the Benghazi Hearings and the 2016 election. Ian Hanchett writes at Breitbart,

House Benghazi Select Committee Chairman Representative Trey Gowdy (R-SC) reported that Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, and Sidney Blumenthal would be on his witness list to testify before the committee or in a transcribed interview on Wednesday’s “Hugh Hewitt Show.”

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Questions for the Benghazi Select Committee

Andrew McCarthy wonders if the Benghazi Select Committee will answer these questions:

Why did our government change sides in Libya for the benefit of anti-American jihadists? What exactly was our government doing in Benghazi – what mission was worth assigning U.S. personnel to one of the most dangerous places in the world for Americans? Who is ultimately responsible for the appalling lack of security at the American compound? Where was President Obama, and what exactly was he doing, during the hours Americans were under siege? Why did the commander-in-chief and the military-chain-of-command take no meaningful action taken to respond to the attack? What role did election-eve politics – Obama’s repeated claims to have “decimated” al Qaeda – play in the administration’s misleading decision to portray the video, rather than al Qaeda-tied terrorists, as the culprit?

We must watch the committee with an open mind. Chairman Gowdy is an impressive fellow and clearly a fine lawyer. The committee has done very little publicly, but we have been told it is working hard behind the scenes, studying documents and deposing witnesses. Today’s hearing is the beginning, not the end. But many of us were hoping for a more enlightening public session before the committee goes dark again.

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