Markos Moulitsas: The GOP jihad on Benghazi

It’s been tough lately for Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), chairman of the House Hillary Clinton Witch-Hunt Benghazi Committee. 

“I would say in some ways these have been among the worst weeks of my life,” he whined earlier this week. “Attacks on your character, attacks on your motives, are 1,000 times worse than anything you can do to anybody physically — at least it is for me.”

{mosads}It sure is tough running a witch-hunt in this day and age! 

Sure, the two-year Republican-led investigation of the 2012 Benghazi attacks conducted by the House Intelligence Committee found that “there was no intelligence failure, no delay in sending a CIA rescue team, no missed opportunity for a military rescue.” But the media didn’t blink twice when the GOP claimed it needed yet another investigation to truly get to the bottom of things, because if at first you don’t succeed in knocking down Clinton’s favorability numbers, try, try again!

The media didn’t sniff partisanship when Gowdy’s first witness request was the former secretary of State, or when the Republican Party fundraised off the committee, or when it stretched out committee work into the 2016 election cycle, or when 22 of the committee’s 27 press releases focused on Clinton or when it quit plans to hold 11 hearings this year on the actual Benghazi attack to focus on Clinton’s State Department emails. 

And of course Gowdy wasn’t being partisan when he skipped the bulk of interviews and depositions — including those of embassy staff, top intelligence officials and people present during the terrorist attack — but somehow found the time to attend interviews with people directly connected to Clinton, including Sidney Blumenthal, who faced more questions about liberal groups such as Media Matters and American Bridge than he did about Benghazi. 

The media ignored those signs of partisanship because, well, because Republicans said it wasn’t partisan. 

“Hillary Clinton is trying to make the e-mail controversy political. But, really, it isn’t,” The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza hilariously wrote. “[W]hile the Benghazi committee was aware that Clinton was the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, the GOP leadership had been very careful to frame it as simply a fact-finding effort that happened to include the former secretary of state.” 

So long as partisan Republicans “carefully framed” the committee’s mission, why would anyone question their motives? Not the Beltway media, that’s for sure!

But then House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) slipped up. “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” he explained. “But we put together a Benghazi Special Committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.” 

McCarthy wasn’t alone in admitting the true purpose of the committee. 

“This may not be politically correct,” said Rep. Richard Hanna (R-N.Y.) just last week, “but I think that there was a big part of this investigation that was designed to go after people, an individual, Hillary Clinton.” And a former Republican staffer to the committee has alleged he was fired for resisting efforts to focus exclusively on Clinton: “I knew that we needed to get the truth to the victims’ families. And the victims’ families, they deserve the truth — whether or not Hillary Clinton was involved.”

Suddenly, the Beltway media can’t help but notice what was always blatantly obvious: the fundamental illegitimacy of a committee that has already spent $7 million of taxpayer funds on a partisan political jihad. 

Now that the media’s on to his game, and with Clinton set to testify on Thursday, Gowdy’s terrible week isn’t about to get any better.  

Moulitsas is the founder and publisher of Daily Kos.