| CNN | - |
Washington (CNN) The chairman of the House Benghazi committee is telling other Republicans to "shut up" about Hillary Clinton.
Gowdy to fellow Republicans not on Benghazi panel: Shut up
Story highlights
- Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House Benghazi committee, defended his panel's work
- Hillary Clinton is set to testify publicly before the committee Thursday
Washington (CNN)The chairman of the House Benghazi committee is telling other Republicans to "shut up" about Hillary Clinton.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-South Carolina, defended the panel's work ahead of Clinton's politically charged appearance this week.
He said comments from top Republicans like House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy
are wrong and that the panel isn't interested in denting the poll
numbers of Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential front-runner who is
set to testify publicly on Thursday.
"I
have told my own Republican colleagues and friends, shut up talking
about things that you don't know anything about. And unless you're on
the committee, you have no idea what we've done, why we've done it and
what new facts we have found," Gowdy said Sunday on CBS' "Face the
Nation."
Instead, Gowdy said, Clinton is merely one out of 70 witnesses called so far by the committee.
22 photos: Photos: Attack on U.S. mission in Benghazi
"I
get that she gets more attention than the other 69," he said. "But
frankly, if you ask me, the eye witnesses on the ground that night in
Benghazi are more important to me as a former prosecutor than the former
secretary of state."
He said he's more interested in the emails of Chris Stevens,
the U.S. ambassador to Libya who had sought additional security help
and was killed in the attacks, than the emails of Clinton.
"She's
a witness. She was the secretary of state. You have to talk to her,"
Gowdy said of Clinton. "We've already talked to 50 people not named
Clinton. We're going to talk to another couple of dozen not named
Clinton."
His defense of the
committee's work comes as Clinton herself -- seizing on McCarthy's
comment that the panel has dragged down her poll numbers -- has
dismissed its work as a partisan expedition intended to keep her from
being elected president.
3 photos: Benghazi email
The
top-ranking Democrat on the committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings of
Maryland, said on "Face the Nation" that Gowdy can "try to dismiss" the
comments of McCarthy and another Republican, Rep. Richard Hanna of New
York, but Democrats on the panel aren't buying it.
"We know what has been going on," he said.
He
faulted Gowdy for failing to interview the head of the Central
Intelligence Agency, the joint chiefs of staff or the secretary of
defense.
"I am calling on Mr. Gowdy to
make sure that he releases all the transcripts of all these people that
he claims that we have interviewed," Cummings said. "Because I got to
tell you, most of them were State Department people or they were Hillary
Clinton's former aides, people that worked in their campaigns, speech
writers. So when he talks about these 50 witnesses, we still have been
zeroed in on Hillary Clinton and there is absolutely no doubt about that
and it's very unfortunate."
Clinton
told CNN's Jake Tapper that she doesn't know what to expect -- or that
she has anything new to add -- when she testifies in a public hearing
Thursday.
"I think it's pretty clear
that whatever they might have thought they were doing, they ended up
becoming a partisan arm of the Republican National Committee with an
overwhelming focus on trying to as, they admitted, down my poll
numbers," Clinton said.
end quote from:
No comments:
Post a Comment