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Tuesday, October 6, 2015

House Dems Go on Offense vs. Benghazi Committee, Plan to Release Cheryl Mills Full Testimony

One clear tip off that if anyone has anything to hide it's not Hillary Clinton but Trey Gowdy and his friends is that she has been willing to testify in public and Gowdy has wanted this to be behind closed doors.

This has been the pattern for a Committee that was supposed be about bringing transparency to government.

The Dems have complained for months about the refusal of Gowdy to release testimony but just little cherrypicked snippets here or there which would serve to give a false impression.


Dems keep heat on GOP after McCarthy's Benghazi flub

They argue that the California Republican validated their view that the panel's work amounts to a witch hunt."

"For months, the House Select Committee on Benghazi has dogged the Clinton campaign; its work led to the discovery that Clinton was using a private email server while running the State Department. But now, after McCarthy’s gaffe, Democrats think they have the advantage, arguing that the California Republican validated their view that the panel’s work amounts to a political witch hunt."

“McCarthy admitted … that House Republicans created the Benghazi Select Committee from the very beginning to wage a taxpayer-funded political campaign against Hillary Clinton’s bid for president,” reads a letter Democrats sent Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) on Monday. “Obviously, this is an unethical abuse of millions of taxpayer dollars and a crass assault on the memories of the four Americans who were killed in Benghazi.”

"Meanwhile, Democrats on Capitol Hill unveiled a new, aggressive strategy: They plan to release the panel’s transcripts of testimony from Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff at State, who defended her former boss behind closed doors. After going along with the GOP’s secrecy rules for months, Democrats on the Benghazi will play hardball by releasing the private testimony to combat Republican “mischaracterizations.”

"Panel Democrats have consistently said the GOP selectively leaks information, if not distorts it, in an effort to make Clinton look bad. Just recently, GOP sources said that Mills had confirmed in closed-door testimony that she suggested changes to an independent review of the Benghazi attacks before it was published by a government review board."

Democrats were furious about the leak, and the GOP’s subsequent suggestion that Mills may have tried to influence the report. Now they’re planning to release the full, unedited transcripts of Mills’ nine-hour testimony on Sept. 3, including comments about how she did not try to influence the review when she suggested changes.

“It has become obvious that the only way to adequately correct the public record is to release the complete transcript,” Democrats said in their Monday letter, adding: “We do not take this action lightly … but we will no longer sit and watch selective, out-of-context leaks continue to mischaracterize the testimony the Select Committee has received.”

That’s a sharp break with a year-and-a-half of panel procedure where more than 50 transcripts of testimony were kept secret.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/benghazi-clinton-house-republicans-mccarthy-214441#ixzz3np3TiBOw

As Hillary pointed out yesterday this was over a real tragedy and it has been mutated into mere oppo research in a Super PAC. 



On Monday, Democrats on the special committee released portions of interview transcripts from Clinton’s chief of staff while she was secretary of state, accusing GOP leaders of selective leaks designed for political gain. The excerpts were more favorable to the Democratic presidential front-runner’s side of the story about the September 2012 attacks on a U.S. diplomatic outpost and a CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya. Democrats gave Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), the committee chairman, five days to respond to their accusations. Otherwise, they planned to release the entire transcript.

Additionally, Democrats are considering their next steps to highlight House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s recent comments bragging that the committee’s work had wounded Clinton’s presidential campaign, according to lawmakers and aides. One option would be to file an ethics complaint alleging that the Gowdy panel’s taxpayer-funded work was a misappropriation because it is essentially political in nature."

Officially, top Democrats are focusing their effort on how the committee’s original mission of examining the terrorist attacks that killed an ambassador, a foreign service officer and two intelligence operatives have morphed into a probe of Clinton’s e-mail habits. “The families begged us — begged — not to make this a political football,” Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the panel, said of the Benghazi victims’ family members."

"Early on, he and Gowdy worked collaboratively, but that has since changed. “We have veered so far from that, it’s incredible,” he said in an interview Monday.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2015/10/06/democrats-work-to-keep-heat-on-gowdy-mccarthy-ahead-of-clinton-benghazi-hearing/?postshare=6051444128346759

With Hillary slated to testify in a couple of weeks and the mess Kevin McCarthy's comments have made you wonder if Gowdy more dreads than relishes the coming date.

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