The congressman who infamously said during the Obamacare debate that Republicans wanted sick people to “die quickly” and recently said Planned Parenthood defunding proponents will shepherd in a new wave of deaths has filed an ethics complaint over the Benghazi committee.
Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), who is running for the Senate seat to be vacated by presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), filed the complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics against House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Select Committee on Benghazi chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.).
McCarthy said Sept. 29 on Hannity: “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable right? We put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? ‘Cause she is untrustable. But no one would’ve known any of that had happened had we not fought and made that happen.”
Grayson is charging that McCarthy and Gowdy are using the taxpayer-funded committee to damage Clinton’s presidential campaign “in clear violation of federal law and House rules.”
“The Benghazi Committee has been a political dog-and-pony show for its entire 17-month history,” Grayson said. “It has been clear even to casual observers that the purpose of the committee was never to investigate the tragic death of four Americans in a terrorist attack; it was to attack Hillary Clinton. I am asking OCE to investigate how Reps. McCarthy and Gowdy misused $4.5 million of taxpayer money in an unscrupulous attempt to torpedo Secretary Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president.”
Grayson sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where he says he’s “read every email, every brief, and every classified memo about the tragic events in Benghazi.”
“There is not one scintilla of evidence that anyone in the State Department, from entry-level employees to Secretary Clinton herself, took any action that unnecessarily put lives at risk, or covered up anything,” he said.
Gowdy, meanwhile, is trying to mop up the damage from the comments made by the Speaker of the House candidate.
“Kevin is not on the Benghazi Committee. Kevin, I’m sure, doesn’t know that we’ve interviewed 41 witnesses that none of the previous committees have interviewed, including seven eyewitnesses,” Gowdy told MSNBC this morning. “So I would just respectfully ask folks to look at what we’ve done and to look at October 22nd [when Clinton testifies], and you’ll see a fact-centric, professional, fair appearing, and that’s all I can do is ask people to focus on actions and not words.”
Gowdy said McCarthy “is a friend but my first reaction is Kevin, you’re wrong.”
“When Speaker Boehner called me, he never mentioned Secretary Clinton’s name. In fact, we’ve had three public hearings… I’ve never mentioned her name,” he continued.
“…Kevin has apologized as profusely as a human being can apologize. I went back and watched the interview. And what I tell folks back home is I don’t care how many times you put an ear piece in your ear and looked into a camera, you still screw up, and Kevin screwed up. I don’t know if it was Hannity pressing him. I don’t know if he got thrown off by asking — to give Speaker Boehner a grade. I can’t unlock the mysteries of that.”
Gowdy stressed that “if you look at what the members of our committee have done, we were pretty reluctantly brought into the Secretary Clinton aspect of it.”
“I mean, we worked in virtual anonymity for the first eight months. In fact, I got more criticism from the right than I did from the left,” he said. “…Our interest in her is because she was the secretary of State at the time.”
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