Popular South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy had strong words this morning for Rep. Kevin McCarthy, blasting his controversial comments regarding the House Select Committee on Benghazi, saying the California Congressman screwed up and was “wrong.”
According to Politico:
“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, no matter how many times you put an earpiece in your ear and stare at a camera, you still screw up. And Kevin screwed up,” Gowdy (R-S.C.) said in an interview with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“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. I can just tell you that if you look at what the members of our committee have done, we were pretty reluctantly brought into the Secretary Clinton part of it,” Gowdy added, remarking that “It’s because The New York Times and AP and others broke this story that folks’ interest in Secretary Clinton picked up in this regard.”
The chairman said that Clinton’s Oct. 22 hearing before the committee will be “fact-centric, professional and fair.”
Asked what his first reaction was to McCarthy’s interview on Hannity, Gowdy said it was, “Kevin, you’re wrong.”
Gowdy also offered a sneak peek at his strategy for dealing with Clinton at the big hearing coming up October 22nd.
“On the email gaps that persist around the Benghazi attack, Gowdy acknowledged that was the case and brought up the fact that Clinton’s friend Sidney Blumenthal turned over 15 emails that the former secretary never turned over to the committee.
“But she deserves a chance to be asked about that in a fair, professional setting, and that’s one of the things we’ll do on the 22nd,” Gowdy said.
As far as his line of questioning on that date, Gowdy offered a preview:
“My interest is in making sure everything I’m entitled to, I have received. And when you say that the public record is complete and I know that there are 15 emails that you never turned over to the State Department, that is a fair line of inquiry,: he said. “The question is, how did you miss it? You have repeatedly said that you turned over everything. What about these 15? And if there are 15 here, how do you guarantee that you turned over everything when it was your lawyers that did the analysis and not the inspector general?”