(This photo of Rep. Trey Gowdy was found at Salon.com.)Republicans got all bent out of shape when Rep. Kevin McCarthy said that the House of Representatives Benghazi Committee had been successful in lowering Hillary Clinton's poll numbers -- inferring that was the purpose of the committee. A couple of days later another Republican, Rep. Richard Hanna (New York) admitted that was the sole purpose of that committee -- to smear Hillary Clinton.
Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-South Carolina) got upset over that, and told Republicans to keep their mouths shut about his committee. He wanted to try and keep up the appearance that they were really investigating possible wrongdoing with the Benghazi tragedy -- even though several other committees in the House had said there was no wrongdoing by any government official.
Now we learn that Gowdy is not just the committee chair -- he is also the ringleader in the effort to besmirch and smear Hillary Clinton. Gowdy has been passing around some heavily redacted documents from the CIA which seemed to infer possible wrongdoing by Clinton. The Democrats on the committee smelled a rat, and that asked the CIA if they could know what was in the redacted sections of the documents.
It turns out that when the CIA turned the documents over to the committee, nothing was redacted -- and they did not ask that anything be redacted from those documents (since they didn't consider anything in them to be secret or classified). And once the full context of the documents was known, it became clear that Clinton had done nothing wrong. It was only the clever (and disingenuous) redactions that had given that impression.
Once this came to light, Gowdy admitted that he had been the one who redacted the documents. The question is why (since there was no classified information in them). The answer is obvious. Rowdy's committee has not been able to come up with any damaging information about Hillary Clinton, even when investigating her supposed e-mail "scandal". He was failing in the designated purpose of his committee -- to find damaging information about Clinton. So he doctored the CIA documents. In other words, he LIED.
I wish I could say this was out of character for the Republicans, but it isn't. They have a fairly long history of lying and performing "dirty tricks" to get elected. This seemed to reach a high point in the Nixon administration, when dirty tricks were just considered to be a part of campaigning. But these new Republicans make Nixon look like an amateur. They are so invested in the lying and dirty tricks that they are willing to use the organs of government to do their dirty work (in this case, a committee of the House of Representatives). They have taken dirty tricks to a new and rather frightening level.
Democrats should be happy about a couple of things though. First, these scurrilous and untrue attacks on Clinton have been exposed. And second, it shows just how terrified the Republicans are about a probable Hillary Clinton nomination.
