Gowdy’s new headache: A Benghazi committee whistle-blower sues him for defamation
The Benghazi committee's credibility is already shot, and a new lawsuit reveals ugly details of toxic infighting .
We haven’t heard a whole lot from the House Select Committee on Benghazi in the month since the embarrassing and thoroughly ridiculous Hillary Clinton hearing. The weeks leading up to that hearing were difficult ones for chairman Trey Gowdy, whose own credibility and the credibility of his investigation had been roughed up by his House Republican colleagues, who couldn’t shut up about how the committee was damaging Clinton’s 2016 campaign. At the hearing itself, Gowdy did himself no favors, getting into petty semantic arguments with Clinton and allowing the whole proceeding to devolve into a shouting match with the Democrats. It went so badly for the Republicans that Benghazi committee member Lynn Westmoreland, Republican of Georgia, began arguing that Hillary had cleverly tricked the Republicans into making her look sympathetic.
After all that, you can understand why the committee might want to lie low for a while and let things simmer down. But things aren’t getting better for Gowdy or his committee.
Last month, Maj. Bradley Podliska, a former investigator on the Benghazi committee staff, claimed that he’d been improperly and illegally fired from the committee. He also revealed some damning details about the committee’s work, claiming that it had become singularly focused on Hillary Clinton and the State Department, to the exclusion of other agencies involved in the Benghazi response. According to Podliska, he’d been discriminated against for taking leave to fulfill his duties as an Air Force reservist, and for resisting the committee’s intense focus on the State Department.
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