GOP Benghazi Committee Finds Nothing; Stevens Family - Don't Blame Hillary

For anyone getting their news from any source other than Fox News it should have always been a foregone conclusion that the GOP House Committee on Benghazi would turn up nothing.  The whole endeavor was never about finding some undiscovered truth but, instead, about inflicting political harm on Hillary Clinton and damaging her presidential run for office.  Seven other committees had found no smoking gun or anything else harmful to Clinton or the Obama administration and only deranged Hillary haters should have or could have expected a different result.  Oh, and did I mention the far higher losses of life on the watches of Ronald Reagan and Chimperator Bush which never were given such an exhaustive investigation?  It is unfortunate that the GOP members of this witch hunt do not have to personally repay the sums wasted for no legitimate reason.  The Washington Post blasts the committee in a main editorial  Here are excerpts:

ON THE night of Sept. 11 and morning of Sept. 12, 2012, U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers in Benghazi, Libya, came under attack by terrorists armed with automatic weapons, mortars and fuel to start fires. By the next morning, four brave Americans lay dead — Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens; his aide, Sean Smith; and two former Navy SEALs providing security, Tyrone S. Woods and Glen Doherty. It was a horrific crime whose perpetrators remain for the most part unidentified and unpunished — and a setback for U.S. foreign policy in the wider Middle East.

As if all of that weren’t bad enough, the Benghazi attacks mutated into yet another of the partisan dramas that U.S. politicians — in this case Republican politicians — generate in lieu of constructive policy making. Unable to turn the events to their advantage when they occurred, during the 2012 election campaign, Republicans have persisted in attempting to milk the “scandal” for the past four years. They have done so even though repeated previous investigations — including by a GOP-led House intelligence panel — found nothing to contradict the Obama administration’s basic account. 

And now, after two years and $7 million, comes Tuesday’s final report of a Republican-led House select committee, which adds exactly nothing substantial to the story. It’s true that the panel’s investigation did, along the way, help trigger the revelation of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server, which is a real issue. On the most sensitive point, however — Ms. Clinton’s personal culpability for what happened in Benghazi — the committee came up empty. 

Yet for reasons best known only to themselves, Republicans have insisted on pursuing their own more inflammatory and conspiratorial version of events. Maybe someone should investigate that.

Ironically, at the same time Vanity Fair is running a piece that looks at the Stevens family's request that Hillary Clinton cease being blamed for the tragedy that claimed the life of their family member.  Odd how they have less of an agenda than sleazy Republicans obsessed with inflicting political harm on Ms. Clinton.  Here are article highlights:

Democrats on the House Committee released their own, three-hundred-and-thirty-nine-page report on Monday. They also cited “woefully inadequate” security in Benghazi. But they claimed to have been virtually shut out of the official Committee report. They called the probe, led by the South Carolina Republican Trey Gowdy, a witch hunt. “Gowdy has been conducting this investigation like an overzealous prosecutor desperately trying to land a front-page conviction rather than a neutral judge of facts seeking to improve the security of our diplomatic corps,” the report said.

Dr. Anne Stevens, the sister of Ambassador Chris Stevens, has served as a family spokesperson since his death. She is the chief of pediatric rheumatology at Seattle Children’s Hospital. We spoke twice in the past three days, including shortly after the House Select Committee report was issued. Dr. Stevens recalled that her brother had been fascinated by the Middle East since childhood, when he dressed up as Lawrence of Arabia, with a towel and a pot atop his head. He served in the Peace Corps, in Morocco, before joining the Foreign Service, and he served twice in Libya before his final posting there, as well as in Damascus, Cairo, Jerusalem, and Riyadh. My interview with Dr. Stevens has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Whom do you fault for the lack of security that resulted in the death of your brother, in Benghazi? It is clear, in hindsight, that the facility was not sufficiently protected by the State Department and the Defense Department. But what was the underlying cause? Perhaps if Congress had provided a budget to increase security for all missions around the world, then some of the requests for more security in Libya would have been granted. Certainly the State Department is underbudgeted.

I do not blame Hillary Clinton or Leon Panetta. They were balancing security efforts at embassies and missions around the world. And their staffs were doing their best to provide what they could with the resources they had. The Benghazi Mission was understaffed. We know that now. But, again, Chris knew that. It wasn’t a secret to him. He decided to take the risk to go there. It is not something they did to him. It is something he took on himself.

After years of congressional investigations, do you feel that your brother’s death has been politicized in Washington?

Yes! Definitely politicized. Every report I read that mentions him specifically has a political bent, an accusatory bent. One point that seems to be brought up again and again is the accusation that the attack was a response to the video. I could understand why that conclusion would be made, because it was right after the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Egypt. But, frankly, it doesn’t matter that that was the thinking, that night, about why the attack occurred. It’s irrelevant to bring that up again and again. It is done purely for political reasons.

And guess who blocked increase security for State Department facilities?  Congressional Republicans, of course.

The take away is that the next time you hear some Republican apologist whining about Benghazi, what you need to do is ask them to their face when they plan on having a tattoo that says "I'm an idiot" placed on their forehead. . 

Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice Also Used Private E-mail

While it annoys me to no end that Hillary Clinton set her self up for the ongoing e-mail "scandal" - if she knew she was going to run for president why give the Republicans a toe hold? - I have always suspected that others have similarly utilized private e-mail while holding the position of Secretary of State or similarly sensitive positions.  Now, my suspicions have been confirmed by a piece at MSNBC that lays details of out how both Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice utilized private e-mail while conducting official business during their tenure under the Bush/Cheney regime.  The take away?  The Congressional Republicans and GOP presidential candidates are using Hillary's shortsightedness to fuel a political witch hunt.  Here are highlights:

When the political world’s interest in Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails was near its peak, the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza defended the media’s fascination with the story. “Democrats, ask yourself this,” Cillizza wrote in August. “If this was a former [Republican Secretary of State] and his/her private e-mail server, would it be a ‘non-story’?”

 

As a rule, I continue to believe that’s a smart way for political observers to look at every story. If the situations were reversed, how would you react to a controversy? If the accusations targeted someone you detest, as opposed to someone you like, would you see the story as legitimate?

 

Cillizza’s question wasn’t really a hypothetical. We learned nearly a year ago from a Politico article that former Secretary of State Colin Powell “also used a personal email account” during his State Department tenure. Several months later, MSNBC found that Powell conducted official business from his personal email account managed through his personal laptop.

 

“But wait,” Clinton’s critics in the media and Republican circles protest, “what about emails that were later deemed to include sensitive information?” NBC News reports today that both of the Bush/Cheney-era Secretaries of State fall into the same category.

State Department officials have determined that classified information was sent to the personal email accounts of former Secretary of State Colin Powell and the senior staff of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, NBC News has learned. […]

 

In a letter to Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy dated Feb. 3, State Department Inspector General Steve Linick said that the State Department has determined that 12 emails examined from State’s archives contained national security information now classified “Secret” or “Confidential.” The letter was read to NBC News.

 None of this is to suggest Powell or Rice’s office is guilty of wrongdoing.

 

The political salience of news like this, however, is that Clinton’s critics would like voters to believe she’s at the center of some damaging “scandal” because of her approach to email management. These new details suggest Clinton’s practices were fairly common, and unless Republicans and the media are prepared to start condemning Powell and Rice with equal vigor – an unlikely scenario – it’s starting to look like this entire line of attack lacks merit.

 

Or as the NBC News report put it, the new findings “show that past secretaries of state and senior officials used personal accounts to conduct government business and occasionally allowed secrets to spill into the insecure traffic.”

 

As for Chris Cillizza’s question – if were talking about a former Republican Secretary of State, would it be a “non-story” – it would appear the answer is, “Yep.”

 

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, said in a statement this morning, “Based on this new revelation, it is clear that the Republican investigations [into Clinton’s emails] are nothing more than a transparent political attempt to use taxpayer funds to target the Democratic candidate for president.”  

U.S. Intelligence Chief Debunks Anti-Hillary Claims

First the Benghazi hearings turned into a tour de force for Hillary Clinton at the expense of her Republican inquisitors.  Now, the office of the Director of National Intelligence  has reportedly concluded that two emails received by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did not contain top secret information as her enemies - and members of the media perhaps more concerned with sensation than the truth - have claimed.  Media Maters looks at the development that proves more than a small embarrassment for the New York Times which had breathlessly floated the intial story.  Here are excerpts:

The office of the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has reportedly concluded that two emails received by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did not contain top secret information, a reversal from the Intelligence Community inspector general's prior claim that they did, according to a Politico report. Media had previously used the notion that the two emails were highly classified to suggest that Clinton or her aides had engaged in criminal behavior.

In July, the New York Times published an article -- which it subsequently had to correct twice -- about a security referral the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community (IG IC) made to the executive branch about whether there was any classified material on Clinton's email account during her time as secretary of state. The IG IC highlighted four allegedly classified emails and subsequently stated that two of those four emails contained "top secret" information. The State Department disagreed about whether the material in the emails was actually highly classified. As Politico is now reporting, "that disagreement has been resolved in State's favor" and the previous claim that the emails contained top secret information is wrong.

Politico reported on November 6 that the office of the Director of National Intelligence has now overruled the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community's prior conclusion that two emails received by Clinton contained highly classified information. As Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists explained to Politico, this "mistake" is nothing short than "astonishing" because "[i]t was a transformative event in the presidential campaign to this point. It had a potential to derail Clinton's presidential candidacy." From the article:

The U.S. intelligence community has retreated from claims that two emails in Hillary Clinton's private account contained top secret information, a source familiar with the situation told POLITICO.

The determination came from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's office and concluded that the two emails did not include highly classified intelligence secrets. Concerns about the emails' classification helped trigger an on-going FBI inquiry into Clinton's private email set-up.

More dashed hopes so far for the GOP.

Benghazi Committe Backfires: Support for Hillary Grows

Many have argued - and some Republicans have slipped up and admitted - that the GOP lead House Benghazi Committee was a political witch hunting from the very beginning with only one goal: to damage Hillary Clinton.  A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal Survey seems to indicate that more Americans now see the Committee's hearings for what they really have always been.  The result? Hillary Clinton has seen a rise in support even as more view the Benghazi Committee as nakedly partisan and seeking to to impact the likely Democrat presidential nominee.  Here are highlights from Politicususa.com: 

The new NBC News/Wall Street Journal Survey contains some great news for Hillary Clinton. Since her appearance in front of the Benghazi Select Committee, there has been a nine-point swing in her favor on the issue of her emails.

According to the survey, before her Benghazi committee testimony, 47% of those polled said that Clinton’s emails were an important factor in deciding whether or not to support her, and 44% said the emails were not an important factor. After Clinton’s testimony, 48% believed that the emails were not an important factor, and 42% said they were. There was also a five point increase in the number of respondents who thought the Benghazi investigation is unfair and partisan. 

The NBC News poll reveals that having Hillary Clinton testify in front of the House Benghazi Select Committee was a major mistake by the Republican Party The hearing gave Clinton a platform and allowed her to turn public opinion on her emails in her favor. Republicans thought they would use the high-profile hearing to stop Hillary Clinton. Instead, they shot themselves in the feet.

According to all the recent polling, Clinton is a stronger presidential candidate today than she was before she testified in front of the Benghazi Committee. She now leads in every early state and nationally. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) gave Clinton a surge in momentum when he admitted that the Benghazi Select Committee was a partisan political stunt.

A hearing that was supposed to yield talking points and thirty-second campaign ads for the Republican side has rallied Democrats around their frontrunner and put her on a steady march towards the White House. 

Hillary Slays Dragons, Loses 3 Opponents in One Week

Some on the right in particular thought that October would be a disastrous month for Hillary Clinton.  With only a week left, so far the month has turned out to be the complete opposite.  Yes, her campaign is still fraught with dangers, but she has seen three would be opponents end their campaigns and the Benghazi Committee failed to do her any damage despite the best efforts of the GOP members.  Pieces in Vanity Fair and Salon at Hillary's surprisingly positive month.  First are excerpts from Vanity Fair:

On Friday, former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee announced that he would drop his bid for the White House, making him the third Democrat to either drop out or forego joining the race against Hillary Clinton.

With his exit, Chafee shall be forever remembered in this cycle as the third Democratic Clinton rival to disappear in a single week: former senator Jim Webb exited the race on Tuesday, and shortly afterwards, Vice President Joe Biden, whom many saw as a potential challenger to Clinton, announced that he would not seek the bid. 

That, combined with her well-received performance at Thursday’s 11-hour-long hearing before the House’s Select Committee on Benghazi, has made this a pretty good week for Clinton.

Then there are these excerpts from Salon:

The end of the [Joe] McCarthy witch hunt did not end conservative hostility to the State Department. 

This suspicion of the State Department has continued even in Republican administrations. During the Reagan administration Secretary of State George Schultz was famously at odds with Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger and there was little love lost between the Bush administration’s Dick Cheney and Colin Powell. When the Democrats have the executive branch it’s much, much worse. There is just something about the State Department that drives conservatives a little bit crazy.

Of course nothing on earth drives them as crazy as Bill and Hillary Clinton, their most hated enemies. The Republicans wasted tens of millions of dollars back in the 1990s trying to destroy them.
It should, therefore, come as no surprise that when the radical right’s decades-long mistrust of the State Department combined with their decades-long crusade against Hillary Clinton, the result would be an incoherent howl of suspicion, confusion and inchoate rage. Throughout that marathon hearing yesterday, if there was a theme, a theory or even a rough guess about what Clinton was supposed to have done, it was extremely hard to see what it was. Under the leadership of Trey Gowdy, a man reputed to be a crack prosecutor, the Republicans were disorganized and unprepared, lurching from one topic to another without connecting any dots or explaining to the nation just what in the world this torturous exercise was supposed to achieve. 

So it’s about spies in the State Department. As usual. Only this time it’s Hillary Clinton, their most hated nemesis, the one who simply won’t go down no matter how hard they hit her. The frustration was palpable.

Joe McCarthy was eventually brought low by his own hubris. A man named Joseph Welch put the final point on it when he said, “at long last sir, have you no decency?” It was Congressman Elijah Cummings who made the similarly powerful moral statement in the hearing yesterday when he said:

“I don’t know what we want from you. Do we want to badger you over and over again until you get tired, until we do get the gotcha moment he’s talking about?

“We’re better than that. We are so much better. We are a better country. And we are better than using taxpayer dollars to try to destroy a campaign. That’s not what America is all about.”

The good news is that if yesterday’s hearing is any example, today’s witch hunters are all ham-handed Kevin McCarthys instead of Tail-gunner Joes. Right wing conspiracy nuts aren’t what they used to be. Maybe we’re making progress after all. 

Republicans Fail To Take Down Hillary Clinton

After squander millions of taxpayer dollars in the partisan witch hunt, the GOP controlled House Benghazi Committee failed to do any damage to Hillary Clinton today.  Not doubt there is much gnashing of teeth in Teabagistan over the fact that no "smoking gun" was revealed.  Not that one was reasonably expected to be found given the fact that numerous other committees failed to find evidence that would send the spittle flecked, knuckle draggers of the GOP base into orgasms.   As for committee chair, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), a former prosecutor, one is left wondering how he ever got convictions if this circus is typical of his investigations.  The Huffington Post looks at the failed GOP efforts.  Here are highlights:

Hillary Clinton maintained a calm, unruffled demeanor for 11 hours Thursday, as Republican after Republican grilled her in relation to the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi and about her use of a private email server as secretary of state. 

"So far today, I've said, 'good morning,' 'good afternoon,' 'good evening.' So let me go ahead and say, 'good night,'" Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.) said around 8 p.m., acknowledging that the hearing had began at 10 a.m. (with some short breaks throughout the day). 

Despite the long hours, Republicans failed to catch Clinton off her guard or come up with significant new revelations to argue that she was negligent in her duties that led to the death of four Americans in Libya. 

Her appearance is likely to give her a boost with the base, especially coming off from a strong performance after the first Democratic debate last week. Republicans weren't able to score any major hits and knock her off her feet, and Clinton showed she had the stamina to withstand the GOP attacks -- a fact that Republican lawmakers grudgingly seemed to acknowledge.

Indeed, many of the members seemed more exasperated than Clinton as the day wore on. 

"I don't know what we want from you," ranking member Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said, his voice rising during hour 10 of the hearing. "Do we want to badger you over and over again until you get tired, until we do get the 'gotcha' moment that he's talking about? We're better than that. ... We're better than using taxpayer dollars to try to destroy a campaign. That's not what America is all about. So you can comment if you like. I just had to get that off my chest."

But some of the most heated debates were between the Republican and Democratic lawmakers, who disagree about whether the committee should exist at all. 

Indeed, the opening statements of Cummings and Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), the committee's chairman, both focused on intra-committee politics. Gowdy tried to argue why, although there have been seven other investigations into Benghazi, his is still necessary. Cummings called for Congress to disband the committee. 

"It is time now for the Republicans to end this taxpayer-funded fishing expedition," Cummings said. "We need to come together and shift from politics to policy. That's what the American people want, shifting from politics to policy."

Clinton was the only one who actually spent her entire time discussing the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi.

 As for Gowdy, is it just me, or does he come across as a peevish closet case?

Today's GOP Benghazi Show Trial

Love her or hate her, today Hillary Clinton will testify before the House Benghazi Committee in hearings about as objective as Stalin's show trials of the 1930's that had no purpose other than to destroy Stalin's chief rivals.  Exposing the truth bore no role in the trials orchestrated by Stalin and the same holds true for the circus that Republicans will oversee today.  As the image above underscores, there have been many more embassy staff deaths under George W. Bush, yet there have been no comparable hearings or committees.  No, the Benghazi Committee has one real goal only: damage Hillary Clinton. Along the way, of course, Republican members of the committee will get to grandstand for the spittle flecked, knuckle dragging members of the GOP base that hate Clinton no matter what she does or doesn't do.  In some ways the hearings are the logical outcome of the GOP's descent into insanity and the alternate reality that it's base lives in daily.  A piece in Salon looks at the Committee and it's pure political agenda.  Here are highlights:

Today Hillary Clinton will appear before the House Select Committee on Benghazi in a likely futile attempt to rebut the fever dreams of cover-up and conspiracy that the committee’s Republican members have gleaned from the comments section at Breitbart. It will be a fantastic piece of theater so far removed from the terrible events that occurred at the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012, that it might as well be occurring on the other side of a galactic wormhole. The hearing’s participants could speak gibberish for all we are really going to learn about the attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others. Assuming there even is anything more to learn that seven prior congressional investigations have not turned up.

It is a truism of modern political horse-race coverage that reporters are not really interested in accurately explaining a candidate’s positions and policies to the audience. The reason the TV cameras are turned on the candidate every single second is in hopes of catching a gaffe, that race-altering goof that undermines the message he or she is trying to pitch to voters.

The hope of inducing that type of campaign-altering gaffe is really the reason why the select committee is dragging Hillary Clinton up to Capitol Hill today. No matter what the most rabid right-wingers think, these hearings are not about investigating a cover-up the way the Watergate or Iran-contra hearings were. They are not about figuring out what really happened in Benghazi, because we already have dozens of reports produced by other congressional committees, federal agencies, and the military to explain what happened and why.

No, what the Republicans want – what they need in order to justify the colossal effort they have put into building Benghazi up to be worse that Iran-contra plus Watergate and Teapot Dome times eleventy billion – is a Clinton gaffe along the lines of “What difference does it make.” Only worse. Something that will rip off the Democratic frontrunner’s carefully spit-polished image and reveal the shrill, corrupt, power-mad harridan underneath.
[T]his has been the Republican way with Hillary Clinton for 25 years now. No matter how many investigations clear her of any wrongdoing on an issue, the GOP just cannot accept it. There must always be one piece of information it did not turn up, one thread it failed to pull until the whole sweater unraveled. 

The only question is how they will go about it. Will they grill her like a salmon, coming at her from every angle, interrupting, badgering, trying to confuse her until the internal dam that has always successfully kept her bottomless evil at bay finally bursts? Or, as Brian Beutler argues, will they be polite and restrained while testing her memory of isolated details to try and trip her up? 

[A]t heart, this is all just one long political attack ad, a sequel to “Hillary: The Movie“ in the guise of a congressional investigation. It’s theater of the absurd for an audience of suckers.

As noted before, to be a Republican nowadays, one has to lack any integrity, and be either insane, a white supremacist, a religious fanatic, motivated solely by greed, or a combination of the foregoing.  It is a very ugly reality. 

2nd Republican Congressman Admits Benghazi Committee Designed To Harm Clinton

Every once in a while Republicans tell the truth, although most often it is by mistake or inadvertently.  Breaking that mold is Rep. Richard Hanna (R-NY) who has confirmed what Kevin McCarthy slipped up and stated last month: the main goal of the House Benghazi Committee has been to harm Hillary Clinton in anticipation of the 2016 presidential election.  Millions of dollars spent and hearings that have now gone on longer than the Watergate hearings - all for the partisan purpose of harming a political opponent.  Think Progress looks at this latest admission of the real agenda of the House Republicans behind the Benghazi hearings.  As the image above indicates, there were far more deaths of State Department personnel under George W. Bush, yet there was no GOP outrage.  Here are article highlights:

A second House Republican has now conceded that the overarching purpose of the House Select Committee on Benghazi has been to attack former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

In September, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) argued that one of House Republicans’ successes has been using the Benghazi Committee to drive down Clinton’s poll numbers. Though McCarthy tried to walk back his controversial comments, Rep. Richard Hanna (R-NY) argued on Wednesday that the Majority Leader had it right to begin with.

“Sometimes the biggest sin you can commit in D.C. is to tell the truth,” Hanna said in an interview on Keeler in the Morning, a radio show in upstate New York. The third-term congressman paused for a moment, perhaps recognizing the importance of what he was about to say, before going on to agree with McCarthy’s original statement.

“This may not be politically correct, but I think that there was a big part of this investigation that was designed to go after people and an individual, Hillary Clinton,” Hanna said.

For years, House Republicans had claimed the Benghazi probe was about investigating the events surrounding the 2012 attack in Libya that left four Americans dead, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, rather than undermining Clinton’s potential presidential bid.

But after McCarthy’s Kinsley gaffe, which was among the factors that doomed his seemingly-inevitable rise to the House Speakership, and now Hanna’s admission, there is growing doubt even among GOPers about the Benghazi Committee’s true purpose.

McCarthy and Hanna aren’t the only Republicans to publicly declare that the Benghazi Committee has been on a partisan quest. Over the weekend, Maj. Bradley Podliska, a Republican investigator formerly working on the Committee, revealed that he had lost his job for refusing to solely focus his investigation on Clinton. Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), who heads the Committee, denies the charge.

Clinton is set to testify before the Committee, which has now continued longer than the Watergate probe, on October 22nd.

The GOP’s Benghazi Summer

With its clown car of candidates and positions on issues that time has proven to be failures and/or that more and more Americans oppose, the sGOP has seemingly decided that the Summer of 2015 will focus on trying to damage Hillary Clinton with Star Chamber like hearings even though past investigations have found that the conspiracies so loved by the rabid dogs of the GOP base are unsubstantiated.  Never let it be said that the GOP lets facts and objective reality get in its way.  One can only hope that during the hearings it is repeated over and over again that the GOP had slashed funding for security at U.S. embassies and consulates across the globe. Here are highlights from The Hill:

Welcome to the GOP's Benghazi summer.

After being hammered for months by Democrats for moving at a “glacial” pace, the GOP-controlled House Select Committee on Benghazi is picking up the pace.

“We are pedal to the metal because we are ready to get this thing done,” said Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (Ga.), one of the panel’s seven Republicans.

This week the panel subpoenaed Sidney Blumenthal, an informal adviser to Hillary Clinton when she helmed the State Department, and who has since agreed to appear before the select committee by the requested June 3 deadline.

Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kansas) hinted that Huma Adebin, Clinton’s longtime aide and the vice chairwoman of her 2016 presidential campaign, could be deposed soon, too.

Earlier this month chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) issued an interim report on the panel’s first year of work that said he wants to interview 60 former and current Obama administration officials, including members of Clinton’s inner circle, about the circumstances surrounding the deadly assault that killed four Americans.

While GOP members insist they still need all the relevant documents to the attacks that occurred on Clinton's watch, the recent moves could blunt the criticism that they are slow-rolling the investigation to hinder her White House bid.

“We want to get this thing over with as quick as we can. I’m sure Mrs. Clinton wants to get it over as quick as she can,” according to Westmoreland.

Jordan said members are already in the process of coming up with the “most appropriate and best lines of questioning” for when Clinton appears before the select committee, something she has agreed to do though no formal date has been set.

The acceleration hasn’t been lost on Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), the panel’s top Democrat, though he’s unsure where the sudden motivation has come from.

“I don’t have a clue. All I know is that they waited for a good while before even asking for documents and then they turn around and blame the State Department,” he told The Hill.

He took particular issue with the Blumenthal subpoena, a move that he called “heavy-handed” at the time.

Cummings said the panel’s investigation is “going down a road that leads straightway” for its original purpose — uncovering additional details about the conditions before, during and after the attacks — and is now “basically, get Hillary Clinton by any means necessary.”

I also hope that these heavy handed efforts to beat up Hillary are not lost on women voters.   The hearings may motivate the deranged elements of the GOP base, but should turn off everyone else.