Trey Gowdy's Benghazi Committee: 20 months, $5 million, and one Michael Bay movie later

[Miles Archer]

The Endless Trial of Trey Gowdy's Benghazi Committee

Twenty months, $5 million, and one Michael Bay movie later, the GOP's Hillary slayer is still searching for answers

By Andy Kroll January 14, 2016



http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-endless-trial-of-trey-gowdys-benghazi-committee-20160114

"A merciful god," Congressman Trey Gowdy of South Carolina tells me, "would only make you do this once." This, in Gowdy's telling, is the experience of squaring off against the vaunted Clinton juggernaut. It's early November, and I've caught up with Gowdy, the chairman of the Select Committee on Benghazi, a few weeks after the committee's eight-hour televised grilling of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It was billed as a potentially fatal event for her presidential campaign — with Gowdy as her slayer. But in one of the grand twists of the primary season, Clinton came out on top. Political observers hailed her performance as "poised" and "presidential." Her poll numbers spiked. Gowdy, on the other hand, looked defensive, at times desperate, matched up against Clinton. Of which, he now says, "Nothing can prepare you."

When Gowdy took charge of the Benghazi committee in the spring of 2014, there had already been seven previous House and Senate investigations, plus an internal review by the State Department, into the circumstances surrounding the September 2012 attacks on a U.S. consulate and a CIA compound in Libya that killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. All the evidence pointed to a terrorist attack, rather than the work of an angry mob, as members of the Obama administration initially claimed. But those same reports — some signed off on by senior House Republicans — debunked various conspiracy theories, including the existence of a so-called stand-down order to CIA operatives responding to the Benghazi attacks, that might have held the White House or Clinton culpable for the lives lost.

Twenty months, more than $5 million, and one Michael Bay movie later, Gowdy is still searching for the damning evidence that might prove Clinton's ineptitude. We meet in a spare conference room near his office on Capitol Hill. Seated in a leather chair, sporting a day's worth of silver stubble and a bottle of Diet Coke, he looks relaxed yet worn down, self-deprecating one moment and full of pathos the next. He is lean with a long narrow face, a penetrating stare, and a frosty head of hair that changes in cut and style and inspiration seemingly by the month. (GQ devoted an entire slideshow to Gowdy's various looks — the Keith Urban, the Emma Watson, the Draco Malfoy.)

His district, South Carolina's fourth congressional, is one of the most rightwing constituencies in America. It's home to the evangelical Bob Jones University, where students can't drink, dance or wear jeans. A local state senator named Lee Bright has called for making enforcement of the Affordable Care Act punishable by a year in jail and still endorses South Carolina breaking off from the Union. "If at first you don't secede," Bright once quipped, "try again."

[Kingofalldems]

1. They're doing yeoman's work.

Perhaps they can call Hillary back for another 11 hrs testimony, then claim she tricked them.

[Mike Nelson]

2. I'd like a world with more people like...

...Hillary Clinton... and fewer like Trey Gowdy.

[sinkingfeeling]

3. You're free to leave the Union, South Carolina. Let's see

how well you do without those federal dollars.