Former President Bill Clinton sympathized with House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) on the campaign trail Friday, saying the Republican lost his chance to be House speaker because he spoke the “truth” about the chamber’s Benghazi probe.
“They had a special committee with a special purpose, and poor Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader from California, said that the most outstanding achievement of the Republican Congress in 2015 was their special committee which drove Hillary’s numbers down,” Clinton said while campaigning in South Dakota, as quoted by Politico.
Clinton said McCarthy, who was widely favored to succeed John Boehner, “couldn’t be elected speaker anymore ’cause he told the truth.”
“I felt bad about it. I mean, I’d hate to be part of a political party where you lost your chance to be a leader just by telling the self-evident truth,” he said, as quoted by Politico. “It wasn’t like everybody didn’t know it anyway.”
McCarthy infamously bragged in a September 2015 Fox News interview that the House Select Committee on Benghazi, tasked with investigating the 2012 attacks, tanked the Democratic presidential frontrunner’s poll numbers. Hillary Clinton’s supporters seized on the comments as proof of the House probe being a partisan witchhunt.
