Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), the chair of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, said over the weekend that the accusations that his investigation is merely a partisan attack on Hillary Clinton have weighed on him.
“I would say in some ways these have been among the worst weeks of my life,” Gowdy told Politico in an interview published on Sunday night. “Attacks on your character, attacks on your motives, are 1,000-times worse than anything you can do to anybody physically — at least it is for me.”
Gowdy said that Democrats have ramped up their attacks on the committee ahead of Hillary Clinton’s public hearing with the committee this week.
“It’s not lost on me that the uptick in criticism is [happening] the two weeks before she’s coming,” he said. “I don’t think that that is a coincidence; it’s an attempt to marginalize and impugn the credibility of the panel that’s going to be asking her questions.”
The congressman told Politico he has been tasked with the “impossible job” of running “a serious fact-centric investigation in a political environment,”
“So the best you can do is keep trying,” he said.
Gowdy also responded to the criticisms that he has purposefully focused the Benghazi investigation on Hillary Clinton:
And Gowdy reiterated that he’s not targeting Clinton, noting that he’s got no qualms if his investigation finds that she did nothing wrong in Libya — though he feels Democrats are so eager to protect Clinton that they’re ruling that possibility out.
“When I hear that ‘it’s about her,’ it is so hard for me,” he said, before addressing Clinton directly: “You are not worth 18 months of my life, with all due respect. Four dead people are, but you’re not.”
During a Sunday interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Gowdy criticized Republicans who have recently suggested that the committee was designed as a vehicle for political attacks.
“I have told Republican colleagues and friends ‘shut up talking about things that you don’t know anything about,'” Gowdy said. “Unless you’re on the committee, you have no idea what we have done, why we have done it and what new facts we have found.”
