Trey Gowdy briefly discusses Hillary Clinton hearing

Donald Trump says the hearing on Benghazi with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton showed how partisan politics has become – and vowed to fix it if he’s elected president.

“I don’t know what you were doing Thursday but I had a rough Thursday”, he joked to the crowd at U.S. Tim Scott’s town hall event on Daniel Island.

Clinton maintained her cool, deftly handling Republicans’ questions about why she was not involved enough in beefing up USA security in Libya in the run-up to the attacks, and how a friend and political operative had closer personal contact with Clinton than United States ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens, who died in Benghazi.

Gowdy told The Post and Courier he had no evidence that Clinton was untruthful in her testimony, saying “I have a different perspective” on a few of the documents and issues.

Republicans were under pressure to reveal a new smoking gun while the Democrats, of which Clinton is a member, sought to portray the Republican-run committee as being created for a political goal, specifically a witch-hunt trying to harm her presidential bid.

But, they added: “If the Speaker rejects our request, Democrats will continue to participate at this point in order to make sure the facts are known and the conspiracy theories are debunked”.

There was no mistaking the new confidence pumping through Hillary Clinton’s campaign Friday after a banner October.

“You saw that 11 hours of testimony?”

The hearing surfaced little new information about the attacks and landed no blows to Clinton’s presidential aspirations, leaving Republicans without a memorable moment to promote as Clinton approaches the first primary contests.

“Obviously it’s a good week for Secretary Clinton”, Chafee said.

Clinton’s team couldn’t have dreamed for a better exposition of her strengths and the weakness of her Republican provocateurs.

Moreover, the bigger debate was not about Benghazi but between Republicans and Democrats on the panel bickering over whether this was a nakedly partisan exercise created to derail Clinton’s campaign for the 2016 election, or whether it was being conducted, not to get at Clinton but to get at the truth. First came an investigation by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Then more probes by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, the House Judiciary Committee, the House Armed Services Committee, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

As Clinton attempts to win voters to catapult her into the White House, it is worth discussing what, if any, responsibility she bears for overseeing failed security measures as Secretary of State. Yet Clinton persisted with the “protest caused by a video” narrative for days thereafter. Rep. Martha Roby of Alabama chastised Clinton for going home on the night of the attack, ignoring Clinton’s testimony that she had stayed up all night monitoring the situation.

“There is no doubt in my mind that Clinton will be the nominee”, he told AFP. Roskam, completing the farce, drafted a confession on Clinton’s behalf: “I and my colleagues were distracted by other matters and opportunities and ambitions, and we breached our fundamental duty to mitigate [the ambassador’s] danger and secure his safety”. It clarified the truth about Benghazi: Hillary Clinton did nothing wrong.