Hillary toys with the Benghazi select committee

Andrew McCarthy, who excoriated Trey Gowdy is a recent post, has a new one entitled Don't Blame Gowdy. McCarthy points out that the Select Committee on Benghazi, headed by Gowdy,

is powerless to obtain search warrants and coerce the physical surrender of evidence. Simply stated, the committee is not a prosecutor.

Congress has no authority to conduct criminal investigations or to seize evidence. Those are police powers and they belong solely to the executive branch.

...Congress is neither intended nor equipped to compel production of evidence, investigate crime, and prove guilt.

I believe I have been harder on the Benghazi select committee than any conservative commentator (see here, here and here). That is largely because I admire Representative Gowdy, was very happy to see the committee placed in such capable hands, and have been disappointed at its lethargic approach to an urgent matter. This, however, has never been to overlook that the committee has a very difficult job.

Not only are there political pressures to bury Benghazi and the disastrous bipartisan policy decisions that led to it. It is also simply very difficult for a congressional committee to investigate government misconduct. It has a much harder time coercing cooperation than a prosecutor does — especially when at least half the Congress is undermining the investigation.

My objection is that, just as the public and the commentariat seem confused about what the committee is for and what it can do, so does the committee. Chairman Gowdy is determined to run the case like a criminal investigation, but it is not one. It is a public-accountability investigation. It is not legal but political in nature – and I mean “political” not in the pejorative sense of partisanship but in the classic sense of accountability for the misuse and abuse of political power.

...For ten months, the committee takes virtually no action and conveys the impression that it is not exactly tripping over itself to get to the bottom of Benghazi. There are nearly no hearings – the ones that have been held have been desultory and mostly irrelevant to the main issues. The public may be forgiven if it forgot that there was a congressional Benghazi investigation, much less that anyone in Washington still thinks it worth examining the government actions that both created conditions inviting the terrorist murder of four American officials and then covered up what happened.

...Republicans, meantime, have forfeited the power of the purse for this year. They will not even consider impeaching officials who abdicated their duty to protect and defend Americans and then studiously defrauded the public about the cause of the attack. They continue to rubber-stamp Obama appointees. Indeed, as Betsy McCaughey points out, they overwhelmingly confirmed a secretary of state who told them he would not adhere to the Constitution’s treaty requirements; and now, they are poised to confirm as attorney general — the nation’s top law-enforcement officer — a nominee who has told them she supports the president’s unconstitutional amnesty order and his non-enforcement of federal law.

Obviously, most of us want the Benghazi select committee to succeed; while skeptical and impatient, we’re willing to assume that the committee wants to succeed. But if Chairman Gowdy and his committee are ever to get to the bottom of Benghazi, everyone needs to stop agitating over executive police powers they do not have and start demanding that they use the powerful tools the Constitution has actually given to Congress.

Read more here.