Trey Gowdy, where are you?

Andrew McCarthy wants to know why, given the evidence of her obstructing the investigation,
the Benghazi Committee has not asked for Hillary to testify publicly.

There is now significant evidence that Mrs. Clinton has been obstructing congressional investigations into the Benghazi massacre for well over two years. As Chairman Gowdy also told Ms. Van Susteren, congressional committees put Mrs. Clinton and the State Department on notice in the weeks immediately following the terrorist attack on September 12, 2012, that all relevant records should be preserved. Clearly, Mrs. Clinton had such records and improperly withheld them: Even by her own very suspect account, she finally surrendered Benghazi-related e-mails to the State Department in late 2014 (from among the thousands of e-mails she concealed on her private server after leaving the government nearly two years earlier).

A good investigator is not indulgent of a recalcitrant witness who is making a mockery of the investigative process. He uses the tools the law gives him to make it crystal clear that that he is not running a kangaroo court. He makes certain that witnesses and the public understand that the law requires compliance with congressional-committee demands for information. This shouldn’t be a case of Gowdy asking Clinton to please do him a favor.

Mrs. Clinton’s testimony should be public. The Benghazi congressional investigation is a public-accountability investigation. In the absence of compelling needs for secrecy, it must be public. There is no good reason to extend the courtesy of a private interview to a former government official who is already known to have made extraordinary efforts to conceal her official government communications from the public.

Mrs. Clinton is a lawyer and she has highly capable legal representation. If a committee question to her implicates a legally cognizable privacy interest, she will have no trouble claiming her privilege at that time. Furthermore, it must be remembered that it is she who, though a public official, chose to commingle her private and official communications against federal law, regulations, and practice. Consequently, she is in a far poorer position than the ordinary witness to complain about invasions of privacy.

In the matter of Mrs. Clinton’s e-mails, the national-security concerns are even less compelling than usual, for two reasons. First, Mrs. Clinton has publicly represented that she did not keep classified documents or other classified information on her private server. If she is telling the truth, there is no national-security basis for avoiding public testimony. And even if she is not telling the truth, the fact remains that she chose to maintain a private communications system outside the government system’s protections against hacking and espionage. Foreign-intelligence services and hostile groups with cyber-spying capabilities have already been able to penetrate her communications, so it’s a tad late in the day to worry about that.

...Every seasoned prosecutor knows that in every investigation that touches on politics, partisans who stand to be embarrassed or accused of wrongdoing attempt to undermine the investigation by carping that it is politically motivated. That comes with the territory. The investigator’s job is to tune out that noise and proceed with the case. In the end, what the public is going to care about is the evidence and whether the witness’s explanations for her actions make sense. The investigator’s motivations for seeking the evidence will be beside the point as long as the evidence is obviously germane to the investigation. What people remember is what was on Nixon’s tapes, not that committee Democrats had an obvious political motivation to seek them.

For the chairman to continue making self-defeating accommodations in the hope that this dynamic will change is not merely futile; it is now badly hurting an investigation that has already floundered for ten months. It is way beyond time for Mr. Gowdy to stop worrying about what Mrs. Clinton’s pom-pom squad will say about his investigative tactics. It is time to stop talking about making a vigorous public case and start making a vigorous public case.

Read more here.