House Benghazi Committee To Investigate House Benghazi Committee

In a development that absolutely no one could have predicted if they were a blind cave fish happily feeding on isopods in a subterranean lake, it appears that there are Deep Partisan Rifts on the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which is definitely going to get to the true truth about the 2012 attack, unlike the previous seven congressional investigations that found no actual wrongdoing. Democrats on the committee complain that they are being shut out of interviews with witnesses, in several cases only finding out that Republicans had interviewed those witnesses from press reports. And committee chair Trey Gowdy has so far refused even to agree to rules for how the committee will operate.

The complaints are outlined in a letter sent to Gowdy by ranking Democratic member of the committee Elijah Cummings, Wonkette's 2013 Legislative Badass of the Year, and a man who does not suffer fools gladly -- he put up with Darrell Issa's antics for years, so he knows a thing or two about working with idiots.

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Cummings is not pleased with Gowdy's refusal to follow through on his promise to "transcend politics" by making sure that Democrats would fully participate in the committee. Cummings accuses Gowdy of having "different standards for Republicans and Democrats," of holding "secret meetings with witnesses," and of having "withheld or downplayed information when it undermines the allegations we are investigating."

It's starting to look like Gowdy is determined to avoid the mistake made by the House Intelligence Committee, which didn't find any conspiracies or malfeasance or even any significant staff misuse of Post-It notes in its Benghazi investigation. That failure to discover a scandal was just downright scandalous, and Gowdy seems to be bent on not letting trivial things like "facts" get in the way of his committee. Or even letting Democrats talk to the witnesses.

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Cummings notes, for instance, that where the Intelligence Committee found that there was no evidence at all for a frequently floated rumor that the CIA was smuggling arms from Libya to Syria, Gowdy has "chosen to disregard" testimony from a witness who confirmed that no such arms transfers took place -- instead, Gowdy is continuing to look into the alleged (and disproven) arms sales, because maybe that would be a really big scandal. And he also won't allow that witness to testify before the Select Committee.

Yr Wonkette wishes Rep. Cummings and the other members of the Select Committee luck in their efforts to actually be allowed to participate in the investigation they're supposedly full members of. We were hoping it might make for good TV, but so far, the committee has only held two lousy hearings, with another scheduled for today (Tuesday) -- CSPAN nerds can catch it online at this very moment. [Update: It's over. You didn't miss much of anything.]

If nothing else, the committee that investigates the failure of the Benghazi Committee should be interesting.

[ HuffPo / Yahoo News ]