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Gowdy Predicts Marathon Benghazi Hearing in October

Clinton's Oct. 22 hearing appearance is likely to be a marathon, Gowdy said. (Al Drago/CQ Roll Call File Photo)
Clinton's Oct. 22 hearing appearance is likely to be a marathon, Gowdy said. (Al Drago/CQ Roll Call File Photo)

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Oct. 22 appearance before the House committee investigating the Benghazi attack is shaping up as a potentially explosive showdown between the Democratic presidential front-runner and panel Chairman Trey Gowdy, who said Sunday he expects a marathon hearing.  

“If she’s going to insist … that she’s only coming once, I’m going to insist that that once be fully constructive, which means that she’s going to be there a while,” the chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi told “Fox News Sunday.” “We’re going to stay there until all of the questions [are answered].” The South Carolina Republican’s comments came after a tumultuous week for the Clinton campaign that saw the former secretary of State turn over her private email server to the FBI amid ongoing questions about whether she or her staff mishandled classified information during her tenure in the Obama Cabinet.  

On the campaign trail in Iowa Saturday, a defiant Clinton ripped the GOP-led House Benghazi investigation and the probe into her email practices as politically motivated.  

“They’ll try to tell you it’s about Benghazi, but it’s not,” she said. “I won’t get down in the mud with them. I won’t play politics with national security or dishonor the memory of those who we lost. I won’t pretend that this is anything other than what it is: the same old partisan games we’ve seen so many times before.”  

Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican and a former federal prosecutor, told “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace that Clinton had no one but herself to blame: “Had she not had this email arrangement with herself, you wouldn’t be talking to me this morning.”  

Speaker John A. Boehner in May 2014 named Gowdy to head the bipartisan panel to consolidate several ongoing committee investigations into the 2012 terror attack that left four Americans dead in Benghazi, Libya.  

Boehner also weighed in last week, calling Clinton’s previous statements about her unusual “home-brew” email arrangement “patently untrue,” and crediting the work of the Benghazi panel for bringing pressure on the former first lady to hand her email server over to an independent third party.  

 

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