Mitch Perry
Last month Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Alan Grayson bashed his chief rival for the Democratic nomination for Senate, Patrick Murphy, for being one of just seven U.S. House Democrats who voted to create the Benghazi Select Committee. But after Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy admitted on Fox News this week that the committee’s work had done its job in weakening Hillary Clinton‘s poll numbers during her presidential run, Grayson repeated his criticisms Friday morning in a conference call with reporters.
“From the beginning, the Benghazi Select Committee has been a partisan clown show, and everyone who was paying any attention to it would know that was exactly what would happen,” Grayson said, pouncing on McCarthy’s remarks.
The Orlando-area Representative noted how four of those six other Democrats who voted alongside Murphy back in May of last year are no longer in office. Most were facing tough reelection races in a year that saw Republicans dominate in November. (Murphy wasn’t one of those incumbents, however, as he easily defeated his GOP challenger, Carl Domino).
Grayson, like many other Democrats, has been outspoken in denouncing the congressional investigations into determining what went wrong back on September 11, 2012, when U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed in an attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Since then, there have been multiple investigations on the incident. South Carolina Republican Trey Gowdy has been chairing the current investigation, and has insisted that politics would not play a part in it, but Democrats like Grayson have seized on McCarthy’s remarks to say that was never the case.
Grayson said the reason why Murphy voted for the current investigation is that he’s not a real Democrat.
“Everything that the tea party Republicans who run the Benghazi Committee have done, they’ve done with Patrick Murphy’s permission,” he said. “He joined with every single Republican in the House to vote for the establishment of this witch hunt committee.”
“Murphy has been a Republican all his life, until he decided to run for Congress,” added Grayson (Murphy was a Republican before switching parties). “His daddy bought him that seat, and Murphy has since kept voting like a Republican.”
Grayson also noted that Murphy has supported the Keystone XL Pipeline, which Clinton (finally) came out against last week.
In response, Murphy spokesperson Joshua Karp notes that when Murphy voted for the Benghazi investigation, “he was 100% confident it would vindicate Hillary Clinton, and he warned the committee must not be ‘used as a way to politicize this tragedy and the deaths of four Americans.'”
“But the Republicans turned this tragedy into a political circus, and Rep. Kevin McCarthy just admitted Republicans hijacked the committee for partisan gain. The House GOP should immediately shut down the committee,” Karp adds.
Murphy has endorsed Clinton for president, while Grayson remains undecided. He gave praise to her on the call, as well as saying positive things about Bernie Sanders.
Karp said Grayson was playing politics on Benghazi, too. “It is disgraceful for Alan Grayson, who is not supporting Hillary Clinton, to further politicize this tragic loss of life,” he said.
