Mitch Perry
Orlando area Rep. Alan Grayson has filed an ethics complaint against House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Benghazi Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy of violating “federal law and House rules by using funds appropriated to the Select Committee on Benghazi to oppose the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton.
Grayson says the committee has misused $4.5 million in “an unscrupulous attack to torpedo Secretary Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president.”
Last week on Fox News, McCarthy acknowledged that the Benghazi hearings had hurt Clinton’s popularity, a gaffe that has embarrassed Gowdy and other Republicans. On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Wednesday, Gowdy rejected the premise that the committee is a political witch hunt and asked the public to “focus on actions and not words.”
“The Benghazi Committee has been a political dog and pony show for its entire 17-month history,” Grayson said on a conference call Wednesday morning. He quoted Bill Clinton’s line during the impeachment saga that it was an example of “the politics of personal destruction” taking place.
A member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the Orlando Congressman said he has read every piece of documentation on the tragedy and said there was not “one scintilla of evidence” that anyone in the State Department took any action that put lives at risk or covered up anything about the incident, which took place on September 11, 2012, when Christopher Stevens, the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, and three other Americans were killed.
Grayson last week held a conference call to criticize his Democratic Senate opponent in Florida, Patrick Murphy, who last year was one of only seven House Democrats to support the creation of the latest committee to investigate what happened at Benghazi. A spokesman for Murphy said last week that week that when he voted for the Benghazi committee, “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.'” He’s now calling on the House GOP to shut down the committee.
Grayson said he didn’t want to talk about Murphy on the conference call.
