House Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy, a former federal prosecutor, used to get death threats in his previous line of work. But watching his Benghazi investigation get slammed by accusations that it’s a partisan assault on Hillary Clinton is actually much worse, he says.

“I would say in some ways these have been among the worst weeks of my life,” Gowdy said this weekend during a lengthy interview with POLITICO. “Attacks on your character, attacks on your motives, are 1,000-times worse than anything you can do to anybody physically — at least it is for me.”


Gowdy faces the biggest moment of his political career when he squares off with Clinton this Thursday. But as the chairman prepares for the showdown, he’s facing increasing pressure to salvage his panel’s reputation — and perhaps his own.

Gowdy worked behind closed doors for 18 months in an effort to keep the committee’s work out of the political fray. But his strategy started unraveling after three Republicans suggested the committee was aimed at hurting Clinton in the polls. Democrats pounced, newspaper editorials called for the panel to be disbanded, and now there are calls from commentators of all stripes for Gowdy to reveal what he’s uncovered.

Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign and its allies have kept up the pressure with an almost daily barrage of news releases and statements slamming the panel’s work.

It’s left the usually cheerful South Carolina lawmaker sounding frustrated — and, at times, even defeated. Weary of the drumbeat of criticism, Gowdy says he’s stopped watching the news and reading the newspaper. During a Sunday morning TV appearance, Gowdy, usually quick to joke, seemed solemn as he fended off another round of accusations that the committee is a partisan exercise.

Gowdy believes the criticism has been demonstrably unfair — an attempt to “delegitimize” his panel and discredit his personal reputation ahead of Clinton’s high stakes testimony on Thursday.

“It’s not lost on me that the uptick in criticism is [happening] the two weeks before she’s coming,” he says. “I don’t think that that is a coincidence; it’s an attempt to marginalize and impugn the credibility of the panel that’s going to be asking her questions.”

But while he’s feeling tremendous pressure to justify his probe, opening up his investigation goes against his instincts as a former prosecutor, and he’s refusing to change his strategy just because he’s getting buried by negative coverage.

“The people who know me appreciate the fact that it is an impossible job … to run a serious factcentric investigation in a political environment,” he said. “So the best you can do is keep trying.”

For now, everything’s riding on Thursday, when Gowdy hopes the public will see the work he’s put into his probe. But even if he can’t win over Washington, where he’s also been chided by the far right for being soft on Clinton, he thinks people beyond the Beltway will appreciate the work he’s done.

“The only thing I can control is what we do,” he said. “We’re going to have a very fair and factcentric hearing on Thursday. I trust the folks that matter the most, outside the D.C. world, they’ll reach the right conclusions and we’ll ultimately be judged on the work.”

‘I knew it would get worse'

In the early months of Gowdy’s investigation, fellow panel Republican Peter Roskam of Illinois offered kudos for the attempt at conducting an apolitical investigation. But he also gave him a warning: That effort won’t be rewarded, and it will eventually turn ugly.

“It was like the older brother saying, ‘You keep believing in the tooth fairy,’” Gowdy recounted. “I knew it would get worse, but I didn’t know how bad.”

Gowdy’s panel surged into the national spotlight after his demands for administration emails led to the discovery that Clinton used an unusual private email arrangement while at State. That triggered an FBI probe and produced major headaches for the Clinton campaign.

It also set off an escalating war of words between panel Republicans and the Democratic front-runner.

But the Democratic rhetorical assault escalated sharply in early October when Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), bragged to Fox News that the panel’s work had hurt Clinton in the polls. A flood of criticism followed, and much of Gowdy’s careful work unraveled.

Over the course of his interview with POLITICO, Gowdy offered a rebuttal for many of those critics. For example, he dismissed questions about why the committee has interviewed more witnesses from the State Department than from the Defense Department or the CIA. He argues that State led the U.S. diplomatic mission that was attacked — so, of course “there are going to be more State witnesses than anything else.”

“The disparity in witness interviews and document production is not a focus on [Clinton]; it’s the reality that this was a State Department facility,” he said.

And Gowdy reiterated that he’s not targeting Clinton, noting that he’s got no qualms if his investigation finds that she did nothing wrong in Libya — though he feels Democrats are so eager to protect Clinton that they’re ruling that possibility out.

“When I hear that ‘it’s about her,’ it is so hard for me,” he said, before addressing Clinton directly: “You are not worth 18 months of my life, with all due respect. Four dead people are, but you’re not.”

Gowdy seems taken aback by some of the recent criticism, including recent broadsides blasting the committee for confirming that top Clinton aide Huma Abedin was coming to testify, as Democrats said she wasn’t relevant to his probe.

“I mean, honestly, have you ever heard a more absurd critique than leaking the fact that one of the more recognizable people in the world was coming to Capitol Hill?” he asks, adding that Abedin’s testimony was relevant because she kept Clinton’s schedule.

Asked about the relatively slow pace of his committee’s work, he points the finger at State, which only a few weeks ago gave him all of Clinton’s Libya emails — messages he had asked for at the start of his probe, well over a year ago.

But Gowdy says the specifics of his rebuttals don’t matter; he feels he “just can’t win.

“I think that’s just [the Democrats’] MO: If you can’t attack the facts, you can attack the investigators … just attack, attack, attack and something will take hold,” he said. “[A]t some point, maybe something will stick, or maybe you get them off track or you get them to do or say something stupid, then you can seize on that.”

He also lays some blame at the media’s feet, arguing they’re too quick to report Democrats’ accusations without checking the merits, or the story of an ex-committee staffer who accused the panel of focusing on Clinton.

“You can work your entire career to have a reputation, and then someone you have no recollection of ever meeting sits down with a reporter and you’re immediately in a position of having to defend and it’s impossible to prove a negative,” he said.

Gowdy says the former staffer is just a disgruntled ex-employee seeking a settlement for having been dismissed.

“It would have taken about 30 seconds for any reasonably skilled questioner to expose what I then had to go on national television to expose, which is when he left, why he left and the fact that he hasn’t said a word about this until, well, he sat down with the media,” he said.

Trying to tune it out

Gowdy’s Sunday school teacher once told him that not everyone wants you to succeed — a lesson he’s taken to heart recently: “I’m quite convinced no matter what we do on Thursday, certain folks will keep the narrative they have right now.”

Instead of spending the past few weeks trying to defend his panel, Gowdy has, for the most part, kept a low profile to prepare for Thursday, doing just a couple of TV hits.

He takes solace in the number of colleagues, including unidentified Democrats, who have texted, emailed or offered him words of encouragement, and says he takes great pride that Clinton’s former chief of staff Cheryl Mills told him she was treated fairly.

While he says he’s not angry — such emotions he says are "unproductive" — he’s clearly frustrated with the latest round of Democratic attacks, including accusations that he canceled plans to interview several top-level Defense and CIA witnesses. Democrats called that proof that the panel is focused on Clinton, but he says nothing is canceled, it's just a matter of timing.

That vexation seeps into a speech he was preparing Saturday for a police chiefs association, where he empathized with the pressure they’re under because of his current situation.

“No one ever asked me for an investigative plan when I was a district attorney, and I would have laughed if they had asked for it,” he said. “But here, apparently, you’re supposed to share your investigative plan with the other side, and if you don’t follow it assiduously, then it’s leaked. And you find yourself explaining why you chose this route instead of that route.”

On Friday, while all of Washington was focused on Abedin’s Benghazi testimony, Gowdy was examining a batch of emails from slain U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, messages he says no committee has ever read.

This is the part of this job he still loves, poring through documents to come up with questions, “looking at ways to put the puzzle together.”

Since the messages are not yet public, Gowdy described them over the phone: In the first few days of June 2012, Stevens asked for more security after an IED explosion outside the Benghazi compound and an RPG attack on the British ambassador’s convoy.

The State Department in Washington turned down the request for more protection from Stevens, who was to die in the Sept. 11, 2012, attack. At the time, Stevens joked to a colleague that maybe the Qataris would pay for the upgrades.

Meanwhile, a top Clinton aide asked him for help “messaging” the violence in Libya back in the States.

“You want to shape the violence? How about defend against it?” Gowdy said of the messages between Stevens and Washington.

Asked whether he can share anything else new about his panel’s work, Gowdy said the panel has made “tremendous progress” answering questions about military preparedness at the time, including the military’s posture, and why and whether it might have been able to do more.

And the panel has recently received documents from the White House and the CIA that haven’t been released, but, Gowdy said, “I’m not going to recklessly, just to justify my committee … I’m not in an effort to defend our existence going to release information that I should not release.”

But the public will learn some new information Thursday, he promised, when he’ll be grateful to have the opportunity to demonstrate the worth of his investigation.

“I am far from perfect, and I am not about to say that every decision I have made is the perfect decision,” he continued, “but I can tell you this: I am at peace with the way we’ve prepared and our motives. … I hope that is reflected on Thursday.”

