Rep. Trey Gowdy's Benghazi malfeasances: Column Some say he's Ken Starr. I say he's Sen. McCarthy.

David Brock | USA TODAY

After delaying her testimony, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., chairman of the nakedly partisan House Benghazi Committee, finally met former secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday. Yet it is Gowdy’s record, not Clinton’s, that is subject of increasing scrutiny, and rightly so.

Over the course of his multiyear, $4.5 million, taxpayer-funded, partisan joyride of a committee, there are few strong-arm tactics Gowdy and his staff have deemed too low for their purposes. They appear to have leaked selective and allegedly incorrect information from closed-door testimony to generate damaging stories in the news. According to Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., the top Democrat on the House Benghazi Committee, they have doctored documents to attempt to incriminate witnesses and Clinton herself. A whistle-blowing, conservative former committee staffer, Bradley Podliska, has accused Gowdy of running a partisan witch hunt.

Gowdy and company have obsessed over Clinton’s use of a personal email — a practice that as far as we know, has nothing to do with the tragedy in Libya that claimed the lives of four brave public servants. Perhaps most illustrative of all, Gowdy’s opponents have accused him of using his position, and the Benghazi tragedy, to gin up fundraising dollars for his fellow Republicans — and Gowdy has seen his own political clout in the party skyrocket in the process.

Dare we say President Gowdy? I’m sure he’d like to imagine it, but it is not to be. Instead, Gowdy is beginning to find that many aren’t as receptive to his brand of smear politics as House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California — who famously said the committee had succeeded in lowering Clinton's poll numbers — and his fellow Republican members of Congress seem to be.

Some have compared Gowdy to Ken Starr — the overzealous prosecutor who doggedly pursued irrelevant, biasedly inflammatory investigations of the Clintons for much of the 1990s. That’s a fine comparison, if you ask me, but it’s a little inexact. In fact, Gowdy has much more in common — not just in deeds, but in raw ambition — with another high inquisitor, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis.

You see, McCarthy used his role as an anti-communist in the 1950s to attack anyone he viewed as possible communists or communist sympathizers, among them people he perceived as personal and political enemies. His detractors accused him of trampling on the facts, subverting the Constitution and flouting his oath, and in the end, he was censured and shunned by his own party. Today, his name is a byword for all that is deeply corrosive and wrong with a political witch hunt gone awry.

It might be that Gowdy’s own malfeasances catch up with him. Given how much has been revealed about the tactics of his committee over just the past few weeks, I would not be surprised if they did.

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But an essential, broader point is that America shouldn’t have to wait for Gowdy’s comeuppance. As a nation, we have a presidential campaign before us. We have issues that need tackling. There are debates to have, disagreements about policies to air, votes to cast and decisions to make. Gowdy has nothing to contribute to that process other than smears and innuendo about one woman who has dedicated three decades of her life to public service.

After Clinton’s testimony Thursday, Gowdy should step down from his shameful committee immediately. The news media should acknowledge his long record of misdeeds and afford his committee's leaks no weight in their coverage of this campaign. The Benghazi Committee — the eighth congressional panel to investigate these events — should be brought to a prompt close. And, at long last, America should be free to have the debate it ought to be having about the nation's future, free from the Gowdy crusade.

David Brock, founder of Media Matters for America, is author of Killing the Messenger: The Right-Wing Plot to Derail Hillary and Hijack Your Government.

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