Rep. Trey Gowdy on MSNBC's 'Morning Joe' spoke on Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy's Benghazi comments. Gowdy slams McCarthy on Benghazi comments: He 'screwed up'

Rep. Trey Gowdy on Wednesday offered a vigorous defense of the work of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, and slammed comments from House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy about the political success of the panel as plain "wrong."

During an interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity last week, McCarthy (R-Calif.) boasted that the Benghazi committee has had a negative effect on Hillary Clinton's poll numbers.


"Kevin has apologized as profusely as a human being can apologize. I went back and watched the interview, and what I tell folks back home, no matter how many times you put an earpiece in your ear and stare at a camera, you still screw up. And Kevin screwed up," Gowdy (R-S.C.) said in an interview with MSNBC's "Morning Joe."

"I don't know if it was Hannity pressing him, I don't know if he got thrown off by asking to give Speaker Boehner a grade. I can't unlock the mysteries of that. I can just tell you that if you look at what the members of our committee have done, we were pretty reluctantly brought into the Secretary Clinton part of it," Gowdy added, remarking that "It's because The New York Times and AP and others broke this story that folks' interest in Secretary Clinton picked up in this regard."

The chairman said that Clinton's Oct. 22 hearing before the committee will be "fact-centric, professional and fair."

Asked what his first reaction was to McCarthy's interview on Hannity, Gowdy said it was, "Kevin, you're wrong."

"When Speaker Boehner called me, he never mentioned Secretary Clinton's name. In fact, we've had three public hearings, Joe. I've never mentioned her name. If you look at what we've done, the 50-some-odd witnesses we've already interviewed, not a single one has been named Clinton. The 50,000 documents that we have accessed that no other committee has accessed, less than 5 percent have anything to do with her. She was the secretary of state at all relevant times, so of course you have to talk to her. But we didn't start with her, and we're not going to end with her. In fact, I've been pretty patient on when she came before the committee. I still don't have all her emails," he remarked to co-host Joe Scarborough.

The committee has been "dogged" and "didn't let up," Gowdy added, but also "in all candor and a little bit of humility, which is unusual in my profession, the media has done every bit as much work as our committee," he said.

"Because number one, you have better sources than I do, and number two, it's not my job to look into classified information or all aspects of her email. My interest in her email is in making sure that the record as it relates to Libya and Benghazi is complete and full," he went on to say.

The comments from McCarthy, who is widely expected to soon replace Boehner as speaker, have reverberated with Republicans rushing to defend the work of the committee as nonpartisan and with influential Democrats calling for the panel to disband. The New York Times editorial board weighed in on Wednesday, calling for the upcoming hearing to be the panel's last action, or at least for the Democrats to stop participating in the "charade."

On the email gaps that persist around the Benghazi attack, Gowdy acknowledged that was the case and brought up the fact that Clinton's friend Sidney Blumenthal turned over 15 emails that the former secretary never turned over to the committee.

"But she deserves a chance to be asked about that in a fair, professional setting, and that's one of the things we'll do on the 22nd," Gowdy said.

As far as his line of questioning on that date, Gowdy offered a preview:

"My interest is in making sure everything I'm entitled to, I have received. And when you say that the public record is complete and I know that there are 15 emails that you never turned over to the State Department, that is a fair line of inquiry,: he said. "The question is, how did you miss it? You have repeatedly said that you turned over everything. What about these 15? And if there are 15 here, how do you guarantee that you turned over everything when it was your lawyers that did the analysis and not the inspector general?"