Former President Bill Clint speaks in Portland, Ore., Thursday, May 5. | AP Photo Bill Clinton: I 'felt bad' for Kevin McCarthy

Bill Clinton wants House Majority Kevin McCarthy to know that he feels his pain.

Campaigning for his wife in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on Friday, the former president listed off the various ways in which the former secretary of state, U.S. senator and first lady is the most qualified candidate for the job, in part because she has been willing to work with everyone, taking implicit shots at Republicans and particularly presumptive nominee Donald Trump.


“I always find you should respect your adversaries. They do not spend their time attacking people they are not worried about," Clinton said. "And they know, they know—you could fill this building with enough psychological studies that if you just sling enough stuff at people, even if every single charge is disproved."

Pivoting to the congressional inquiries into the Benghazi attacks while Hillary Clinton was at the State Department, the former president remarked it was "the only time in the history of America by the way, when we’ve ever had seven separate congressional committees looking at the same thing, in Benghazi."

“So they had a special committee with a special purpose, and poor Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader from California, said that the most outstanding achievement of the Republican Congress in 2015 was their special committee which drove Hillary’s numbers down," Clinton said.

In late September 2015, weeks before Clinton testified before the House Select Committee on Benghazi, McCarthy appeared to suggest in an interview that the committee's investigation, of which he was not a part, played a role in driving down her poll numbers.

“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee,” McCarthy said last Sept. 29. “What are her numbers today?"

McCarthy, Clinton continued, "couldn’t be elected speaker anymore ‘cause he told the truth."

"I felt bad about it. I mean, I’d hate to be part of a political party where you lost your chance to be a leader just by telling the self-evident truth," he said. "It wasn’t like everybody didn’t know it anyway. But you should take that as an endorsement of her candidacy, because she’s always the grownup in every room, and she will get people to do the right thing if you make her president of the United States.”