Michael Hirsh is national editor for Politico Magazine.

It’s late Wednesday afternoon, the day after Hillary Clinton’s defiant I’m-telling-you-this-and-nothing-more news conference at the United Nations and Trey Gowdy — who’s now seen as her No. 1 antagonist on Benghazi — is all over the news up in Washington. But this is the middle of South Carolina, Gowdy’s home district, and the two-term congressman pulls into a Cracker Barrel on State Highway 183 — where I’m waiting to meet him — alone at the wheel of a filthy silver Toyota Corolla. Gowdy gets out, hands me the keys and drawls, “Car’s over there. Got to go to the men’s room.” Inside the Corolla, crud from some ancient condiment spill has permanently affixed itself to the gear-shift console, and a thick layer of dust covers the dash. Stuffed into the passenger back seat pocket is a battered loose-leaf notebook labeled “Benghazi ARB”—which, when I point it out to him, Gowdy leafs through as if he’s discovering a long-lost document. “Oh yeah, this was our hearing on the Accountability Review Board,” he says. “Forgot it was there.”

The day before, Gowdy had made all the right Washington moves. Clinton had barely stepped away from the microphone before Gowdy’s office released a statement, chiding the insufficiency of her answers, demanding Clinton turn over the personal computer server and promising to require her to “appear at least twice” before Gowdy’s committee. A few hundred miles and a news cycle away from the capital, maneuvering the car onto the rainy highway, bound for a lecture at Clemson University, the voluble and relaxed former prosecutor sounds less like the Grand Inquisitor and more like the fair-minded judge that he has long aspired to be.


Contrary to all rumor and innuendo, Gowdy says he is completely open to the idea that Clinton may have done nothing wrong while secretary of state. He has publicly pointed out “gaps” that go for “months" in the materials she has provided on Benghazi. But he insists he’s not accusing her of anything; he just doesn’t know yet, he says.

Short and whippet thin, with close-cropped graying hair that looks as if it’s hand-combed, Gowdy has a sharp-angled, crudely handsome face; at times he resembles the quick-silver Terminator II guy who beat up on Arnold Schwarzenegger. But Gowdy doesn’t see a similarly relentless pursuit of Hillary as his mission.

Taking on Clinton, Gowdy repeats, “is not my job. That’s the job of the RNC, and the Republican candidate for president. … If they hired me for that job they hired the wrong guy. Why would you hire a not-even-two-term guy, all of whose training tells him to go where facts take him, who doesn’t even go to NRCC [National Republican Congressional Committee] dinners, who’s lousy at fundraisers, who hates to travel? Because that’s who you’re getting.”

The job he was appointed to do last year by House Speaker John Boehner was to chair a special investigatory committee on Benghazi after the Republican right roared its disapproval of previous failed inquiries. What does he know right now, I ask him, based on numerous witness appearances and 850 pages already submitted by the State Department?

Not all that much. He says he’s “seen no evidence” that Clinton ordered a stand-down of security forces in Benghazi, contributing to the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans on Sept. 11, 2012, or any of the other more damning things the right typically alleges.

And if anyone expects him to chase the presumptive frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination to the gates of political hell to get tens of thousands of her personal emails, well, don’t bank on it. Right now, Gowdy wants an independent arbitrator to decide whether those 30,000 or so emails contain anything significant material to his probe, and he says he’d even accept a respected Democratic professional like Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz for that task. But when I point out that another committee he serves on recently accepted a high-level witness’s mere “certification” or a personal oath that his submitted emails were complete, Gowdy says a similar compromise might be possible with Clinton.

“That may be the best we can get. If you can’t get what you think is your reasonable alternative, because you’re dealing with the limitations of the legislative branch. What is your power to dictate otherwise? Public pressure maybe. But beyond that what can you do?”

***

People who know Gowdy well wouldn’t be surprised to hear him talk this way.

A Christian conservative elected in the Tea Party wave of 2010, Gowdy is a believer all right — but not in what many of his fellow Republicans would consider the “cause,” namely preventing, by any means necessary, the title President from appearing in front of Hillary’s name. He has little interest in becoming a latter-day Kenneth Starr. He has no visceral hatred of the Clintons, he says.

“I never would have become a prosecutor except for Bill Clinton,” Gowdy remarks casually, explaining that it was only when Clinton became president in 1993 that he got the job he’d long wanted, federal prosecutor in South Carolina, which had been denied him under George H.W. Bush.

When I joke that perhaps he should recuse himself from the Benghazi investigation for his pro-Clinton bias, he laughs. “She really is going to be, I don’t want to say a small part — I don’t know — but she is by no means the central focus of our inquiry. … John Boehner didn’t even mention her name when he asked me to do this. There are a million other things to pursue with respect to Benghazi other than Secretary Clinton.”

By the account of many friends and associates, it’s the law, not partisan politics, that Gowdy reveres. Gowdy himself says he’d much rather be a judge or even a law professor than a member of Congress, a place, he admits to me, that he’s come to hate. The House, Gowdy says, has become little more than as a venue for permanent political warfare, unrelieved by action. According to Dave Woodard, Gowdy’s political mentor in Spartanburg and the man who launched his career: “He said to me not long ago, ‘I thought I was doing more for America by putting bad guys in jail than hitting my head against a wall with 435 morons.’”

Mick Mulvaney, Gowdy’s friend and fellow member of the close-knit South Carolina congressional caucus, says selecting the 50-year-old Gowdy was a big risk for Boehner, who remains on permanently thin ice with his right-wing base.

“I think he’s more well-suited to be judge than a politician, which is why he was a great choice on one hand, but also a very dangerous choice for Boehner,” says Mulvaney. “He’s brutally fair, and brutally honest, and brutally transparent. While everyone assumes he’ll find something on Benghazi, it’s entirely plausible that he finds no wrongdoing, and if he does there are going to be some Republicans who are not happy with that finding.”

Mulvaney says he warned Gowdy about this before he took the position. “I did point out to him that this could be very bad thing to do politically. I said, ‘What happens if you find no wrongdoing?’ He said, ‘Then that’s the answer.’ I said, ‘Trey, look, these people are expecting you to find something.’ He said, ‘Well, they might be very disappointed.’ ”

Not surprisingly, Gowdy is already getting push back from the right.

“No subpoenas, no hearings, no nothing,” cried Andrew McCarthy, also a former prosecutor, in a scathing critique of “the select committee’s ten sleepy months of operation” in National Review Online last week. Wrote McCarthy: “Just as Mrs. Clinton did not turn over any of her private e-mails until the State Department finally asked for them, Gowdy, by his own account, did not issue a subpoena to address a scandal he has long known about [the emails] until the scandal became public. That in itself is a scandal.”

On the other hand ranking Democrat Cummings just wants Gowdy to wrap things up quickly on the theory — which Gowdy completely rejects — that Congress and other independent bodies have already gotten to bottom of Benghazi. “From selectively releasing information to issuing an unnecessary subpoena to Secretary Clinton to excluding Democrats in key aspects of the investigation, it has become apparent that the Select Committee is using its blank check from taxpayers to go after Hillary Clinton and impact the 2016 election,” Cummings told me in an email.

Gowdy registers sadness over the accusations from Cummings — whom he still, rather longingly, considers a friend despite their increasingly rancorous relationship—that the investigation is moving at a “glacial” pace. “That came out of nowhere,” Gowdy says. In response, Gowdy insists he doesn’t leak, and he’ll darn well (he doesn’t curse) get things done at his own pace. He’s aware of the political calendar, of course, but doesn’t seem to care a lot about it. He’s building a case from the bottom up. Like a prosecutor.

When I suggest to him that simultaneous criticism from the left and right is often an indicator in Washington that one is handling things just fine, he grins and tells a story about another habitual annoyer of both left and right, Barack Obama, whom he admires as a person, if not necessarily as a president.

When Gowdy attended a White House meeting at which his fellow GOP congressman bitterly complained about mischaracterization of their views, Obama retorted: “How do you think I feel when the right is constantly questioning my faith and my birth?” Recalls Gowdy, “I was really struck by that. That was a real authentic moment.”

***

Democrats have reason to worry too. The junky car and wrinkled suit-look, the aw-shucks routine, conceal what many long-time associates and observers say is a brilliant prosecutorial mind and a Lt. Columbo-like doggedness. His passion as a prosecutor, especially in violent crime cases, is legendary in South Carolina.

“He’s a bulldog,” says Lynne Shackleford, who covered Gowdy for years at the Spartanburg Herald Journal. “You will not outwork him, and he never loses.” Even as Gowdy frankly admits he hates being in Congress, he also says he wants to stay on until the “job is done.”

He also, frankly, has something of a case that we haven’t fully plumbed the mystery of Benghazi, including what Chris Stevens was doing there in the first place. Democrats like to cite the supposed impartiality of the Accountability Review Board, which was headed by esteemed diplomat Thomas Pickering and Former Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen. Gowdy is contemptuous of it.

“The ARB didn’t interview people that we’re interviewing this week. So the notion that was the end-all-be-all is just wrong. They didn’t interview Secretary Clinton, they didn’t interview Susan Rice, they didn’t interview [former Clinton chief of staff] Cheryl Mills. And frankly they couldn’t have possibly had access to the information we just got because nobody has seen it.”

Gowdy says he’s found “gaps of months, and months, and months” in the roughly 850 pages of emails Clinton has provided to the panel. A big gap, he says, surrounds Clinton’s October 2011 visit to Libya, apparently to meet rebel leaders in Tripoli. What was the U.S. government’s policy at the time? he asks. “We don’t know.”

“There’s enough to warrant asking more questions, that’s all. It is completely irresponsible for me to see a gap and to assume the most nefarious explanation. … But I do think it is curious that there would be no emails and documents from when she was in Libya. There are gaps on either side of that trip.”

And, he adds, “There were other State Department officials who had personal email accounts upon which she communicated.”

Gowdy is equally dismissive of Clinton’s claim that she decided on her own which emails were relevant. “Tell me what you mean by personal email. Tell me what the limits of that category would be. Take an email that says, for example, ‘Secretary Clinton, I’m looking forward to coming to Chelsea’s wedding, when I’d like to talk to you about Uruguay.’ Is that public or private?” he says.

“Also we know some of her more trusted advisers used purely private email accounts. She’s saying, ‘Take my word, trust me.’ It doesn’t mean she’s not telling the truth. But she created the fact pattern under which people would raise their eyebrows. … I mean, I have no business at looking at her personal emails. And by the way, I have no interest in looking at her emails. But this royal ‘we’ she used — ‘we’ did this, ‘we’ did that. Who is ‘we’? If it’s her lawyers, are they experts in the federal records acts?”

I asked about a statement he made on Fox News last year — “I have evidence that there was a systematic intentional decision to withhold certain documents from Congress.” He says that was a misunderstanding. He actually doesn’t have that proved — yet.

I asked him how far is he really willing to take things if the Clinton camp refuses to give up personal emails or the private server. Gowdy says he’s mainly focused on getting Clinton to appear on Benghazi. He’s resting his hopes on conversations between David Kendall, her lawyer, and his own committee counsel, Dana Chipman. “Kendall hasn’t said she wouldn’t appear,” Gowdy says hopefully.

As we drove toward Clemson University, where he was scheduled to deliver a lecture on his grand passion—criminal justice—I asked Gowdy whether he aspires to be this generation’s Ken Starr. Gowdy paused, staring out the windshield, as if reminded of an unpleasant thought. Starr, he says, just kept increasing his purview in the 1990s, making a bizarre trek from Whitewater to Monicagate. “I’m trying to shrink my jurisdiction.”

Indeed, Gowdy has already suggested that any probe into Clinton’s private email trove might be better left to another committee, such as the House Intelligence panel or Rep. Jason Chaffetz’s Government Oversight committee (on which Gowdy also serves). “I would be more than content if the speaker in his judgment concluded that other committees have equities there,” he says.

Ultimately, says Gowdy, he may be able to do nothing more than to report that Clinton might be guilty of “spoliation of evidence” — suggesting, but not asserting, that she destroyed documents unfavorable to her.

“I am limited under the rules under which our committee was formed. And the rules make it really clear what we have the power to do and what we don’t. … There really is no argument that our committee has the subpoena power to seize personal property. It is an open constitutional question as to whether the House as whole has it,” he says.

“So if you don’t have the power to compel the client, to [cite Clinton for contempt] would be purely for optics.” Even if Clinton were criminally cited for contempt, Obama’s Department of Justice would almost certainly not act on it.

***

Gowdy does appear to be one of those increasingly rare politicians who really just couldn’t give a damn about political optics, even as that world has begun to consume him.

“I think Trey is as uncomfortable with the far right as he is with far left. I think that’s who he is,” says Bill Barnet, the former mayor of Gowdy’s home town of Spartanburg.

Despite going his own way on many issues, Gowdy, the son of a pediatrician who delivered “most of the babies in Spartanburg,” according to Woodard, remains ridiculously popular in his district, which is also made up of the city of Greenville, where he was born. It’s one of those southern Republican districts where ever-evolving right wing base tends to eat its young, if they don’t evolve rightward fast enough. Former GOP Rep. Bob Inglis found that out when he was elected in ’92 and then caucused eagerly with the Gingrich revolution of ’94, only to be viewed as suspiciously moderate (much like Gingrich) over the years, especially on climate change; Gowdy wiped the ground with him in the 2010 primary.

“To fit Greenville, you have to be kind of Neanderthal,” says Woodard, who’s a Clemson professor of political science. “Some people down there are just downright scary.”

But Gowdy’s unfavorable ratings are in such low single digits that he jokes, with typical self-deprecation, that the detractors must all be members of his family. According to some local pols, the once-besieged Sen. Lindsey Graham is to this day thanking his stars that Gowdy didn’t try to take him on in 2014, though some GOP strategists hoped he would. Why didn’t he? He likes Lindsey, just didn’t want to.

Gowdy is the hometown boy who speaks the language, and whose reputation as a federal and state prosecutor who never lost a murder case has insulated him from a lot of criticism. He’s won over many Democrats too. “He’s a right-wing Republican. That’s pretty much where his loyalties lie, but basically Trey Gowdy’s a fair man. I would be shocked and horrified to see him to do a hatchet job,” says Lynn Hawkins of the Safe Homes Rape Crisis Coalition in Spartanburg, who adds: “And I’m voting for Hillary. So there you go.”

As we arrive at Clemson, I ask him whether, as one friend suggested, he finally left the career he loved as a state prosecutor — or solicitor, as they’re called down here — and decided to run for Congress because he and his wife, Terri, and son and daughter were forced to live with police protection.

We pull into the parking lot at the lecture hall and sit for a moment. Gowdy pauses and says, no, it wasn’t really his wife who pushed him — though it’s true that his family was threatened.

“It was a summer’s worth of watching” — there is an even longer pause, and as I look over at him he has tears in his eyes — “of watching kids get killed. Three of ‘em. It will wreck your faith. My wife did say you need to leave, not for personal safety but because it was so hard for me. There were three in about a six-week time period. One was a nine-year-old girl with cerebral palsy who was beaten to death. It’s the pictures, you can’t get ‘em out of your head.”

We walk into the lecture hall together, and it’s clear this is his milieu. Gowdy delivers a “Socratic” talk engaging students on the merits of the death penalty, which he fiercely defends. He shows them horrific crime-scene slides of a murdered couple. The wife’s face was so badly smashed by a hammer, Gowdy tells the kids, “it was no longer recognizable as human.” Then the killer sexually violated her dead body. Gowdy got the defendant convicted and sent to death row. He asks for a show of hands on who supports the death penalty. Most raise theirs.

Nothing else can compare with the satisfaction of putting evil-doers away, Gowdy says, but now he’ll never have that again. “The most liberating feeling in the world is to already have had the job you love,” he says. “That is my version of success. … The old job was really easy. It’s hard to win at my current job.”

That’s one reason his interest is not so much Hillary and what she did (or didn’t do), as it is to seek justice for the families of the Benghazi four. To hold someone accountable. As for Gowdy’s true life’s dream — a judgeship — he thinks that’s already passed him by. He’s become too controversial, he says.

“I think one of the great ironies of life is this will ensure that never happens,” he says. “It doesn’t matter how fair you want to be, sometimes there are words that become adjectives for your life. And for some people it will always be ‘Benghazi committee chairman Trey Gowdy.’”