Still leaking? That's unpossible.

Still leaking? That's unpossible.

It's now time to check back in with House Republicans and Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-Benghazi)'s Select Committee for Something Something Hillary Clinton Bad. It seems it is business as usual, by which we mean yet another instance in which the committee has been caught "leaking" something to the press that is in fact completely made up. You do not need to be overly cynical to note that House Republican Benghazi investigations to date have sustained years of momentum for themselves and their budgets solely on supposedly-unauthorized "leaks" that just happen to be manufactured from bungling or lying outright about the evidence that investigation has "collected," every last one of them terribly damaging-sounding to a certain Democratic presidential candidate right up until the point where some ninny, almost always ranking Democratic committee representative Elijah Cummings, points out that the supposed "leak" was actually, well, a gigantic lie.

In this case the designated "leaker" manufactured their case by copy-pasting unrelated emails together as if Hillary Clinton had responded to one email by saying she would be "pushing to [the White House]"—when that wasn't actually her response to that email. It was a response she gave to an entirely different email chain. Golly, what are the odds of such a mixed-up, James O'Keefe-ish faked-evidence "leak" happening? Again, I mean?



But as [Rep. Elijah E. Cummings] notes in his letter [to Gowdy], it didn’t go down like that. The “I’m pushing to WH” response actually attaches to a different e-mail correspondence between Clinton and Blumenthal, from a week before Blumenthal’s boast about those Benghazi links. As documents released by the State Department last week show, Clinton was actually intent on sending to the White House a Salon article claiming that the campaign of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was planning a brand-new line of attack based on Benghazi. [...] Another point: The Politico story cites a source as saying that the e-mail wasn’t among those turned over by the State Department. Cummings writes that State had passed it along in February.

Well, double-oops?

You may note that neither of these things have fudge-all to do with how Benghazi happened, or who in the administration or CIA initially thought it may have been related to demonstrations in the region, or any of the other things Gowdy's committee at one point or another was theorized to have been tasked with determining. Instead, under Gowdy's guidance the committee has leapt headlong into the meta-meta-battle of Republicans believing crackpot conspiracy theories about Benghazi and Gowdy investigating who in the administration and in the dastardly media might have been saying rude things about the Republicans who were pushing those theories.

America, House Republicans must get to the bottom of whether Clinton family ally Sid Blumenthal thought conspiracy-minded House Republicans were stupid or hyper-politicizing—and whether he brazenly emailed Hillary Clinton links to public media articles he liked in which the authors pointed those things out! He forwarded on press articles he liked? From the internet? Truly, he is among history's greatest monsters.

So perhaps this has gotten very far afield from the supposed Republican-pushed scandal of why State Department official so-and-so was Wrong on TV that one time, but Gowdy has clearly satisfied himself with all the other investigations that turned up no wrongdoing about that and has moved on. He is currently very concerned that perhaps the delicate flowers of the Republican House are the real Benghazi victims here. It appears somebody sent Hillary Clinton emails suggesting House Republicans were bad people, and we will clearly need many more months and millions of dollars to investigate these slights further.

