Two weeks before Hillary Clinton’s high-stakes Capitol Hill testimony on Benghazi, Democrats are trying to discredit the GOP-led Benghazi investigation following Kevin McCarthy’s boast that the panel was hurting the Democratic front-runner’s campaign.

For months, the House Select Committee on Benghazi has dogged the Clinton campaign; its work led to the discovery that Clinton was using a private email server while running the State Department. But now, after McCarthy’s gaffe, Democrats think they have the advantage, arguing that the California Republican validated their view that the panel’s work amounts to a political witch hunt.


“McCarthy admitted … that House Republicans created the Benghazi Select Committee from the very beginning to wage a taxpayer-funded political campaign against Hillary Clinton’s bid for president,” reads a letter Democrats sent Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) on Monday. “Obviously, this is an unethical abuse of millions of taxpayer dollars and a crass assault on the memories of the four Americans who were killed in Benghazi.”

Clinton pressed that case on Monday, calling the investigation a “partisan exercise” during a TV appearance and saying “as we now know, very clearly the way that the Republicans are trying to bring my — as they admit — poll numbers down” — clearly alluding to McCarthy’s flub.

Meanwhile, Democrats on Capitol Hill unveiled a new, aggressive strategy: They plan to release the panel’s transcripts of testimony from Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff at State, who defended her former boss behind closed doors. After going along with the GOP’s secrecy rules for months, Democrats on the Benghazi will play hardball by releasing the private testimony to combat Republican “mischaracterizations.”

Panel Democrats have consistently said the GOP selectively leaks information, if not distorts it, in an effort to make Clinton look bad. Just recently, GOP sources said that Mills had confirmed in closed-door testimony that she suggested changes to an independent review of the Benghazi attacks before it was published by a government review board.

Democrats were furious about the leak, and the GOP’s subsequent suggestion that Mills may have tried to influence the report. Now they’re planning to release the full, unedited transcripts of Mills’ nine-hour testimony on Sept. 3, including comments about how she did not try to influence the review when she suggested changes.

“It has become obvious that the only way to adequately correct the public record is to release the complete transcript,” Democrats said in their Monday letter, adding: “We do not take this action lightly … but we will no longer sit and watch selective, out-of-context leaks continue to mischaracterize the testimony the Select Committee has received.”

That’s a sharp break with a year-and-a-half of panel procedure where more than 50 transcripts of testimony were kept secret.

Panel spokesman Jamal Ware blasted the Democrats’ announcement, saying the panel doesn’t release transcripts because of “the need to hear from all witnesses and gather all facts before drawing inferences or conclusions from those interviews, and the need to avoid tainting the recollections of future witnesses.”

“Serious investigations hear from all witnesses and the testimony of each witness should be viewed in the context of all available information,” he said, adding the Democrats had “violated the letter and spirit of House Rules, and their desire to defend Secretary Clinton without regard for the integrity of the investigation.”

In their Monday letter, Democrats seized on Gowdy’s earlier statement that Mills’ testimony would be treated as “classified,” with no readout for the press or public — something both sides agreed to in front of reporters and TV cameras immediately following her marathon day of testimony.

But a few minutes later, POLITICO published an exclusive readout of what Mills told the panel, citing a source familiar with Mills’ testimony. Republicans later said they were surprised to hear Mills testify that she had offered suggestions to the government’s Accountability Review Board investigation that produced a report on the Benghazi attacks.

That, the GOP source said at the time, raised red flags about the integrity of the final report.

Democrats, however, called that leak “inaccurate.” They didn’t disagree with the description of what Mills said but suggested Republicans hadn’t given the proper context. They noted that the head of the review process, Ambassador Thomas Pickering, said in mid-2013 that he had provided a draft report to Clinton’s office for accuracy sake. He said Clinton and Mills did not try to influence or impede his work.

Democrats released Mill’s testimony on the matter Monday.

“Did you ever, in that process, attempt to exert influence over the direction of the ARB’s investigation?” a questioner asked Mills during the Sept. 3 closed-door hearing.

She answered “no.”

Democrats reiterated that Mills said there was no attempt to cover up what happened when Susan Rice, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, went on TV after the attack and blamed it on anti-Muslim video protests. A source close to Mills told POLITICO she learned the incident was solely a terrorist attack several days after the actual attacks and after Rice had already made her controversial TV appearances. The source close to Mills also said she told the panel there was no cover-up.

Democrats on Monday also released quotes backing up Mills’ reported testimony.

“I don’t know, because I didn’t participate in her prep or in the materials for her prep,” she said, according to the part of the transcript released.

The full transcript won’t be released for five days, as Democrats are giving Republicans time to suggest redactions. But they also released several pieces of Mills’ testimony that broadly defended Clinton.

In answer to questions about whether Clinton ordered Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to “stand down,” for example, Mills said Clinton had given no such order and “said we need to be taking whatever steps we can, to do whatever we can to secure our people.”

“I can remember that someone from the White House said that the president was 100 percent behind whatever needed to be done and we needed to do whatever needed to be done,” Mills told the panel.

Democrats also released her comments on then-Secretary Clinton pressing for rapid action: “She was pretty emphatic about wanting whatever to be done and whatever were assets that could be deployed, if that was both effective and possible to be done,” Mills said of Clinton. “She was very concerned. She was also very determined that whatever needed to be done was done.”

Democrats bemoan that “Republicans have never disclosed any of this information” during the Benghazi investigation.