McCarthy: ‘Benghazi’ was about hurting Hillary

The other night, I was working in a hotel room in Carmel, half-watching my favorite source of entertainment, Fox News.

Sean Hannity was interviewing House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the Republican congressman from Bakersfield, about his bid to replace John A. Boehner as speaker of the House.

Scratch that.

Hannity was hectoring McCarthy rather than interviewing him. Hannity demanded to know why congressional Republicans under Boehner had allowed “executive amnesty,” why they failed to defund Obamacare or Planned Parenthood, why they hadn’t done enough to lower the debt.

McCarthy was getting defensive. Finally, he interrupted: “The question you really want to ask me, is how am I going to be different?”

“I love how you ask my questions for me,” said Hannity, “but go ahead.”

“What you’re going to see,” McCarthy said, “is a conservative speaker that takes a conservative Congress, that puts a strategy to fight and win. And let me give you one example.”

Now, I am just going to stop here for a moment and tell you that what came out of McCarthy’s mouth next cannot be misconstrued. It was one of those rare moments of radical political honesty that is sometimes described as a “Kinsley gaffe.”

(“A gaffe,” the pundit Michael Kinsley famously wrote, “is when a politician tells the truth - some obvious truth he wasn’t supposed to say.”)

“Everybody thought that Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” McCarthy said. “But we put together a Benghazi Special Committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she is untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened had we not fought and made that happen.”

Hannity: “I agree. That’s something good. I give you credit for that.”

I thought I had misheard the exchange because what McCarthy had just revealed is what Democrats have claimed for so long: The Benghazi committee hearings in the House were ginned up for only one reason - to make Clinton look bad.

I was about to tweet what I heard, and then thought, no, I need to rewind, just to make sure I heard correctly. I mean, you’d look like a moron if you wrongfully stated that McCarthy had just admitted to a national television audience that he and his colleagues had wasted untold hours and who-knows-how-many taxpayer dollars on a partisan-fueled faux scandal designed to dirty up a political rival, right?

After all, McCarthy is a seasoned politician. There’s no way he would fall into the trap of wanting so badly to prove himself to his Fox News overlords that he would sell out his own caucus, right?

Well, thank heavens for the Internet.

I watched and rewatched the exchange. It’s so blatant that even Republicans have rushed to condemn their would-be speaker.

Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who supports McCarthy’s bid, had to do some serious damage control on CNN on Wednesday. “I don’t think it necessarily disqualifies him,” Chaffetz told Wolf Blitzer, “but I think it’s an absolute terrible statement. I think he should apologize.”

Yes, he should. McCarthy should apologize to American taxpayers for wasting their money on an interminable and pointless investigation.

He should apologize to former Secretary of State Clinton, whose “conspiracy” theories about the right wing always seem to bear out in the end.

And he should apologize to the families of the four men whose deaths in Libya have been exploited in the most cynical way.

On Thursday, in an interview with Fox’s Bret Baier, a clearly rattled McCarthy tried to explain away his Kinsley gaffe.

“It was never my intention to ever imply this committee was political ‘cause we all know it was not,” McCarthy said. “It has one sole purpose: Let’s find the truth wherever the truth takes us, and you know what? Sometimes truth comes out in other manners, and let’s not let politics hold that back.”

Oh, I think the truth has come out here. Don’t you?

Robin Abcarian is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.