Trey Gowdy wants Republicans not on the Benghazi committee to 'shut up' about it

Rep. Trey Gowdy.
(Image credit: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

Trey Gowdy has a message for his fellow Republicans not serving on the House Select Committee on Benghazi: Shut up.

The Republican congressman from South Carolina and chairman of the committee appeared on Face the Nation Sunday, and said Reps. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Richard Hanna (R-N.Y.) and former committee staffer Maj. Bradley Podliska are wrong about the committee targeting former secretary of state and current Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. "I get that there's a presidential campaign going on," he said. "I have told my own Republican colleagues and friends, shut up talking about things that you don't know anything about. And unless you're on the committee, you have no idea what we've done, why we've done it, and what new facts we have found."

In September, McCarthy said the reason why Clinton's poll numbers were slipping was because of the Benghazi committee, and two weeks later Hanna said "there was a big part of this investigation that was designed to go after people and an individual, Hillary Clinton." Podliska, who is filing a lawsuit against the committee, said he was fired because he wasn't focusing just on Clinton. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the ranking member of the committee, was also on Sunday's Face the Nation, and said it's time for the investigation to turn toward how to stop a similar attack from ever happening. "At some point," he said, "we gotta move from politics to policy."

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.