Frankly, I liked Issa. I thought he did fine, but with as many as five committees competing on the same subject, it was a confusing matter of who’s on first, who’s on second and the cover up was in full sail at the time.
Now there is ONE committee and a the clever, cute kid running it is a prosecutor with a reputation. Trey Gowdy.
He is the best I’ve seen and there have been some greats at questioning witnesses.
I like him because he has said from the beginning that expectations are low that while under this president and this Justice Department that the Benghazi events will ever be resolved.
He will build the case block by block anyway, so that after 2016 maybe we can hope to hear it and resolve it. It will haunt Hillary nicely next summer, right during the heat of the her campaign battle. That suits me fine.
And Issa, by trying to crash Gowdy's panel, is just adding more confusion to the process. He had his chance. Now he should get out of the way! It's Gowdy's turn to drop the ball.
I liked Issa too, at first. But I have been around lawyers enough to know that cross examination, the posing of carefully crafted questions to get someone to reveal a specific narrative of affairs, is a very specific skill. Not all lawyers are litigators, eg; courtroom operators. Most, I would say, review and or craft contracts. Maybe I should say that very few lawyers are *good* litigators.
Issa damaged the early versions of these investigations by asking questions that were not leading enough and they provided the questionee the opportunity to generate two (or more) equally plausible answers. He really did. I spoke with a couple of lawyers I deal with and they independently posited the same thing. You allow a witness to generate a duality once, twice, three times, and now you have eight possible variations of the story.
Gowdy will not do this. Gowdy is superb.
Once upon a time, Richard Nixon was president, and the Justice Department was controlled by him. And a Democrat congress didn't settle for "low expectations." And the Democrat House impeached the president and forced his resignation before the Senate could convict.
Sure, the GOP has controlled the Senate only since this January. (Although given what McConnell's done so far this year, that fact is debatable.) But Boner's had the House since 2011; and, as the Democrats showed during Watergate, you do *not* need the Justice Department to uncover a cover-up.
Boner et al are either complicit, incompetent, or stringing this out to coincide with the next election cycle. And frankly, in a constitutional republic, where the rule of law should be supreme, any one of those possibilities is *unacceptable*! There is absolutely no excuse why we, the American people -- and most of all, the families of our four fallen heroes -- have still not learned the truth of what happened on that night!