There was never any doubt that Democrats in Washington would launch an aggressive campaign to discredit the House Select Committee on Benghazi. The only question was when they’d do it.

That inevitable effort got under way last week, after House majority leader Kevin McCarthy boasted to Sean Hannity that the committee’s work had hurt Hillary Clinton’s public standing.

McCarthy’s claim is undeniably true. The investigation uncovered the existence of Clinton’s personal email server, and her mendacious efforts to explain why she didn’t use a secure government email account to carry out her work as secretary of state have complicated her presidential bid. But it was a monumentally foolish thing for McCarthy to say. And his efforts to clean up the mess—in a follow-up interview on Fox News and later in a written statement—only made matters worse. When McCarthy stunned the political world on October 8 by announcing he would not be a candidate to replace John Boehner as speaker of the House, he cited his unhelpful comments and the furor they created as a contributing factor.

Within hours of his original comments, Democrats were recasting McCarthy’s words as an admission that the committee’s purpose had been political. And within days the Clinton campaign released an ad featuring McCarthy’s comments, echoing claims that the committee had been designed to bring down Clinton. “The Republicans finally admit it,” says the narrator. “The Republicans have spent millions attacking Hillary because she’s fighting for everything they oppose.”

So much drama. So much nonsense.

Read the article “Drip, Drip, Drip – Congress’s Benghazi Investigation Has Been Slandered” on weeklystandard.com.