Topics: Marco Rubio, trey gowdy, benghazi committee, House Select Committee on Benghazi, USA Freedom Act, National security, Domestic Surveillance, 2016 Elections, 2016 GOP primary, 2016 Republican primary, aol_on, Elections News, Politics News
Marco Rubio’s rise to “2016 GOP Frontrunner Because It Just Sort Of Makes The Most Sense” got another jolt over the weekend with the announcement that South Carolina congressman Trey Gowdy is going to endorse Rubio and campaign with him in Iowa. Gowdy’s a Tea Party guy and his national profile was raised considerably when John Boehner tapped him to be the chair of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, so the general consensus is that his endorsement is a good thing for Rubio, particularly given that South Carolina is among the early-voting primary states.
But, of course, nothing is ever that simple, and a Gowdy-Rubio campaign tag team is actually kind of awkward for Rubio, given the extent to which their records clash and the high-profile failings of Gowdy’s Benghazi inquiry.
Let’s start with the Benghazi stuff, since that was what Donald Trump zeroed in on when attacking Gowdy for endorsing one of his primary rivals for the Republican presidential nomination. Trump was on Fox News over the weekend and tore into Gowdy for the Benghazi Committee’s interrogation of Hillary Clinton this past October, calling it, in that distinctly Trump-ish variant of near-English, “a total not-good for Republicans and for the country.” That’s an accurate, if grammatically exotic, assessment of the excruciating 11-hour faceplant Gowdy and the Republican members of the committee threw themselves into when taking on Clinton over Benghazi. And as Paul Waldman notes at the Washington Post, that hearing was “just one more iteration of the pattern that has Republican voters so disgusted with their Washington leadership: touted as the vehicle to bring down Hillary Clinton, it ended up backfiring and doing nothing but make Republicans look foolish.”
Since the circus of the Clinton hearing, Gowdy and the committee have tried to maintain a low profile. But their efforts have been stymied by a former staffer who filed a lawsuit claiming that the committee had discriminated against him for his military service before he was wrongfully terminated. The same staffer is also suing Gowdy for defamation. The whole operation has become a scandalized mess as what little credibility it enjoyed has crumbled in recent months, and Rubio just picked up the endorsement of the guy responsible for all this dysfunction.
