Washington, DC (Link) – Today, Congressman Adam Smith, a Member of the Benghazi Select Committee and Ranking Member of the House Armed Services Committee, issued the following statement in response to House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s honest admission about the Benghazi Committee’s true purpose:

I appreciate Rep. McCarthy finally coming clean and admitting what we have all known all along: that the Benghazi Select Committee was designed and created as a political attack tool to damage a potential Democratic Presidential nominee. The committee has now spent $4.5 million of taxpayer dollars to, as McCarthy admitted, defeat Hillary Clinton. That is a clear violation of the role of Congress and the American people should be sick of this wasteful partisan nonsense. Taxpayer dollars should be spent to improve the quality of life for the American people, not to fuel a naked political attack.

In the beginning, we were told that this committee was stood up to investigate the attacks in Benghazi. We were told that the investigation would respect the lives that were lost in that tragic event. In the end, we all knew that the committee was established for political reasons, and it's about time that Republicans finally acknowledged that fact. 

Last night in an interview on FOX, McCarthy admitted: 

“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee. A select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known that any of that had happened had we not fought to make that happen.”