The Trey Gowdy Wars.

The Trey Gowdy Wars

The Trey Gowdy Wars

Weigel
Reporting on Politics and Policy.
May 8 2014 12:10 PM

The Trey Gowdy Wars

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He's winning the war for best hair.

Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images

My quick profile of Rep. Trey Gowdy, who'll run the Benghazi select committee, is right over here. It reads pretty positive, and that's because the people who knew Gowdy—even two who were primaried by him on his rise to power—think the guy's basically Atticus Finch. It's really no accident that Democrats have struggled, so far, to portray Gowdy as a hack who's doing this to raise money, and have had to rely on stories of other Republicans doing so and of Gowdy mentioning Benghazi at a fundraiser for someone else.

The better knock on Gowdy (hey, it's in my piece) is that he is demanding answers to questions that have, in some form, been asked. "Why was security lacking"? That's been dealt with in several internal reports.

This is why Gowdy, and less adroit allies, emphasize that the Benghazi investigation has been confusing. It's been divided between several committees, one of them (Select Committee on Intelligence) unable to share everything it got, all of them too hard to follow.

"The White House took advantage of the fact that there were so many committees," Rep. Raul Labrador said today. "They were lying or not giving full briefings on the subject."

David Weigel is a reporter for the Washington Post.