Fox News host Neil Cavuto told Chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi Trey Gowdy (R-SC), that his on-going investigation into the attacks will only “carry currency” if the FBI acts against Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton or “recommends taking actions with the Justice Department.” 

Following the January 14 Republican presidential debate on the Fox Business Network, Neil Cavuto suggested to Gowdy that the only way for the Benghazi Select Committee to “carry currency” is “if the FBI acts on this or recommends taking actions with the Justice Department.” Gowdy responded by suggesting that the committee's findings were a forgone conclusion, claiming “the smoking gun is the fact that she had her own unique server arrangement,” but noted "whether or not there's any criminality ... the voters can judge that:

NEIL CAVUTO (HOST): At the Benghazi hearings a lot of people were saying, alright, Gowdy's got to deliver a knockout blow here. And after all those hours, [people are] amazed by your legal skills and ability to parlay this and go after her, maybe the mainstream media attention, all that they said in the end they didn't lay a glove on her. What do you make of that?

TREY GOWDY: I think the smoking gun is the fact that she had her own unique server arrangement.

CAVUTO: And that ironically could be her real Achilles heel.

GOWDY: But you know the world we live in Neil, once people know that she had her own server, that's no longer the smoking gun. But go back two years ago. If you were told that a Benghazi committee would find her emails that nobody else found, Chris Stevens' emails that nobody else found, and Patrick Kennedy, Susan Rice, you would say “they did a great job.” Those are all home runs.

CAVUTO: But it's like people almost want to say, this will only carry currency I think, and I think you raise a number of great issues to your point, if the FBI acts on this or recommends taking actions with the Justice Department. What do you think happens if that happens, Congressman, but the Justice Department doesn't act? 

Gowdy: There's one jury that our framers gave us every four years in November and the fact that DOJ may or may not do something, the voters can certainly mete out their own discipline and to Senator Rubio's point the mishandling of information, the decision to have your own server, whether or not there's any criminality, the jury can judge that. The voters can judge that. 

The latest admission by Cavuto and Gowdy that the goal of the select committee is to “deliver a knockout blow” to Hillary Clinton comes after months of allegations that the committee abandoned conducting a comprehensive investigation into the attacks, turning its mission instead into a political “sham” meant to damage Clinton.

In October 2015, The New York Times reported that Bradley Podliska, a former investigator on the Republican-led Benghazi committee, accused the committee of becoming “preoccupied with the State Department's role in the controversy surrounding the Benghazi attack and less interested in a comprehensive investigation.” 

A month earlier, in September 2015, Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), came under fire for comments he made on Fox News' Hannity in which he boasted that the Benghazi committee was damaging Hillary Clinton's poll numbers. McCarthy's comments led to a repudiation from House Republicans with Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) calling on McCarthy to apologize.