CHARLES SHOWALTER (HOST): With Hillary Clinton being there for eleven hours, I think the rest of the public saw exactly what these Benghazi hearings were like. Mr. Gowdy, I hate to say it, but he deserves it, he looked like a southern guy treating a woman just poorly and this is the kind of thing that they want to do. But fortunately, I don't think that they have anybody on their team who is capable of mounting an effective campaign against Democrats, period
DAVID BROCK: It doesn't look that way and I think that one of the reasons that they settled on this strategy of trying to tear Hillary Clinton's character down was that they know that no matter who wins the Republican primary, we know what the platform is. And the platform, from more tax breaks for the one percent, to taking away your healthcare and your Social Security, and building a wall and starting another war is not a popular platform. And so they know that they don't really have issues that are going to be persuasive to the public, and so that's why we see this kind of personal campaign as trying to destroy someone's reputation and character. But it's not working, and the Republicans actually did us a bit of a favor in the past few weeks by admitting publicly what we've been saying for a couple years now, which is that this Benghazi investigation is nothing but a partisan campaign to drag Hillary Clinton's poll numbers down. And they are using public money to do it. They are abusing the investigative power of Congress and they are squandering taxpayer money on politics, and it's wrong.
SHOWALTER: Absolutely. David, If there is one thing that you could leave with the public, Democrats, Independents, Republicans and have them understand it, what would that be?
BROCK: The one thing is that you've got a whole host of Republican and conservative organizations that are out there trying to dig up dirt on Hillary. And you have a press corps that is too often willing to be used by those groups for partisan ends. I have a long section in this book about how the Benghazi committee manipulated The New York Times for example, very successfully. So the one thing I would say is be very skeptical of what you're reading when you read the Clinton coverage, not only in the conservative media but in the mainstream media too. It's become a serious problem, there have been a number of errors in this coverage related to Hillary's email use, and so consider the source.
