One of the first questions Gowdy was asked today during a press conference announcing the Benghazi report was how he could convince anyone it was about more than presidential politics. Gowdy’s answer, which he repeated several times, was to simply read the report.

A reporter at the press conference asked, “There are folks who are going to read this report and say this is just a part to go get Hillary Clinton 130 days before the election and 27 days before the convention. How do you, regardless of what’s in the report—that’s going to be the criticism, how do you deflect that?…How do you not get that perceived as something that’s political.”

Gowdy replied, “Read the report for yourself. If you can read this report and you believe, on the last page of the report, that it is about one person instead of about four people then there’s nothing I can say that’s going to disabuse you of that.” Gowdy added, “The Democrats’ mantra all along has been that there is no new information well there’s indisputably new information so now there position is but it doesn’t fundamentally change the way we view Benghazi.”

Gowdy concluded his answer saying, “I can’t do anything to disabuse what Elijah [Cummings] thinks. He’s not my audience. My audience are reasonable, fair minded Americans who want to know what happened to four of their fellow citizens and I think they can draw their own conclusions.”

Later, Dana Bash asked Gowdy if his refusal to draw conclusions in the report might suggest, “you don’t have the goods on placing any blame on the administration, specifically the woman who wants to be the President of the United States.”

With a smile, Gowdy replied, “Dana, shockingly, that was not what the House asked me to do. Look at the resolution. The resolution doesn’t mention Secretary Clinton. Speaker Boehner nor Speaker Ryan have ever asked me to do anything about 2016 presidential politics. Speaker Boehner asked me to find out what happened to four of our fellow citizens and I believe that that is what I have done.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NpktBNIuVA