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Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.), who chairs the House select committee investigating the Benghazi massacre, has invited former secretary of state Hillary Clinton to submit to a private, transcribed interview with committee staff. The interview would cover her improper use of a private e-mail system to conduct government business, and her unilateral decision to destroy over 30,000 e-mails previously stored on a Clinton-owned server – e-mails that she and her counsel dubiously claim have been irretrievably deleted.

In a column on Tuesday, I argued that this invitation is a mistake: Mrs. Clinton should be subpoenaed, forthwith, to provide public testimony under oath. Congress’s Benghazi investigation is supposed to be about public accountability, and there is no justification for extending the courtesy of a private interview to a critical witness who has been impeding investigations of Benghazi for two-and-a-half years. Some sympathetic to Representative Gowdy’s approach point out that the private interview is not an either-or proposition: Having Mrs. Clinton submit to a private interview with committee staff now does not preclude calling her as a witness at a public hearing later on. The point is academic since, as I will explain, it is hard to imagine Mrs. Clinton and her lawyers agreeing to submit to a private staff interview. But it is nonetheless worth considering this “private interview now, public testimony later” strategy.

If that is truly Mr. Gowdy’s plan, then the rationale he has offered is even more mystifying than I originally posited. According to the explanation the chairman gave Greta Van Susteren on Monday night, he does not want to summon Mrs. Clinton for public testimony at this point, in part, because he does not want to play into the suggestion that he is engaged in “a political charade.” That is, he does not want to help Democrats manufacture the perception that the Republican-led investigation is just a pretext to inflict damage on Mrs. Clinton, the Democrats’ putative nominee for president in 2016. RELATED: Why Won’t the Benghazi Committee Compel Hillary to Testify? As I pointed out in yesterday’s column, a good investigator does not get caught up in such political calculations. For one thing, he cannot control them: He knows that no matter what he does, the opposing party will claim it is politically motivated.

More to the point, by openly acknowledging that he is weighing the politics of obtaining Clinton’s testimony, Gowdy – however inadvertently – gives Democrats exactly what he says he wants to avoid giving them: ammunition to buttress claims that the investigation is political. But in light of Gowdy’s stated motive, let’s consider his plan. He has reportedly invited Mrs. Clinton to do the private interview by May 1. The interview is supposed to cover only Clinton’s improper private e-mail system and her destruction of evidence. While important, that constitutes only a bare fraction of what Clinton needs to be questioned about – she is a central figure in the Benghazi debacle, second in significance only to President Obama. Not wanting to appear political, Gowdy will presumably also want to interview her privately about those many other Benghazi matters, too. Who knows when that will happen – indeed, who knows why it hasn’t happened already? Meanwhile, Mrs. Clinton will, some time soon, announce her candidacy. If Gowdy, beset by worry over being accused of engineering a political charade, declined to demand public testimony before Clinton was officially a candidate, how is he going to justify demanding it after she has formally launched a presidential campaign? More Hillary Clinton Auto-Deleting Hillary’s Inactive Account Why Won’t the Benghazi Committee

Compel Hillary to Testify? The Five Worst Clinton E-mail Excuses Can’t you already just hear the Democrats? Led by the formidable Clinton machine that chewed Ken Starr to bits, they’ll inveigh: “It has been a year since Gowdy took over the probe of an incident that had already been extensively investigated by several committees before his appointment. In fact, Gowdy was a member of one of those prior investigative committees, so he had intimate knowledge of the case by the time the select committee was formed. Hillary was obviously a central witness, and Gowdy could have called her to testify at any time over the last year. Yet he slow-walked the investigation, intentionally delaying for months and months, only to pounce at the moment when Republicans figured they could do maximum damage to her campaign. As we’ve said for months, this is a patent political charade.”

At that point, Gowdy’s choice will be (a) to subpoena Clinton for public testimony and thus subject himself to this onslaught, which would be many times more intense than the criticism he is seeking to avoid right now; or (b) to show how high-minded and bipartisan he is by announcing that his committee will not interfere in the 2016 campaign by seeking Clinton’s public testimony. RELATED: The Five Worst Clinton E-mail Excuses Having long sensed a lack of Republican zeal to get to the bottom of Benghazi, let’s just say I’m pessimistic about the choice the chairman will make. I hope I’m wrong. Is there a different scenario in which we could see Mrs. Clinton in the witness chair at a public committee hearing? Yes … but only if it happens soon, and only after Mrs. Clinton declines Chairman Gowdy’s invitation to a private interview. Understand: No witness is required to submit to a pre-testimony interview. The law mandates only that one honor a subpoena to testify at a formal proceeding. A staff interview is voluntary.

That’s why I can’t see it happening. The point of a transcribed interview is to create a paper trail. Let’s say Mrs. Clinton were subpoenaed for public testimony, and, as often seems to happen to her, she found herself needing to make up new explanations when confronted by damaging facts. If she had submitted to the private interview, Gowdy could use the transcript to impeach her, just like a prosecutor uses statements made during an earlier police interview to cross-examine a slippery witness who tries to change her story at trial. Mrs. Clinton’s modus operandi is to avoid paper trails at all costs. She is in the latest mess of her own making precisely because she took extraordinary (and illegal) steps to insulate her communications from State Department record-keeping. She is the same Mrs. Clinton who, as secretary of state, managed to avoid being interviewed about Benghazi by her own hand-picked Accountability Review Board (and, as I mentioned in Tuesday’s column, a senior official says Mrs. Clinton’s aides mined State Department records to withhold information from the ARB).

Why would someone so obsessed with avoiding paper trails volunteer to give one to a committee led by the opposition party just so they could hammer her with it? Moreover, Mrs. Clinton has to know – and she certainly has good enough lawyers to tell her, ever so gently – that her gaffe penchant is an argument against answering any questions that can be avoided. Even when interviewers are friendly, and sometimes even when she can script the answers ahead of time, she tends to court disaster. It was just three weeks ago that Mrs. Clinton chose to hold her press conference, evidently confident she could put the e-mail controversy to rest. She must have spent hours preparing for it with her retinue of advisors, lawyers and spin doctors. The result? A clueless yarn about not wanting to carry two communications devices around – a story that was laugh-out-loud ludicrous on its face (every 12-year-old knows you can access multiple e-mail accounts on a single device) and that has now been exploded as a bald-faced lie (she in fact carried at least two devices – and there is easily retrievable audio of her breezy claim, just two weeks before the press conference, “I have an iPad, a mini iPad, an iPhone and a Blackberry”). While a Clinton in name and ambition,

Hillary lacks Bill’s agility and rogue charm. They both bounce from scandal to scandal, but she digs herself deeper where he would nimbly escape. And, to be blunt, she simply does not have the likeability that made people want to overlook his flaws – very few politicians do. So, since there is no requirement that she submit to a grilling by Gowdy’s staff, why run the risk? Mrs. Clinton and her counsel are thus likely to decline Chairman Gowdy’s interview invitation – probably after taking a few weeks to appear to mull the offer over. Gowdy would then be forced to decide whether to subpoena her for immediate public testimony and endure howling from the left that he is politicizing the Benghazi investigation, or forgo her testimony altogether and endure howling from the right that his investigation is a sham. At the moment, there is great public interest in Mrs. Clinton’s private e-mail scheme, interest only heightened by her own absurd attempts to explain it away. In light of that, and of the fact that Clinton is not yet an announced candidate, Gowdy could well calculate that this is as propitious a time as he will have to call her as a public witness. While Clinton would clearly prefer not to answer questions at all, she could prepare behind the scenes with committee Democrats. They would do their best to protect her at the public hearing, just as they did when she gave her infamous “What difference, at this point, does it make” testimony about Benghazi two years ago. They could lead her through some testimony about how thoroughly Benghazi has already been investigated, praise her distinguished career, bloviate about how the committee is a political farce, and run out the clock. In between, Gowdy and committee Republicans could have some fun making her squirm about the e-mails. Mrs. Clinton would be damaged, though probably not much more than she already is. Meanwhile, we would be no closer to answers about Benghazi. Does anyone remember when getting them was the point? — Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book is Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.

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