Hillary Clinton’s campaign begins running a national ad on Tuesday that highlights statements from House Speaker hopeful Kevin McCarthy which revealed that the Benghazi select committee was set up to politically destroy her.
Says the ad: “The Republicans finally admit it.”
McCarthy told FOX News host Sean Hannity last week:
“The question you really want to ask me is how am I going to be different? What you’re going to see is a conservative speaker that takes a conservative congress that puts a strategy to fight and win. Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee. A select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Cause she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought and made that happen.”
Clinton uses McCarthy’s sound byte in the new ad, which adds: “Republicans have spent millions attacking Hillary, because she is fighting for everything they oppose, from affordable healthcare to equal pay, she’ll never stop fighting for you, and the Republicans know it.”
Clinton herself jumped on the remarks in a TODAY show interview on Monday, saying:
“This committee was set up, as they have admitted, for the purpose of making a partisan, political issue out of the deaths of four Americans. I would have never done that! And if I were president — and there were Republicans or Democrats who were thinking about that — I would have done everything to shut it down.”
Watch the Hillary Clinton ad:
Politico adds:
While Clinton’s team has been eyeing the Democratic debate on Oct. 13 as a big moment, it has also been focused on her Oct. 22 Capitol Hill testimony in front of the committee as an opportunity to move past the controversy.
The ad suggests that Clinton’s team will keep pushing McCarthy’s message leading up to the testimony as a way of combating the panel’s Republicans. And it demonstrates that the team will likely take an aggressive stance heading into the middle of the month.
