The House select committee probing the Benghazi bloodbath should have grilled Hillary Clinton in public hearings long ago, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy tells
Newsmax TV.
"We should have had robust public hearings in this investigation already. I mean it's been 10 months," McCarthy said Monday on "The Steve Malzberg Show.
McCarthy was referring to the time that has passed since the House Republican leadership formed the committee being led by Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina.
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"[Gowdy's] approach has been to say, I'm building this meticulous case and I want to interview people like a prosecutor does in his office and then at some point in time, who knows when, we're going to have the public hearings," he said.
But McCarthy — who was Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and prosecuted against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 others in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center — doesn't agree with that strategy.
"You don't go about something like this, which is a public accountability congressional investigation, as if it were a criminal investigation. It's simply not the same thing," he said.
Gowdy has invited Clinton — who was secretary of state when Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed in the Sept. 12, 2012 attack — to meet him for a private interview.
"When I was a prosecutor, I liked to bring people in for private interviews. It usually makes your testimony on the stand go smoother because you make sure that people don't blurt out things that are irrelevant and such," McCarthy said.
"But you can't compel them to come in for an interview. You can only compel them for public testimony."
The select committee has called for Clinton — the presumed 2016 Democratic candidate for president, to testify by May 1 — following a scandal involving her use of private emails while leading the State Department.
The request came after Clinton rejected his earlier demand that she turn over her private computer server, on which her emails were stored, to officials for a third-party review.
McCarthy is a National Review columnist and author of
"Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama's Impeachment," published by Encounter Books.