© Reuters/Loren Elliott
When the Benghazi investigation came to a close in 2014, the House Intelligence Committee found "no deliberate wrongdoing" by the Obama administration. This was viewed as a massive failure for the GOP and a huge win for the Democrats, Hillary Clinton in particular (who everyone knew would be the next DNC candidate for president).
The Republican majority then set up a special Select Committee to continue the probe. Kevin McCarthy, at the time the Republican majority leader in the house, was completely honest in a 2015 interview about why the GOP fought so hard to investigate Clinton's involvement in the Benghazi disaster.
"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? Because she's untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought," he said.
McCarthy and his Republican compatriots knew the likelihood of any sort of conviction coming down on any Obama officials was next to none. That wasn't the point. The point of the Benghazi investigations was creating a "strategy to fight and win" - in the long term, not the short term.
Convicting Clinton was never the goal, the goal was to kick the DNC out of the White House. People mocked McCarthy and the GOP establishment after the Benghazi hearings and again when he admitted the real reason behind those investigations. But they stopped mocking him after Donald Trump assumed office almost 4 years ago. They stopped mocking when the leftist tears began to flow, when it became clear that their much-anticipated progressive future had crumbled into useless dust.
McCarthy and the Benghazi hearings are not the only thing that kept Clinton from becoming the first female president. There were numerous other factors. Benghazi certainly didn't help, however, and by forcing the issue into a massive public debacle the GOP refused to let anyone forget about it. In other words, McCarthy's approach was no silver bullet to slay her - but it did help.
Now the DNC is doing the exact same thing, with these impeachment hearings. They know there's no chance of removing Trump from office outside of beating him in 2020, something that they probably can't do. All their candidates are awful and the economy is good. Plus, incumbent presidents rarely lose; it's only happened five times since 1900.
Just to be clear, there literally is no mathematical way for the DNC to actually remove Trump from office by impeachment. The Constitution gives the responsibility for impeachment to the House of Representatives. Then the Senate has to vote with a two-thirds majority in favor of removal for the president to actually leave office. So yes, the House will impeach Trump. It's currently run by Democrats who are completely dominated by Trump Derangement Syndrome. But President Trump won't be removed from office, because the Senate is Republican.
That's why so much of the testimony so far has been a complete circus sideshow that has nothing to do with "high crimes and misdemeanors." The DNC is doing everything they can to turn the Ukraine quid pro quo into Trump's Benghazi. They need to unleash every last piece of possible ammunition if they're to stand any chance of beating him in 2020. This is the apotheosis of power and party politics. None of this has anything to do with the rule of law, justice or anything remotely rational. It's just a massive mafia street fight, happening within what is supposed to be the most powerful government on Earth.
Instead of focussing on what Trump did (past tense) they should be telling us what they (the Dems) are intending (future tense) to do if they beat Trump in the elections and how they're going to do better than their opponents. Except they probably don't have anything to offer. Except some light entertainment from their Court Jester Amelia Occasional-Cortex?