Earnest on McCarthy: He Said ‘In Public The Thing That Everybody Knows Is True’

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy‘s (R-CA) comments last week connecting the House Select Committee on Benghazi’s investigation with Secretary Hillary Clinton‘s falling poll numbers essentially amounts to the likely House Speaker-to-be “saying in public the thing that everybody knows is true.”

The remarks came under intense scrutiny from Democrats and some Republicans, some of whom have said McCarthy should apologize to the families of the victims of the 2012 terrorist attack. But Democrats in particular have seized on McCarthy’s comments in an effort to validate what they perceived all along: that the committee was established with the goal of damaging Clinton’s presidential bid.

“We’ve known for a long time that the motives of the Benghazi Committee were not pure,” Earnest said at Monday’s press briefing. “And despite that knowledge, we’ve continued to cooperate with them, and we’ll do that in the future, even though Leader McCarthy has made that pretty embarrassing, I think, for many of the Republicans on the committee.”

Although it was rumored that Democrats on the committee would boycott future hearings, Rep. Elijah Cummings (R-MD), the ranking member, denied such speculation and insisted Democrats will be present in order to “defend the truth” from Republicans’ “political attacks” on Clinton. McCarthy has since clarified himself, saying it was “never [his] intention” to imply that the committee’s investigation was political.

Watch the video above, via NBC News.

[Image via screengrab]

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