WASHINGTON — House Democrats will decide whether to pull their members from the Benghazi Select Committee following the committee’s hearing Thursday with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Minority Leader [crscore]Nancy Pelosi[/crscore] told The Daily Caller during her weekly press conference Thursday.
“We’ve been having this debate since they came up with this taxpayer scheme to undermine Hillary Clinton,” Pelosi said. “People said, ‘Don’t even appoint people.’ And so we had that debate back and forth in our caucus. We chose the path that Mr. Cummings described. You have to be in the room to defend the truth.”
“I’ll be hearing from my colleagues who have been in that room to see what course of action they want to take next,” she continued. “Let’s just see how the hearing goes today and what’s next? Is this thing forever? Are they ever going to make a decision about whether to continue this? Is this in perpetuity — this committee? We’ll see, but I’ll respect the wishes of my members of the committee.”
“I’ll respect their judgment and we’ll talk about this when this is over,” Pelosi added.
California Democratic Rep. [crscore]Adam Schiff[/crscore], a member of the committee, told Reuters Tuesday that Democrats may consider resigning from the committee after Clinton testifies.
“That, I think, is going to be a matter of our discussion after the hearing this week: How much longer does it make sense for us to continue to participate?” Schiff said.
The committee’s ranking member, Maryland Democratic Rep. [crscore]Elijah Cummings[/crscore], however, said it is better for Democrats to participate to “defend the truth.”
“I think we have to be careful about leaving the committee for this reason. Somebody has to defend the truth. I mean, c’mon, if you don’t have anybody to make sure that the process is fair — to make sure that the entire committee and I’m talking about the entire committee’s product is one that has as much integrity as possible and make sure that the truth us defended.”