Even Benghazi-obsessed Trey Gowdy says phony Clinton scandal isn't worth special counsel

It was a sale then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was only tangentially involved in, but some obsessive Republicans, along with Fox News, have tried to turn the distant hollow tale into an official Clinton Scandal, nearly one decade after the fact. (The New York Times first tried to launch the story in 2015, and failed.)

On Tuesday night, Sean Hannity went full Glenn Beck when he unveiled the outlines of the supposedly sprawling controversy:

That same day, during a House Judiciary Committee hearing, resident Republican screwball Gohmert was brandishing his own conspiratorial depiction of all the moving pieces into the harebrained, Clinton witch-hunt storyline:

Republicans, led by Donald Trump and Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, have been pushing the Department of Justice to appoint a special counsel to investigate the uranium sale, even though there’s nothing to actually investigate. Nine different federal agencies approved the deal and few if any objections were made at the time. (Just ask Fox anchor Shep Smith.)

Also, Republicans have given no reason why investigators at the Department of Justice aren’t capable of looking into the deal (yet again). They’ve offered no justification for why the extraordinary step of a special counsel is needed.

And that’s the point Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) stressed on Fox News Wednesday. Gowdy — who served as the GOP’s Captain Ahab during the Obama years, forever chasing the Benghazi conspiracy whale — announced the facts simply don’t support the appointment of a special counsel:

GOWDY: On the issue of special counsel, I did not sign — Jim Jordan’s a great friend, I have tremendous respect for him — I did not sign the letter because I do not think the threshold has been met for the appointment of a special counsel. And I think this is a really important point, you can investigate something without a special counsel. In fact, 99.9 percent of all investigations in this country are done by the women and men at the Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s offices, and none of them is called special counsel. So there’s a threshold that has to be met and I don’t think it has been met. […] The appointment of special counsel, when you hear special counsel, what you should hear in your head is the current people we have that we are paying to be federal prosecutors cannot do the job.

Gowdy joins Attorney General Jeff Sessions who on Tuesday also broke hearts at Fox News when he told Republicans in Congress that the “factual basis” did not warrant the appointment of a special counsel.