Before vanishing in a puff of smoke a week ago, Republic House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy asserted that the House’s select committee on Benghazi had been very successful ... in damaging Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers. The backlash against those comments may have led to McCarthy’s abrupt withdrawal from the Speaker of the House race, but this week, one of his Republic colleagues admitted what McCarthy said was basically true.

“Sometimes the biggest sin you can commit in D.C. is to tell the truth,” Rep. Richard Hanna (R-N.Y.) said on a New York morning radio show Wednesday.

“This may not be politically correct, but I think that there was a big part of this investigation that was designed to go after people and an individual, Hillary Clinton ... After what Kevin McCarthy said, it’s difficult to accept at least a part of it was not [political].”

The select committee was meant to investigate the attack that killed four people, among them U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, in Libya back in 2012, but it’s also had the effect of keeping alive the meme that the attack was all Hillary’s fault. (See, for example, the typo-ridden attack ad StopHillaryPAC ran during the Democratic debate this week.)

The committee has also come under fire from one of its former investigators, Maj. Bradley Podliska, who claimed he was fired because “he resisted pressure to focus his investigative efforts solely on the State Department and Clinton’s role,” CNN reported.

Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), the head of the select committee, called Podliska’s claims “sensationalistic and fabulist,” and trashed CNN as not “fact-centric,” unlike his objective, unbiased, non-witch-hunty committee, for interviewing Podliska in the first place.

Hillary Clinton is scheduled to testify before that committee on October 22.

[h/t ThinkProgress, Photo of Hanna via AP Images]