Possible Clinton running mate decries Benghazi ‘witch hunt’

Julian Castro, an Obama Cabinet secretary floated as a potential running mate for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, said on Sunday the release of State Department emails relating to Benghazi is part of “basically a witch hunt.”

{mosads}“What you have here with these emails is basically a witch hunt, and Congressman [Trey] Gowdy [R-S.C.], who is leading this, is very intentionally trying to manipulate this witch hunt to play politics,” Castro, the Housing and Urban Development Secretary, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Under public pressure, the State Department on Friday released hundreds of emails between Clinton and other department officials related to the 2012 attack on the American embassy in Benghazi, Libya. Gowdy, who is chairing a congressional investigative committee into the events around the attack, has called Clinton to testify on the matter before Congress later this year.

“This thing has been studied to death, by Republicans and by Democrats, several committees, including in Congress, that have all said, ‘Yes, of course what happened was tragic, but Secretary Clinton was not in any way at fault,’ ” Castro said.

Democrats have pitched Castro as a potential running mate for Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, speculation he has brushed off as “flattering.”

“If I had a dime for every amount of speculation that happens in DC, I think all of us would be wealthy,” he said.