The GOP's Benghazi Kerfuffle Couldn’t Have Come at a Better Time for Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton has been on a pretty good run. In a matter of weeks, her opponents have helped undermine two of the biggest sources of negative press that she has faced in her bid for the White House.

Last Friday, fellow Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders publicly told Clinton that everybody is "sick and tired about hearing about your damn emails," referring to the ongoing saga over the private email server that she used during her tenure as secretary of state.

Several Republican lawmakers offered up another gift recently when they said that the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which was set up to investigate the 2012 attack on the US diplomatic compound in Libya, was designed to hurt Clinton's chances in 2016. Democrats have been making similar claims since the Republican-led body was established in May 2014.

On Thursday, Clinton will appear before the Benghazi panel in a public hearing that will examine what role she played — if any — in the September 11, 2012 attack that killed four people, including US Ambassador Christopher Stevens. Many Republicans maintain that Clinton should not have sent diplomats to Libya in the first place, and then didn't provide enough security for staff while they were there, despite their repeated requests. The GOP has been trying to muffle rogue members who have recently split away from that assessment.

Related: New Clinton Campaign Video Calls Benghazi Investigation 'Political Charade'

In a televised interview on Sunday, the Benghazi committee's chairman, Representative Trey Gowdy, a Republican from South Carolina, told lawmakers not involved in the panel to "shut up talking about things that you don't know anything about," adding that "unless you are on the committee, you have no idea what we have done, why we've done it."

The brouhaha began after House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California, suggested in an interview with Fox News at the end of September that the Benghazi panel was formed to attack Clinton, not get to the bottom of what happened in the terror attack.

"Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee," McCarthy said. "What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping."

McCarthy subsequently walked back the statements, but just seven days later, he dropped out of the running to be the next House Speaker, saying he didn't think he could unify a splintered caucus. Yet less than a week later, Representative Richard Hanna, a Republican from New York, backed up McCathy's statement, telling a radio show, "Sometimes the biggest sin you can commit in DC is to tell the truth."

"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," Hanna said.

Republicans are also currently embroiled in a spat with a former Benghazi committee investigator. Major Bradley Podliska, an Air Force Reserve officer and self described "conservative Republican," plans to file a lawsuit claiming he was fired unlawfully for trying to conduct a comprehensive investigation into the incident while his superiors were only interested in targeting Clinton.

Jeremy Carl, a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution who closely follows GOP politics, said that in recent days "you've seen people really put their foot in their mouths" over Benghazi.

"When it happened, people were genuinely angry in the conservative grassroots movement about what happened to the ambassador and claims that he wasn't sufficiently protected," Carl said. "But over time partisan politics has taken focus away from the substance of the issue."

Related: Kevin McCarthy Just Dropped Out of the Race for Speaker of the House

Gowdy, who says he has stopped watching TV and reading papers ahead of Clinton's testimony, was forced over the weekend to defend the panel's integrity on CBS, saying it was focused on getting to the bottom of Benghazi, and not on personal attacks on Clinton or her email. The statement came after Gowdy accused Clinton earlier this month of revealing the name of a CIA source in an email forwarded from her private server to a colleague. He claimed the information was "some of the most protected information in our intelligence community," and debunked "her claim that she never sent any classified information from her private email address."

But the Benghazi Committee's ranking member, Representative Elijah E. Cummings, a Democrat from Maryland, called on Sunday for Gowdy to apologize, saying the CIA had confirmed that the information sent from the server was never classified.

The public Republican unraveling over Benghazi could not have come at a better time for Clinton as she prepares to testify before the panel this week, and as the race for the Democratic nomination heats up. At the first Democratic debate last Tuesday, Clinton defended the 2011 US military intervention in Libya, saying it helped overthrow the "murderous dictator [Muammar] Qaddafi," and "produced the first free elections in the country since 1951."

While Democratic presidential candidate Jim Webb claimed at the recent debate that Benghazi was the "inevitable" result of the US invasion, Clinton blamed a conflagration of factors, including the Arab Spring.

The US government initially thought the attack on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi was caused by a "spontaneous protest" over Innocence of Muslims, an anti-Islamic film that sparked demonstrations across the Muslim world after it was uploaded to YouTube earlier in 2011. The militant group Ansar al-Sharia soon claimed partial responsibility, however, and in August 2013, US officials charged Ahmed Abu Khattala, a senior leader of the group, for his role in the attack. Khattala was arrested last June.

Since Qaddafi's death, Libya has been locked in a bloody civil war. The resulting chaos has left the North African state open to infiltration by the Islamic State, which has moved in to violently put down civil uprisings and seize control of key roads leading to the country's central oil fields.

Follow Liz Fields on Twitter: @lianzifields

Watch the VICE News documentary Libya: A Broken State: