A reporter than asked Issa if he was still "confident" the investigation would "get to the bottom of this." "It may well be we have gotten to the bottom of it," Issa said. "At this point, roads lead to Ms. Lerner. The witness who to took the Fifth. That becomes -- she becomes one of the key characters at this point. Had she been willing to explain those emails which were provided through separate subpoenas, then we could have perhaps brought this to a close. Without that, it may dead end with Ms. Lerner."
Earlier in his capricious tenure, he banned Democratic witness Sandra Fluke from a panel about birth control, leaving an all-male slate of witnesses and giving his Republican Party a major embarrassment. His hearings have been chaotic affairs in which he talks over members of his panel, and he has often discredited his committee's investigations by making incendiary accusations that turn out to be unfounded. His latest: speculating at a fundraiser last month about why Pentagon assets were not mobilized to protect American facilities in Benghazi, Libya, when they were attacked in 2012 because Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton "told them to stand down." But the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee found that there were no such orders. "Well," Issa told Fox News's Chris Wallace when pressed about this on Sunday, "the use in answering questions in a political fundraiser, that was in response to a question, the term 'stand down' is not used in some sort of an explicit way." On the IRS, similarly, Issa had said that it was "the targeting of the president's political enemies effectively and lies about it," and that he would prove it was directed "out of Washington headquarters."