The House Select Committee on Benghazi has been furiously preparing for months to interrogate Hillary Rodham Clinton about private email accounts, the computer server in her house, and Americans killed in Libya, but on the eve of the hearing Thursday, it is not Clinton who is on the defensive.

It is the committee.

Congressional Republicans have made so many missteps in the run-up to their marquee event of the presidential primary that the chairman of the committee finally implored his colleagues over the weekend, "Shut up talking about things you don't know anything about." The Clinton campaign now views the daylong grilling that once threatened to derail her White House bid as a veritable campaign stop.

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"Republicans on the committee are going to be under intense pressure to justify their very existence, to justify the existence of this committee and to prove to the American people that this committee is not just another arm of the Republican National Committee," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday.