When someone knows that a situation like an ambassador's death is covered up by a President and Sec of State, it is well worth finding out why they felt they must do that.

Thus, in this case, Trey Gowdy felt for sure something was wrong in DC and knew he needed to get control of the information that HRC and OhB were hiding.

In our country, that generally takes an election and an informed voter population. Part of the Federalists papers explains why there is oversight authority in the legislative branch. Trey exercised his authority under the constitution in an attempt (1) to drill down far enough to find this reason and (2) to help inform the population as to potential illegal action in the executive branch and to vote for a situation that would help find the answer.

I would submit that it is not willful Ignorance that creates this divide. Liberals push feelings to define morality and Republicans push facts to define morality in most situations. Thus, if one wants feelings to solve problems, they ignore facts and vice versa. Of course, one behavior does not dominate 100% of the time. Both parties will move back and forth from feelings to facts in an effort to gain majority in the votes of the elected representatives or voting population.

I dare say that any/all of us are guilty of willful ignorance to some extent or degree.

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool."—Richard Feynman

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."—Aldous Huxley

Willful ignorance is the state and practice of ignoring any sensory input that appears to contradict one's inner model of reality. At heart, it is almost certainly driven by confirmation bias.

Willful ignorance differs from ordinary 'ignorance' — when someone is simply unaware of something — in that willfully ignorant people are fully aware of facts, resources and sources, but refuse to acknowledge them. Indeed, calling someone 'ignorant' shouldn’t really be a pejorative, but intentional and willful ignorance is an entirely different matter. In practice though, the word 'ignorance' has often come to mean 'willful ignorance', and indeed, in many non-English languages, the word based on the same stem ('ignore') actually carries that meaning.

Willful ignorance is sometimes referred to as tactical stupidity.

Depending on the nature and strength of an individual's pre-existing beliefs, willful ignorance can manifest itself in different ways. The practice can entail completely disregarding established facts, evidence and/or reasonable opinions if they fail to meet one's expectations. Often the willfully ignorant will make excuses, claiming that a source is unreliable, suggesting that an experiment was flawed or asserting that an opinion is too biased. More often than not this is simple circular reasoning: “I cannot agree with that source because it is untrustworthy because it disagrees with me”.

In other slightly more extreme cases, willful ignorance can involve outright refusal to read, hear or study, in any way, anything that does not conform to the willfully ignorant person's worldview.

With regard to oneself, this can even extend to fake locked-in syndrome with complete unresponsiveness. Or with regard to others, to outright censorship of the material from others.

You sir, totally miss the point of our government. The divide is created not because they fight for power. It is because they do not do their job as defined by our Constitution. Trump and current admin fights to bring government back under the law of the constitution.

Thus, anyone that thinks feelings over rule law, is not obeying the law. Those of you that offer wiki leaks or psychology today as proof for anything, are only lowering yourself to law written by the perpetrators or violators of Constitutional Law. Or simply stated, putting the fox in charge of the hen house.

Feelings are not definers of morality or law. Feelings are only someones' effort to persuade based on getting an emotional hook. Leaders need to make tough calls. All the marines on this sight should understand those calls are not all fuzzy love things. They are hard and especially when lives are at stake.

The issue is democrats politicians use emotions to make law. Emotions should only be used to get one motivated to conform to the law of the land.