WASHINGTON — In its first meeting of 2015, the House special committee investigating the 2012 attacks on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, once again Tuesday became an exercise in fingerpointing, with Republicans saying the White House is evading and Democrats saying Republicans are stonewalling.
Rep. Trey Dowdy, R-S.C., speaks Tuesday at a House special committee to investigate the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Lybia. The panel’s progress has slowed, with the GOP and Democrats blaming each other as the cause of the issues. (Paige Leskin/MNS)
Committee Chairman Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., along with the other GOP members, accused federal agencies of preventing their access to all documents and witnesses relevant to the events surrounding the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2012, in which U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed.
The committee, formally called the Select Committee on the Events Surrounding the 2012 Terrorist Attack in Benghazi, Libya, called Tuesday on representatives from the State Department and the CIA to respond to the panel’s outstanding document requests.
Gowdy pressed Joel Rubin, the deputy assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs, and Neil Higgins, the CIA’s director of Congressional affairs, to disclose whether their agencies had been completely compliant with the committee.
“I have zero interest in prolonging this committee,” Gowdy said. “We should be analyzing documents, not waiting for them to appear … If you want all of the truth, we need all of the information.”
The committee’s Democrats focused their disapproval and questions not at the witnesses, but at the committee’s Republicans. Democrats used the hearing to criticize the GOP for creating the committee for political purposes.
While Gowdy expressed his intention to get every question answered and every document released, Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., Smith said the expectation was unrealistic. He said “bad things” like Benghazi unfortunately occur sometimes when a president is in office, such as 9/11 during George W. Bush’s presidency and U.S. involvement in Somalia under Bill Clinton.
“There is no question that Benghazi is a bad, bad incident in the Obama administration,” Smith said. “It has always been my suspicion that the purpose of this (investigation) is to focus on that bad incident as much as possible for partisan and political reasons.”
Prior to the hearing, Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the committee, released a series of letters sent to Gowdy that condemned the GOP for cutting Democrats out of key parts of the investigation, including witness interviews and document subpoenas. The committee’s rules lack transparency and encourage the panel to run a biased investigation, Cummings said.
Cummings called on the chairman to run a more bipartisan committee and participate in more joint meetings and decisions.
“We were hopeful, based on your public assurances, that this investigation would be a credible, bipartisan effort to get the truth,” Cummings said in a letter to Gowdy on Friday. “Over the past eight months, Democrats have repeatedly been excluded from core components of the investigation, and we have been proceeding with no rules to prevent this from occurring in the future.”
The committee was formed in May and has held three public hearings. It was formed after four standing committees had held hearings on the attack, but Republicans learned the White House had not provided all the documents requested.
