A House Benghazi committee interview with former State Department aide Bryan Pagliano, who managed Hillary Clinton’s private email network, lasted only 15 minutes Thursday after he refused to answer questions.
Transcribed interviews of Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s former chief of staff, and Sidney Blumenthal, an informal adviser to Clinton from her time at State, both took roughly nine hours.
Rep. Elijah Cummings, the committee’s ranking Democrat, first announced that Pagliano had refused to talk with the panel.
“We knew he was going to do that last week,” the Maryland Democrat said, before blaming Pagliano’s appearance on politics.
“I would love to hear what he has to say,” Cummings said.
He suggested conferring with the FBI about a possible immunity deal.
Chairman Trey Gowdy said the committee had prepared 19 pages of questions, but only got through four or five before it became clear that Pagliano had no intention of answering.
The South Carolina Republican said Thursday marked the first time one of the 45 witnesses called before the committee had invoked the Fifth Amendment.
Gowdy said lawmakers had hoped to question Pagliano about the chain of command, preservation of evidence and the 15 emails provided to the committee by another witness, Blumenthal, that Clinton had withheld from the State Department.
Still, he suggested allowing the executive branch to take the lead on offering Pagliano an immunity deal because the branch has “the best access to evidence.”
“Traditionally that is the branch we’ve looked to to conduct investigations,” Gowdy told reporters after the interview had ended.
Flanked by several individuals presumed to be his legal team, Pagliano briefly attended the closed-door interview Thursday afternoon after alerting the select committee through his attorney last week of his intention to plead the Fifth Amendment in response to lawmakers’ questions.
Gowdy required Pagliano to appear in person Thursday to assert his Fifth Amendment rights, rather than canceling the interview altogether.
Republican members of the committee said they hoped the former Clinton aide would decide to answer questions once behind closed doors.
“Just because someone says they’re going to [plead the Fifth], doesn’t mean when they get in the actual setting that they’re actually going to do it,” Rep. Jim Jordan, a member of the select committee, told the Washington Examiner. “There’s a difference between the warm-up and the game.”
Through his attorney, Pagliano has declined requests from three separate congressional committees to discuss his involvement with Clinton’s server.
The chairmen of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Homeland Security Committee invited Pagliano’s attorney to meet with staff from both committees in order to discuss a possible immunity deal, which would allow Pagliano to answer questions about the server without risking incrimination.
Two-thirds of one of the committees involved would need to vote in favor of granting Pagliano immunity, and could only do so after giving the attorney general at least 10 days of notice of their intention to seek the immunity order, a committee aide told the Examiner.
Clinton acknowledged Saturday that she had paid Pagliano personally to manage her private email network.
Before working as an IT analyst at the State Department, Pagliano was paid by Clinton’s political action committee for “computer services” during her first presidential bid.
