Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Calif., said Monday that Congress still hasn’t seen “thousands” of documents from the Obama administration related to the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, and accused Hillary Clinton of stonewalling lawmakers’ effort to investigate.
“There are scores and scores of documents, thousands we understand that we have not yet seen,” he said on Fox News. “We don’t know the contents of them. We can be pretty sure they weren’t just about yoga and schedules.”
Pompeo said Clinton has clearly worked to keep her emails and other documents away from Congress, and noted that the House Select Committee on Benghazi didn’t get many of her work emails “until the third or fourth attempt.” For that reason, he said it “won’t surprise me that there are more Benghazi-related documents that neither Congress [nor] America has seen yet.”
Pompeo said he is “very disappointed” in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s handling of the case, and said FBI officials failed to spend “any serious time” on Clinton’s intentions, “the very reason they said they couldn’t prosecute.”
The FBI said it would not pursue criminal charges against Clinton or anyone on her team, since there was no evidence that her team intended to mishandle classified information on her private email server.
But Pompeo and other Republicans have pointed to other evidence, such as the recent finding that the FBI couldn’t recover any of the 13 devices Clinton used to access her information, and that at least two of those devices were physically destroyed.
“When someone smashes 13 phones, that looks like intent,” said Pompeo.
Pompeo is on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which has subpoenaed Bryan Pagliano, a former staffer for Clinton’s failed 2008 presidential campaign, to testify. Pagliano was one of two who have been granted immunity by the Justice Department in exchange for providing information for the investigation into Clinton’s private email server, and he will testify at the committee on Tuesday.
In May, the State Department reported it was unable to find Pagliano’s work-related emails while he was working as an IT specialist for the State Department. Pompeo said on Fox that learning more from Pagliano will be key to learning more about Clinton’s emails.
“Our committee was the first one to attempt to interview him. He took the Fifth during the course of our questioning of him. I hope tomorrow we will get some answers from him,” he said. “That is at the heart of unlocking the understanding of where these documents went, how they were deleted, the structure of the system she set up, and frankly the intentionality which she hid this information from Congress and the American people.
“[T]he only reason you give someone immunity, the only reason you protect someone from prosecution who was at the center of an elaborate scheme to defraud the American people, the only reason you give them immunity is because you want to learn something from them,” Pompeo said. “That is normally before a grand jury or trial and in this case has been neither.”
