Democrats on the House Select Committee on Benghazi seized on recent comments by Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy to justify releasing transcripts of closed-door interviews with key witnesses, beginning with that of Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton’s former chief of staff.
In a letter to Republican Chairman Trey Gowdy Monday, panel Democrats blasted the majority for “selective leaks” that they said painted an unflattering and unfair picture of Clinton’s role in the 2012 Benghazi terror attack.
Clinton and her supporters quickly touted McCarthy’s self-described gaffe — in which he implied last week that the select committee had actively worked to bring down Clinton’s poll numbers — as evidence that the Benghazi committee’s mission has become political in nature.
Hours before panel Democrats published their letter, the former secretary of state said the select committee’s investigation is “not appropriate” during an appearance on the “Today” show Monday morning.
“This committee was set up, as they have admitted, for the purpose of making a partisan political issue out of the deaths of four Americans,” Clinton said, referring to McCarthy’s comments. “I would’ve never done that, and if I were president and there were Republicans or Democrats who were thinking about that, I would’ve done everything to shut it down.”
Benghazi Democrats pointed to the June 22 release of 179 pages of emails between Clinton and Sidney Blumenthal, one of her informal advisors, in their call to publish interview transcripts without the consent of the majority.
Rep. Elijah Cummings, the committee’s top Democrat, demanded a vote on whether to release the Blumenthal transcript in June after Republicans chose to publish his emails.
Gowdy refused, arguing he would not treat Blumenthal differently than any other witness by making his transcribed interview public. The committee has interviewed dozens of officials behind closed doors this year, including two senior intelligence officials last week alone.
Lawmakers interviewed Mills on Sept. 3 in a session that lasted more than nine hours. Speaking to reporters after the interview, Gowdy said Republican members planned to treat the interview as “classified.”
But panel Democrats argued in their letter that the session was inherently unclassified because members without security clearances were permitted to participate.
“The stenographers who recorded the interview also considered the session to be unclassified,” the letter said. “In fact, they prepared and transmitted the interview transcript to the select committee as an unclassified document.”
“In addition, your staff emailed a copy of the transcript to our staff on our unclassified email system which, ironically, is precisely what Republicans have accused Secretary Clinton of doing,” the minority added.
A Republican spokesman for the committee did not immediately return a request for comment to address the Democrats’ allegations.
The minority detailed a number of “inaccurate Republican leaks” from the Mills interview in its argument in favor of publishing the transcript from her session.
Among other examples of unflattering leaks, committee Democrats cited a Washington Examiner interview with Rep. Jim Jordan, a member of the select committee, in which the Ohio Republican raised concerns about Mills’ involvement with an internal State Department review of Benghazi.
Democrats argued “the only way to adequately correct the public record” is to release the Mills transcript. They published a small excerpt of the interview that seemed to counter Jordan’s suggestion that Mills had attempted to “exert influence” over the agency’s internal review.
Another portion of the transcript published in the letter Monday refuted the notion that Clinton had ordered responders to “stand down” rather than intervene in the raid on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi.
“Republicans have never disclosed any of this information from the interview of Ms. Mills to the public because it directly contradicts their political narrative,” the Democrats wrote.
They gave Republicans and Mills’ legal team five days to respond with concerns about any particular parts of the interview that needed to be withheld, but reiterated their commitment to making the transcript public.
Gowdy had successfully fought off Democrats’ demands that interview transcripts be published following the high-profile depositions of Blumenthal and Mills.
But McCarthy’s comments have emboldened opponents of the probe to work toward tearing it down, throwing the committee into chaos just three weeks before Clinton is set to testify in a public hearing.
The select committee first uncovered Clinton’s use of a private email account by demanding documents from the State Department that the agency discovered it did not have in its archives. The committee also exposed the relationship between Blumenthal and Clinton that allowed the ousted aide to serve as a top advisor on foreign policy in Libya.
