Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign fought back against allegations that have surfaced through a congressional probe of her handling of the 2012 terror attack in Benghazi.
“Trey Gowdy and the Republicans are clinging to their invented scandal, one that’s on life support,” John Podesta, chairman of Clinton’s campaign, said Sunday.
“Their latest witch hunt is based on the testimony of a non-government employee and a set of documents he turned over, which Gowdy himself called ‘unvetted, uncorroborated, unsubstantiated intelligence,’ ” Podesta added, referring to the House Select Committee on Benghazi’s investigation of Sidney Blumenthal, a former Clinton aide who provided reams of unreliable Libya intelligence to Clinton while she was secretary.
Gowdy, who is chairman of the select committee, said Sunday he is prepared to summon Secretary of State John Kerry if the State Department continues to stonewall congressional requests for records produced by top Clinton aides.
“If Rep. Gowdy is going to continue his taxpayer-funded campaign, he needs to explain himself,” Podesta said. “He needs to explain what wasn’t satisfactory about seven previous congressional investigations, the independent and exhaustive findings of the Accountability Review Board, and the conclusions of his Republican counterparts on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and on the House Armed Services Committee, both of which found no wrongdoing.”
The Accountability Review Board, an internal agency investigation, was hand-selected by a top State official, Patrick Kennedy, whose involvement in the Benghazi security failures has been widely noted. Several key witnesses have questioned why Kennedy did not face consequences for his role.
Other congressional probes, such as the one conducted by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, were hampered by the State Department’s refusal to turn over certain documents in the months after the Benghazi attack.
For example, the State Department did not include emails about how infamous talking points blaming the attack on a spontaneous response to a YouTube clip were drafted for Ambassador Susan Rice when it provided documents to to the Oversight Committee, sparking outrage when they were eventually released.
