Rep. Mike Pompeo, a member of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, said Hillary Clinton will likely be asked about who she contacted on the night of the attack when the former secretary of state appears before the panel for a highly-anticipated interview Thursday.
“I expect we’ll have many questions about all of the U.S. government’s response post-incident — that is, after the first news of the attack on the compound reached our government officials in Tripoli and then in Washington, D.C.,” Pompeo said Tuesday during an appearance on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom.”
“I expect we’ll have many questions about who acted, who spoke and why it was the case that the response was insufficient to address the needs of the men on the ground,” he added.
The Kansas Republican doubled down on recent comparisons of the Benghazi investigation to the congressional probe of the Watergate scandal in 1973, arguing the former is in some ways worse than Watergate.
“In this case, we had a secretary of state who set up an entire homebrew server with an attempt to make sure the American people didn’t see any of her official correspondence, and then destroyed 30,000 emails that no one has had a chance to review and determine whether or not they were official,” Pompeo said.
“No third party has had a chance to look at those emails. So in many ways our ability to get at the record and to get transparency and find the facts is more difficult than the situation that faced the Watergate committee,” he said.
Pompeo defended the length of the Benghazi investigation, which began in May 2014 with the creation of the select committee and has outlasted the special panel convened to probe the Watergate scandal.
“I get asked all the time, ‘Mike, why isn’t this finished?’ And the answer is, we have been obstructed at every turn by the administration and by the Democrats on our committee who have not lifted a finger to help us solve the riddle to put together the puzzle about how four Americans were killed on Sept. 11, 2012,” he said.
The Benghazi committee is under intense pressure to demonstrate its objectivity as Democrats on and off the panel pile on criticisms that the investigation has become a politically-motivated inquisition designed to damage Clinton.
