A Republican member of the House Select Committee on Benghazi said Cheryl Mills, former chief of staff to Hillary Clinton, seemed to have forgotten some of the “finer details” of events surrounding the 2012 terror attack during a closed-door interview with the panel Thursday.
“She does not have a good memory,” said Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, a member of the Benghazi panel that questioned Mills and Jake Sullivan, another former Clinton aide, on Fox News’ “On the Record” Thursday.
“We had documents that we questioned her with, and they did seem to make her memory better,” the Georgia Republican said of Mills.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, chairman of the select committee, said Thursday he planned to treat the Mills interview as “classified” and declined to discuss specifics of what was uncovered during the roughly nine-hour meeting.
Westmoreland revealed the panel’s questioning had to be altered, in some cases, because Mills is presently serving as legal counsel to Clinton, creating a potential for information sought by the committee to fall under attorney-client privilege between Mills and Clinton.
Rep. Elijah Cummings, the panel’s ranking Democrat, continued his attacks on committee Republicans for what he has described as a partisan inquest designed to hobble Clinton’s campaign, not investigate Benghazi.
Panel Democrats accused Republican on the committee of selectively leaking information to damage Mills’ image.
Minority staff cited a Politico story that summarized some of the findings that emerged in the roughly nine-hour interview, including the fact that Mills had had access to an internal State Department report that was supposed to have been conducted by an independent accountability review board.
But the Democrats argued Mills’ involvement in the development of the accountability review board’s report had already been exposed in June 2013 testimony by Ambassador Thomas Pickering, chairman of the board that compiled the report.
Pickering had been testifying before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which was then chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa.
Cummings said panel Republicans were “peddling an old conspiracy theory that was debunked more than two years ago.”
“They had access to Ambassador Pickering’s deposition transcript, so the only way they can claim their concern is ‘new’ is if they never read it or they simply ignored it in a desperate effort to resuscitate a conspiracy theory that was debunked under Chairman Issa,” the Maryland Democrat said.
Cummings called for the release of the transcript from Mills’ interview in the face of “inaccurate Republican leaks.”
Democrats had also pushed the majority to publish the transcript of Sidney Blumenthal’s closed-door interview with the committee in June.
Members sparred over the scheduling of a vote to consider releasing the Blumenthal transcript, with Republicans ultimately prevailing in their efforts to keep the high-profile interview under wraps.
Gowdy has insisted that none of the transcripts of witness interviews will be made public, saying he would not provide special treatment to politically-connected subjects such as Mills and Blumenthal by releasing their transcripts but not others.
The panel has conducted more than 45 closed-door interviews to date.
Although most of the select committee’s interview with Mills Thursday was said to focus on Benghazi, Westmoreland said members did ask about Clinton’s private server, which was originally uncovered by the committee.
“According to what we heard today, it was Mrs. Clinton’s idea,” Westmoreland said Thursday evening of the server.
