Rep. Elijah Cummings, top Democrat on the House Select Committee on Benghazi, released the unredacted version of an email Wednesday evening that suggested the Pentagon had military forces ready to be deployed to Benghazi the night of the Sept. 11, 2012 attack.
A spokesman for committee Democrats said the email, which was first made public in a redacted form Tuesday by conservative watchdog Judicial Watch, was “yet another example of how conservative conspiracy theorists use bits of information out of context to rehash baseless allegations that have been debunked time and again.”
Portions of the email that were removed from the document given to Judicial Watch, but included in the one provided to the select committee, indicated the military forces in question were located in Croatia and Spain. The original email did not include any information about the location or nature of available military assets, leading some to speculate that the newly-disclosed record undermined testimony from high-ranking officials claiming there were no forces in the vicinity of Benghazi.
The email’s description of those forces matches one provided to the House Armed Services Committee and recounted in its February 2014 report about Benghazi.
Jeremy Bash, then the Defense Department’s chief of staff, wrote in the email that the two military teams were “spinning up as we speak” when asking top aides to Hillary Clinton how to go about approving the teams for deployment to Libya.
Former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has said he ordered the forces from Croatia and Spain to head to Benghazi, but that neither arrived in time to spare the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans who lost their lives in the terror attack.
The Democrats did not publish any response to the email from the State Department officials in question.
However, Matt Wolking, spokesman for committee Republicans, said Tuesday the panel had reviewed a response from Jake Sullivan, then State’s director of policy planning, and used it to inform their interview with him in September.
“This is further proof that Democrats are focused solely on playing politics and protecting Hillary Clinton, not on conducting a serious investigation and getting the truth for the families of the four Americans who lost their lives,” Wolking said of the minority’s decision to release the unredacted email Wednesday.
