Jim Jordan: ‘It’s tough to get information from the Obama administration’

The interview, which took place the afternoon of Sept. 10, lasted less than 15 minutes after Pagliano declined to discuss his involvement with Clinton’s private server. The incident echoed a now-infamous hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in 2013 during which Lois Lerner, then the head of the Internal Revenue Service’s tax-exempt unit, pleaded the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions about her agency’s alleged targeting of conservative nonprofits.

As a member of both the Oversight Committee and the select committee, Jordan said he has encountered parallel difficulties when attempting to investigate both the IRS and the 2012 Benghazi terror attack. Both have been hampered by bureaucratic stonewalling and accusations from the Left that the respective probes are devolving into political theater. Lawmakers continue to face an uphill battle digging into both scandals, as the IRS investigation slowly fades from view and the Benghazi probe is increasingly thrust into the national spotlight thanks to Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Washington Examiner: What do you see as the biggest similarity between the IRS investigation and the Benghazi investigation?

Jordan: Frankly, the fact that it’s tough to get information from the Obama administration. You know, we’ve been fighting with the State Department to turn over documents for, good Lord knows how long. And with the IRS, [we’ve gotten] the same kind of stonewalling from them, but most recently, the Internal Revenue Service destroyed 422 backup tapes that contained potentially 24,000 emails, this according to the inspector general. So that’s been one of the biggest similarities. We’d like to get all the record — you sort of want to have all the record.

So take the IRS. Think about this situation: when the story breaks on May 10 of 2013, the inspector general tells the IRS and the Treasury Department that they’ve been caught with their hand in the cookie jar, targeting was going on. So instead of waiting for the inspector general’s report to come out three days later, Lois Lerner goes to the staged event, a Bar Association event, [takes a] planted question from her friend, and she lies. Right from the start, she’s lying. Lois Lerner said ‘It wasn’t me, it wasn’t Washington, it was those line agents in Cincinnati.’ Remember this? So, it starts off with a lie. So when you start off with a lie, and then 12 days later, Ms. Lerner is brought in front of the Oversight Committee, and she takes the Fifth.

You have a central figure in this scandal, lying and then taking the Fifth — that puts a premium on getting the documents, and getting the record, and getting the emails and all communications. So there’s a preservation order put in place by the IRS to preserve all documents, there’s a subpoena from our committee, [that says] ‘give us all the documents, letters, communications, emails’ — and with a preservation order and a subpoena in place they destroyed 422 tapes that contained 24,000 emails. And they destroy them on March 4, 2014, and three weeks later, [IRS Commissioner] John Koskinen comes in front of our committee and when repeatedly asked, ‘Will you give us all the emails?’ He says over and over again, ‘Yes, I’ll get you all the emails.’ Which is a complete lie, because you can’t give us all her emails if you’ve destroyed 24,000. So that’s been the kind of treatment we’ve gotten from this administration time and time again. And to me, that’s probably the biggest similarity.

Examiner: What’s been the biggest difference between the two?

Jordan: Well obviously the biggest difference is, you know, with Benghazi, four Americans lost their lives. It’s just a total tragedy. And … the charge of this committee is to get to the truth. And we owe that, to do the best job we can and get the most information we can, we owe that to the American taxpayer, and more importantly, we owe that to the families of Glen Doherty, Tyrone Woods, Sean Smith, and the ambassador’s family, Chris Stevens’ family, as well. So that’s the biggest difference.

The IRS scandal is of critical importance as well simply because there, you had one of the most fundamental rights we have as Americans being systematically, and for a sustained period of time, targeted. And that’s your First Amendment right to speak. And I tell folks all the time, when the founders put together the Constitution and specifically, the Bill of Rights, and more specifically the First Amendment, of the number of rights in the First Amendment — practicing your religion, freedom of the press, freedom to assemble and petition your government — the most fundamental right you have under the First Amendment is your right to speak.

And what the founders really envisioned wasn’t just any old speech, it was political speech, it was speech of a political fashion and a political nature. And yet that’s exactly what the Internal Revenue Service went after. This is not just any old agency — this is an agency with the power the IRS has, the power to disrupt Americans’ lives. This agency targeted American citizens for speaking out against the policies of their government. And that’s why it’s been such a big issue for us, and we’ve been after it to get to the truth — and frankly, why we’ve called for the impeachment of John Koskinen.

Examiner: You talked about Lois Lerner pleading the Fifth, and now you have another Benghazi witness, Bryan Pagliano, pleading the Fifth. What sort of complications does it create when key witnesses don’t want to cooperate with the committee?

Jordan: It makes it that much more difficult to get to the truth. You know, we don’t know that Pagliano is going to do it for sure, we’ll find out at 1 o’clock. There’s maybe still some hope that he won’t. I’d like to ask him, ‘who asked you to set up the server, who used the server, who paid you to set up the server, and you know, did you have access to the information that was on the server?’ Because the fundamental question is — this is the tech guy! This is the guy who sets up your phone here. What is the guy whose job is to just set up the apparatus and the technical components and make it all work — what is the tech guy doing taking the Fifth? What would he have to hide? But that’s sort of the question that comes to mind. Those would be some of the questions that, if he doesn’t take the Fifth, I’ll ask. But we’ll see.

Examiner: It seems like there have been more public hearings in the Oversight Committee’s investigation of the IRS than for the select committee’s investigation of Benghazi. Is there a reason for that?

Jordan: We haven’t had that many hearings in general, let alone if they were public. We’ve had interviews, depositions, and those are typically done in a private setting. We’re trying to gather all the information. There will be some public. Obviously, on Oct. 22, when Secretary Clinton comes, that will be a public setting. So our job is to get to the truth, and sometimes that is slower and kind of a painstaking, deliberate process. It would go faster, and frankly better, if the State Department would actually help us get to the documents in a much faster way. And frankly, if we had all the documents from the get-go.

Remember, we didn’t even have all the documents because Mrs. Clinton had them in her possession. She decided which ones that she had went to the State Department, and then the State Department is taking their good, sweet time about giving them to us. So you’ve got that roundabout process, and — but for the work of some people in your industry — we might not have ever figured out, might never have learned that Mrs. Clinton had this amazing email relationship and server process that she’d set up herself.

Examiner: Was that discovery, that there were private emails, was that a big turning point in the Benghazi investigation?

Jordan: Yeah it was, I think, just an important piece of information, [realizing] that, ‘Wow, we don’t even have — not only is the State Department dragging their feet in giving us what they have, they don’t even have everything because Mrs. Clinton had her own server.’ So yeah, that’s a pretty big piece of news.

Examiner: Do you see the State Department’s appointment of this transparency czar as a step in the right direction?

Jordan: We’ll see. Fine. I think it could be helpful. What we need is the information, get us the information so we can examine all the documents and fulfill the charge given to the committee by the Congress, by the House of Representatives.

Examiner: How do you respond to critics, namely the Clinton campaign, who have said the Benghazi investigation is a political witch hunt against Hillary Clinton?

Jordan: It’s not. It’s about getting to the truth. It’s just simply not true. You know, one of the things they’ll talk about is the ‘independent’ ARB, accountability review board. There’s lots of adjectives you could probably use to describe the ARB; independent is the last one. It’s the most inappropriate.

Because Cheryl Mills, Secretary Clinton’s chief of staff, someone who has been a close associate of the Clinton’s for a long, long time, Cheryl Mills controlled the entire ARB process. Cheryl Mills picked the people on the process, Cheryl Mills oversaw the process, Cheryl Mills got a draft copy of the report to review it before it went public, Cheryl Mills made recommendations for changes to the report before Mrs. Clinton released it to the public, Cheryl Mills was never interviewed by the ARB, and Hillary Clinton was never interviewed by the ARB.

So if that’s independent, that is the wildest definition I’ve ever heard of independent. It sure looks like the folks who potentially should have been investigated, who controlled the State Department, who were in charge, were controlling the entire process. So, that’s one charge we hear all the time, that there’s already been an independent examination of the tragedy of Benghazi but, again, not the word I would use.

Examiner: There was talk of there being a little tension between the Clinton camp, with the committee wanting a closed-door interview of her and her wanting a public hearing. Is there a reason why she’s testifying in public when all the other witnesses were interviewed behind closed doors, like Mills and Sullivan and Blumenthal?

Jordan: You’d have to check with the chairman, but I think, look, she’s secretary of state, she wants to be interviewed in a public venue, a public setting, I think that’s appropriate. The American people want to see how she answers some of these questions, probably, too. So Chairman Gowdy felt that was the right way to do it, and I am totally comfortable with that.

Examiner: Do you expect that there will be a lot learned from that hearing?

Jordan: We’ll see. Let’s hope we can get some answers to some important questions. I mean, that’s always the goal, is to get to the truth, so let’s hope we can get answers. The thing that sort of, is always — in my mind and I think a lot of people’s minds — has always been the before, the during and the after. The before is, why did we take the security posture that we did? There were 200 security incidents in the 13 months prior to the attack, IED attacks, an assassination attempt on the British ambassador, you know, all kinds of breaches of the actual wall of the temporary mission facility.

With this track record, this history, why, when there were repeated requests for additional help, were they denied? And not only denied, what security force they had was actually reduced. So there’s that line of questions. Then there’s the whole during, and the response time — what we did or didn’t do, what could we have done or maybe not done. There’s a series of questions there.

Then, of course, there’s the after, and this idea that it was a demonstration prompted by a video that turned into an attack. I just don’t see the evidence for that, either. But that was sort of the narrative that [UN Ambassador] Susan Rice and others projected to the American people. So I think you have all those areas. And there’ll be questions on all those, and, now the fourth area, the emails. There’ll be questions about that as well.

Examiner: And any other observations about the IRS or Benghazi?

Jordan: We should impeach John Koskinen. I mean, thinking about the duties he had: he had a duty to preserve all the documents, a duty to produce all the documents, a duty to disclose to Congress and the American people if he couldn’t preserve and/or produce those documents, a duty to testify accurately and a duty to correct the record if he testified in an inaccurate way. He failed every single duty he had.

They had a preservation order in place and they didn’t preserve the documents. They destroyed 422 tapes, 24,000 emails. They didn’t give us all the documents, because you can’t when you’ve already destroyed them.

He didn’t disclose to us that he’d done that until the inspector general found it out, and frankly, even when he did find out things, he waited months before he told us. He testified inaccurately when he said he’d give us all the information. And we even gave him the opportunity to correct the record in a public hearing, [saying] ‘Will you send a letter of correction to the Congress saying you want to correct the record?’ So when you have that kind of pattern, particularly when his chief counsel knew even before he testified that there were problems with the Lerner hard drive and Lerner emails, and he didn’t tell us — he needs to go.