Hours before Bryan Pagliano, Hillary Clinton’s former IT staffer, invoked his Fifth Amendment rights and walked away from a closed-door interview with the House Select Committee on Benghazi, Rep. Jim Jordan still had hope that the key witness would change his mind and answer the panel’s 19 pages of questions.
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.
