Rep. Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, said the “most surprising” part of his panel’s forthcoming report on the 2012 terror attack involves the question of whether the Obama administration had forces in position to intervene on the night of the raid.
“If the president did say, ‘Do everything you can,’ and [Defense] Secretary [Leon] Panetta communicated that order to his command staff, ‘Do everything you can,’ both of those communications took place before 7 p.m. eastern time,” Gowdy said Monday evening during an appearance on the “Hugh Hewitt Show” radio program. “Why did the first wheel not take off for hours and hours and hours? That is the part that we are getting at that I would submit to you the other committees did not, and I think you’re going to be surprised by that part of the report.”
Gowdy has repeatedly declined to discuss his committee’s specific findings ahead of the highly-anticipated release of its investigative report, which is slated for later this year.
“When we issue our report, and hopefully it is coming sooner rather than later, I think that part of our investigation is going to be the most eye-opening, the most surprising and, frankly, will dwarf the other two tranches of Benghazi in terms of what we have been able to find,” Gowdy said. He has often described his panel’s investigation as involving three separate parts: what happened before, during and after the 2012 terror attack that claimed four American lives.
Last week, the Benghazi committee received 880 pages of new documents from the State Department, including the emails of a top official who has been heavily involved in both the production of records to Congress and the agency’s own internal investigation of the Benghazi attack.
Patrick Kennedy, State’s undersecretary for management, was in charge of the agency’s record-keeping practices and has been linked to a number of controversies that transpired under Clinton’s leadership at the State Department.
The select committee began requesting Kennedy’s emails from the State Department in Nov. 2014, but a full year elapsed before the first records began to trickle in.
More than a year after the select committee requested documents from the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies involved in the handling of the 2012 raid, lawmakers are still waiting on government officials to hand over records crucial to the panel’s investigation.
Gowdy has said he hopes to wrap up interviews with Benghazi witnesses by February.
Most of the witness interviews have taken place behind closed doors in transcribed sessions, leaving critics to argue in public about the partisanship of the probe.
But Republicans on the committee contend the private nature of the sessions allow witnesses to be more candid with investigators than they would if the questioning took place in an open setting, such as the high-profile interview of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in October.
Gowdy said Monday only one witness out of the dozens who have appeared before the committee ever refused to cooperate.
That witness, Bryan Pagliano, set up the private email server in Clinton’s Chappaqua, N.Y., home that allowed her to shield her communications from the public until years after she left the State Department. He invoked his Fifth Amendment rights and declined to answer questions when summoned for an interview last fall.
“There was a little bit of discussion about offering Bryan Pagliano immunity,” Gowdy said Monday. “There were some really notable folks on the side of offering him immunity from the legislative branch’s perspective.”
The South Carolina Republican said he argued against extending immunity protections to Pagliano after his appearance in September because doing so might have interfered with the Justice Department’s investigation of the Clinton email network.
“I was the only one saying, no, we should not do that,” Gowdy said. “I don’t want to do anything that jeopardizes an ongoing executive branch investigation.”
Because Congress does not have the power to convene a grand jury or issue search warrants, Gowdy explained, “we are not the branch to conduct criminal or quasi-criminal investigations.”
