A former aide to Hillary Clinton, who had vowed to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights if called to testify before Congress, will still appear before the House Select Committee on Benghazi Thursday afternoon.
Bryan Pagliano, the former State Department IT analyst who also managed Clinton’s private server, has declined inquiries from three separate congressional committees, the FBI and the State Department’s inspector general.
Pagliano will face questions Thursday from the panel tasked with investigating the Benghazi attack, whose Republican members hope the Clinton aide may change his mind about cooperating with the probe once he is behind closed doors.
Rep. Jim Jordan, a member of the select committee, said he was unsure if Pagliano would ultimately cooperate with the panel.
“Maybe he’ll decide, ‘you know what, I’m going to answer questions after all.’ You never know,” the Ohio Republican told the Washington Examiner.
Jordan said he had several questions planned for Pagliano if the aide did decide to cooperate Thursday.
“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 did you have access to information that was on the server?” he said.
Clinton has said she paid Pagliano personally to render services to the server she reportedly set up in her Chappaqua home.
Jordan also questioned why Pagliano, as an IT analyst at the State Department, had chosen to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights.
“This is the tech guy! This is the guy who sets up your phone here; what does the guy whose job it is to just set up the apparatus and technical components and make it all work, what is the tech guy doing taking the Fifth?” Jordan said. “What would he have to hide? But that’s sort of the question that comes to mind.”
Rep. Elijah Cummings, the committee’s ranking Democrat, blasted Chairman Trey Gowdy for requiring Pagliano to appear in person.
“This is the identical approach taken by Chairman [Darrell] Issa when he served as Chairman of the Oversight Committee — forcing witnesses to appear in person to assert their Fifth Amendment rights just for a photo op,” the Maryland Democrat said Thursday. “Mr. Pagliano’s testimony has nothing to do with the Benghazi attacks and everything to do with Republicans’ insatiable desire to derail Secretary Clinton’s presidential bid.”
Democrats have repeatedly accused the select committee of deviating from its stated mission in order to damage Clinton’s presidential campaign — a suggestion Republicans roundly dismiss.
Gowdy insisted in a letter to Pagliano’s attorney that the move to bring Pagliano in for questioning did not represent an attempt to “intimidate” the Clinton aide, as his attorney reportedly suggested Wednesday.
The Benghazi panel interviewed Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s former chief of staff, and Jake Sullivan, her former director of policy planning at State, last week in a pair of closed-door interviews that lawmakers said shed new light on the circumstances surrounding the 2012 attack.
Clinton herself is set to testify before the select committee on Oct. 22.
