Rep. Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, said the criminal case against retired Gen. David Petraeus regarding his handling of classified information effectively prevented the committee from interviewing him before his scheduled appearance with the panel Wednesday.
“There’s no lawyer in the world who would let his client come testify before a congressional committee while he has pending criminal charges,” Gowdy said of the former CIA director. “That would frankly be legal malpractice.”Gowdy declined to describe what the committee planned to ask Petraeus, who faced legal trouble after sharing classified documents with his biographer and mistress.
But the closed-door session Wednesday marked the first high-profile meeting of the committee since Hillary Clinton publicly testified before the committee in October.”We have a number of interviews scheduled for the next few weeks,” Gowdy said. “We may have about a dozen more witnesses left to interview.” The committee chairman said his panel hopes to finish the interview process by mid-February and begin the process of compiling the final investigative report.
“I will offer this caveat: that sometimes you interview witnesses and you hear names that you had not previously heard,” Gowdy said, warning that the panel may find it necessary to interview more than the dozen remaining witnesses.”We have consistently learned new information that no other previous committee either endeavored to look at or learned,” he said. The South Carolina Republican pointed out that no previous committee had ever accessed Clinton’s private emails.
“There are timing issues and there are scheduling issues, but in terms of cooperation, I think even Cheryl Mills said she was treated fairly by our committee,” Gowdy said, referring to Clinton’s former chief of staff. Gowdy said the committee still planned to interview Ben Rhodes, White House security adviser, and Susan Rice, former ambassador to the United Nations.
Rice infamously appeared on a series of political talk shows the Sunday after the Benghazi attack and blamed the violence on a spontaneous response to a video clip, an explanation later proven to be false. Gowdy said he hoped the panel would not need to subpoena Rice and Rhodes to subject to interviews.
