A federal judge’s ruling that slammed the State Department for behaving in “bad faith” was further evidence of the department’s “gross incompetence,” according to a leading House member responsible for investigating how the department handled events surrounding the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi.
“The State Department has acted with gross incompetence, at best, with respect to what our committee has been trying to do,” Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo told the Washington Examiner on Wednesday.
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Pompeo, one of seven Republicans serving on the Select Committee on Benghazi, was responding to Tuesday’s ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth that found “evidence of government wrongdoing and bad faith” within the State Department.
Lamberth found the evidence presented to him justified a request by watchdog group Judicial Watch to engage in legal discovery related to Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. That group’s investigation began with a request for talking points used by officials following the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on U.S. facilities in Libya. The inquiry expanded to include a private server Clinton used to store email after the department suggested it was unable to locate the responsive documents.
Pompeo said Judicial Watch wasn’t alone in hearing excuses from the department. “We have been pursuing a legitimate inquiry into how we had the first ambassador killed in decades,” he added. “The State Department has taken not days, not months, but years to get us documents we wanted.”
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“They told us, with respect to Hillary Clinton’s emails in particular, [that] you have them all, only for us to find we of course didn’t have any of them, because she had potentially placed them on a homebrew server in the basement of her home in New York,” he said. “Every step along the way we have had to fight, pull, ask repeatedly, and play detective to determine whether we had a complete record set, and learn later that we didn’t.”
Judicial Watch is currently engaged in several lawsuits against the State Department seeking to force the agency’s compliance with requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act. Lamberth is the second judge to permit the group to proceed with a request for discovery, which could potentially include interviews with former Clinton aides and associates.
The State Department often rejects requests for information made under open record laws, suggesting the information may have been surreptitiously stored on Clinton’s server in the basement of her Chappaqua home.
Pompeo credited the effort by Judicial Watch and other groups for helping to break through the department’s “stonewalling.”
“We’ve had to rely on discovery that has taken place outside of our investigation by groups like Judicial Watch and others who have made FOIA requests,” Pompeo said. “Instead of the State Department doing what it ought to do, which is respond to a legitimate inquiry from the legislative branch, duly authorized by statute and cooperate.
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“Our committee has been stonewalled at nearly every turn in our effort to get the facts about the deaths in Benghazi,” he said.
