Members of the House Select Committee on Benghazi are set to interview Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Tuesday in the second closed-door interview of key figures this week.
The committee also interviewed Michael Morell, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency, on Monday as members prepare for the public testimony of Hillary Clinton next month.
Tuesday’s transcribed interview will not be the first time a congressional committee has asked questions of Flynn about Benghazi. The House Armed Services Committee received briefings from Flynn’s staff in the weeks after the 2012 attack.
The select committee has interviewed dozens of witnesses this year behind closed doors, including several former aides to Clinton. Many of the witnesses had never been questioned by any other committee that looked into the events surrounding Benghazi.
Select committee investigators first uncovered Clinton’s use of a private email account to shield her government communications as they pressed the State Department last year for additional documents related to the attack.
Pressure from the Benghazi committee forced the State Department to ask Clinton for copies of her emails. Clinton maintains the document request was part of a routine housekeeping effort by State Department officials.
As head of the DIA during the Benghazi attacks in 2012, Flynn could provide unique insight into what the Pentagon knew in the months before the diplomatic compound there was overrun. He retired from service last year, and has since become an outspoken critic of the Obama administration’s policies in the Middle East.
The findings of the Benghazi committee, which have largely remained under wraps pending an official report slated for release at the end of the year, have created problems for Clinton’s presidential campaign. Her allies have attempted to paint the committee as a partisan crusade that has lost sight of its original mission, and that shouldn’t exist in the first place, given that several other committees have investigated the attack in the past.
But the select committee has uncovered several details about Benghazi that were not previously known to the public, and more that have yet to be revealed by its staff.
For example, the select committee discovered Clinton relied on Sidney Blumenthal, a divisive former aide and informal advisor to Clinton, for foreign policy guidance on the deteriorating situation in Libya. The documents Blumenthal provided to the committee this summer exposed missing emails in the set of official records Clinton gave the State Department last year.
