Only a few members of the House Select Committee on Benghazi were seen arriving Friday for a closed-door interview of Huma Abedin, a top aide to Hillary Clinton.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, the committee’s chairman, was not at the deposition an hour after it began, and Rep. Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat, didn’t arrive until nearly an hour after it was scheduled. The House was on recess this week, which likely explained the lower-than-usual attendance.
Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, R-Ga., attended the interview Friday morning at the Capitol Visitors Center. Westmoreland is a candidate for speaker of the House.
Abedin was expected to be questioned about the events leading up to and following the 2012 attack in Benghazi, as well as the State Department’s efforts to comply with congressional records requests.
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Although Clinton has repeatedly dismissed the committee’s efforts as redundant given the conclusion of several other congressional inquiries into Benghazi, she kept hundreds of records hidden from all previous investigators by declining to provide emails she had hosted on her private server.
The Benghazi committee has interviewed dozens of witnesses this year in similar closed-door settings. Democrats on the panel have pushed Gowdy to publish transcripts from a pair of high-profile interviews with Cheryl Mills and Sidney Blumenthal, two of Clinton’s closest advisers.
Emails provided to the committee earlier this month indicate Blumenthal outed the identity of a CIA source to Clinton, who then forwarded the email to other members of her staff. Gowdy vowed last week to make those and other emails public, but has yet to do so.
The Benghazi committee has been under intense scrutiny in recent weeks following comments from House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who suggested a key accomplishment of the panel’s investigation has been to bring down Clinton’s standing in the primary.
Despite recent controversy over Abedin’s involvement with the Clinton Foundation and a consulting firm called Teneo Strategies while also employed at the State Department, committee aides said Abedin would not be asked about anything not related to the 2012 attack.
Abedin is presently vice chair of Clinton’s presidential campaign, and travels with her frequently on the trail.
Clinton herself is to set to appear before the committee next week in the panel’s most highly-anticipated hearing to date. She will be among the first witnesses to deliver public testimony, as most others did so in transcribed sessions to encourage candor.
But committee sources have said Clinton wanted and was eventually granted a public hearing. She has touted the upcoming appearance as further evidence of her cooperation with the committee, even as she has sought to discredit the investigation on political grounds.
Abedin had been slated to testify before the committee earlier in the fall, but delays in document production forced the panel to delay her appearance. She was among the last of Clinton’s top aides to provide copies of her private emails to the State Department.
Abedin is the only Clinton aide known to have used a private email account on the “clintonemail.com” network, although others are believed to have had such addresses.
Mills used a private email address to shield some of her government communications, but it was a commercial account.
