House Benghazi Committee lines up Obama administration witnesses
The House Benghazi Committee is set to interview nearly two dozen senior Obama administration officials in the next three months. Republican Chairman Trey Gowdy announced on Friday that top officials close to both President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have been called to appear for the House panel investigating the 2012 terrorist attacks in Libya. Story Continued Below Included on the witness list is former White House press secretary Jay Carney, Gen. Martin Dempsey, former national security adviser Tom Donilon, current adviser Susan Rice, Jake Sullivan, a former deputy chief of staff to Clinton, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes, former CIA Director David Petraeus and former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. White House chief of staff Denis McDonough is on Gowdyâs witness list as well. âI am announcing an ambitious timeline for interviews consistent with my plan to speed-up the pace of the investigationâ Gowdy said. âI intend to stay with this schedule and will issue subpoenas if necessary.â Also included are State Department âwhistleblowerâ Mark Thompson, former Assistant Secretary of State Andrew Shapiro, former U.S. Ambassador Thomas Pickering, former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Matt Olsen, retired Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency Michael Morell, Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, State Department official Charlene Lamb, State Department Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy, former White House National Security Council staffer Benjamin Fishman and retired foreign service officer William Burns. Sullivan and Lamb are considered key figures in âClintonlandâ while Mullen and Pickering chaired the State Departmentâs investigation into the attacks â a probe Gowdy has criticized for failing to interview Clinton. Gowdy added in a letter sent to ranking member Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) that he plans to schedule an interview with Clinton âas soon as possible.â Cummings said in January that Clinton told him verbally she would appear before the panel to answer questions on the Obama administrationâs response to the attacks. The witnesses will appear before the panel without a subpoena, but Gowdy warned in his letter that if the State Department, CIA and Obama administration do not meet a timeline set between Gowdy and the administration, he would be prepared to issue formal requests for testimony. âAll told, over the next three months, the committee will gain access to information not fully considered by any committee of Congress to date from the nearly three dozen witnesses identified,â Gowdy wrote. The White House would not be forced to comply with any subpoenas as the bulk of the witnesses requested would be shielded by executive privilege. Cummings criticized the witness list on Friday, calling it redundant. âA majority of these witnesses have already provided information to Congress through prior interviews and testimony â in some cases multiple times â during seven previous congressional investigations,â the Maryland Democrat said. Democrats on the panel have grown increasingly critical of Gowdyâs direction of the committee since the beginning of the year. Cummings has blasted the chairman for moving too slowly with hearings and investigations, shutting Democrats out of key interviews and arguing that Gowdy is operating outside the normal bound of committee rules. âThis new list of 20 senior officials was released to the press before the Committee actually invited a single one of these individuals to come in for an interview, raising further questions about the purpose of these interviews,â a Democratic staffer said on background. The interviews will be completed by the end of April, Gowdy said. Thompson previously testified to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that Clinton allegedly cut the State Departmentâs counterterrorism bureau from the response to the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks, which left Ambassador Chris Stevens dead. Naming these key witnesses is, to date, the most aggressive action Gowdy has taken since the panel was created last May. The loquacious Republican has preferred to operate in private when interviewing witnesses and requesting troves of documents from the State Department and CIA. The committee has received more than 40,000 documents, Gowdy said last month, but is still in negotiations with the Obama administration for thousands more. Gowdy has repeatedly stressed that he was unwilling to call in key witnesses before he felt confident with the information the committee received. Riceâs inclusion on the list is a signal the seven Republicans on the panel will focus on a series of talking points that the national security adviser, then the U.S.âs ambassador to the United Nations, delivered on the Sunday shows following the attacks. The details Rice presented have been heavily criticized for purporting that an anti-Islamic video spurred the attacks. There also has been great attention paid to the White Houseâs involvement in drafting and revising those talking points.