Republican party’s disagreements over approach to investigation in public view as committee chair Trey Gowdy chastises members of his caucus

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

As Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton prepared to testify before a panel investigating the 2012 Benghazi attacks, a behind-the-scenes fight over the Republican-led inquiry broke into messy public view at the weekend, raising questions about what sort of spectacle would greet the public when the lights go up in the hearing room on Thursday.

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A visit to Capitol Hill on Friday by top Clinton aide Huma Abedin seemed to foreshadow a week of drama. Abedin testified for eight hours in a closed-door hearing before the House select committee on Benghazi, saying afterward that she had “answered all of their questions to the best of my ability” but declining to specify what she had been asked.

Democrats challenged the committee’s decision to question Abedin, who was at the State Department at the time of the attacks but whose role, other than as an aide to Clinton, did not relate to Libya policy.

The more potent challenges to the committee’s credibility in recent weeks have come from Republicans, who have suggested the panel has ulterior political motives.

House majority leader Kevin McCarthy said on television in late September that the Benghazi committee was a good example of how Republicans in the House had been effective at attacking Clinton and driving her poll numbers down. McCarthy subsequently withdrew a bid to replace John Boehner as speaker.

Richard Hanna, a Republican congressman from New York, said last week that he thought there was “a big part of this investigation that was designed to go after people and an individual, Hillary Clinton”, while a former Benghazi committee staffer said this month that the committee was pursuing a “partisan investigation”.

On Sunday, committee chairman Trey Gowdy, a third-term representative from South Carolina, delivered a sharp rebuke to his caucus-mates.

“I have told my own Republican colleagues and friends, ‘Shut up talking about things that you don’t know anything about,’” Gowdy said, in an interview on CBS. “And unless you’re on the committee, you have no idea what we’ve done, why we’ve done it and new facts we have found.”

Gowdy, a former federal prosecutor, said that in questioning Clinton, the committee would focus on the time leading up the attacks, in which four Americans were killed, including the ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens.

“She’s a witness,” he said. “She was the secretary of state. You have to talk to her.”

As Gowdy spoke, the ranking Democrat on the committee, Elijah Cummings, released an official letter addressed to Gowdy in which he accused the committee of faking a redaction in a Clinton email to make it look like Clinton had spread classified information – which was not actually classified.

“I believe your accusations were irresponsible, and I believe you owe the Secretary an immediate apology,” Cummings wrote.

Successive investigations of the Benghazi affair, in which an American diplomatic outpost and CIA station in Libya were attacked on 11 September 2012, have attracted controversy from the beginning.

Supporters of the inquiries have said there is evidence of negligent and possibly criminal behavior on the part of government officials, who critics say did not reply to requests from Stevens for added security before the attack and portrayed events inaccurately afterward.

Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time of the attacks, testified before separate House and Senate committees on Benghazi in January 2013.

Critics of the latest prong of the investigation, led by a special committee formed by speaker Boehner in May 2014 with Gowdy as its chair, say the Republicans are on a political fishing expedition meant to bring down Clinton, the likely Democratic presidential nominee.

In an interview broadcast on CNN on Sunday, Clinton called the Benghazi panel “a partisan arm of the Republican National Committee”.

“[I]t’s pretty clear that whatever they might have thought they were doing, they ended up becoming a partisan arm of the Republican National Committee with an overwhelming focus on trying to, as they admitted, drive down my poll numbers,” Clinton said.

“I’ve already testified about Benghazi. I testified to the best of my ability before the Senate and the House. I don’t know that I have very much to add.”

Democrats have gained considerable ammunition in recent weeks for their argument that the Benghazi investigations are politically motivated. Gowdy was at pains on Sunday to tamp down the notion.

“They’re three people who don’t have any idea what they’re talking about,” Gowdy said. “Two of my colleagues – the two Republican members of the conference – have never asked for an update on our committee, they couldn’t name three witnesses we’ve talked to.

“The former staffer left in June, so he has no idea what we’ve done since June. They have no first-hand knowledge.”

Gowdy found himself under attack as well, however, in the form of the scathing letter from Cummings.

In the letter, Cummings accused Gowdy of baselessly claiming that one of Clinton’s emails contained the name of a CIA operative that should not have been released.

“The CIA has now informed the select committee that you were wrong,” Cummings writes.

“To further inflate your claim, you placed your own redactions over the name of the individual with the words ‘redacted due to sources and methods’,” the letter continues.

“To be clear, these redactions were not made, and these words were not added, by any agency of the federal government responsible for enforcing classification guidelines.”

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Established before the scandal over Clinton’s use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state had fully bloomed, the Benghazi committee has expanded its purview in the last year to explore the emails, which the State Department has been releasing monthly.

The committee so far has worked for a year and a half, interviewed 50 witnesses, and plans to interview 20 more. It has spent an estimated $4.7m.

Some of the emails, Gowdy said, show that Clinton aides were seeking political advice from Ambassador Stevens while he was seeking more security for the diplomatic outposts in Libya.