Mary Troyan

USA Today

WASHINGTON – The House investigation into the 2012 attacks in Benghazi heated up again this week with testimony from the first of two top military and intelligence officials.

Former CIA Director David Petraeus was interviewed Wednesday afternoon by members and staff on the special House committee probing the attacks. Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta will testify Friday morning.

After a high-profile, 11-hour grilling of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in October, the committee has returned to its normal practice of interviewing witnesses in private.

The committee, created in May 2014, is expected to issue its final report sometime this year. It is probing diplomatic, security, intelligence, military and political decisions surrounding the attacks that killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

The panel's Republican chairman, Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, declined to comment on what the committee would ask Petraeus.

He said panel members are still waiting on additional documents from the State Department, the CIA and the White House, and could have another dozen witnesses to interview. Former U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice is expected to be among them.

Rice was the Obama administration official who initially described the attacks as the spontaneous outgrowth of a protest rather than as a coordinated terrorist attack. Republicans continue to pursue whether Rice deliberately mischaracterized the attacks in order to protect President Obama's re-election chances.

“The committee is diligently working to complete its thorough, fact-centered investigation and release a report with recommendations within the next few months,” GOP committee spokesman Matt Wolking said..

The panel conducted 64 witness interviews last year. Wolking said 53 of the witnesses had never before been interviewed by a congressional committee.

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Democrats are participating in the probe under protest. This week, they calculated that the special panel is taking longer than the 9/11 Commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City, Pennsylvania and Washington.

“Republicans continue to drag out this political charade closer to the 2016 presidential election, and the American taxpayers continue to pay the price,” said Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., the top Democrat on the committee.

Republicans disputed the Democrats’ timeline. The 9/11 Commission was created Nov. 27, 2002, and issued its report on July 22, 2004, a span of 604 days. But it didn’t formally disband until Aug. 21, a span of 634 days. The Benghazi committee has been in place 609 days.

The Benghazi panel had spent about $5.2 million through November 2015.

Gowdy dismissed criticism that Republicans are deliberately drawing out the investigation in order to damage Clinton’s campaign for the presidency. Unfulfilled requests for documents, not politics, are slowing things down, he said.

“You can either issue a report that is incomplete… or you can wait and put up with the criticism of how long it’s taking,” Gowdy said. “I have accepted the reality we are going to be criticized no matter what we do, so we might as well write a complete and exhaustive and full report. So we’ll wait until the document requests are complied with.”

Petraeus, a retired Army general, was sentenced in April to probation and a fine for giving classified information to his biographer, with whom he was having an extramarital affair. Gowdy said Petraeus’ lawyers correctly prevented him from testifying before the Benghazi committee while the criminal investigation against him was underway.

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Previous congressional investigations into Benghazi concluded that U.S. intelligence agencies had no specific warnings about an attack on the U.S. compound.

In 2013, the White House released emails showing that Petraeus wanted more details about the attacks included in the initial administration explanation that Rice relied upon when she gave her media interviews, but that State Department officials wanted the terrorism-related references eliminated.

An investigation by the House intelligence committee in 2014 found that the inter-agency process for developing the talking points Rice used was flawed and “mistakes were made.”

Panetta testified publicly in February 2013 about the Benghazi attacks. Petraeus testified privately before the House and Senate intelligence committees in November 2012.

Also scheduled for interviews this week are Charlene Lamb, former deputy assistant secretary of state for international programs for diplomatic security, and Jeremy Bash, former chief of staff at the Defense Department.

Gowdy has said repeatedly that the select panel has uncovered new information about events before, during and after the attacks, but Democrats say none of it contradicts what previous investigations have uncovered.

“So the charade continues,” Cummings said Wednesday on his way into the Petraeus interview.