House GOP plans probe of Benghazi

WASHINGTON - House Speaker John Boehner plans to form a select committee to investigate the 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, escalating Republican scrutiny of the administration’s handling of the deadly assault.


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The Ohio Republican’s announcement came as House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa issued a subpoena to Secretary of State John Kerry to testify on the administration’s response to congressional investigations, including White House emails Issa said had been withheld from Congress.

Republicans have accused President Barack Obama’s administration of obstructing the truth about the Benghazi attack, which killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.

“What else about Benghazi is the Obama administration still hiding from the American people?” Boehner asked in a statement. “Four Americans died at the hands of terrorists nearly 20 months ago, and we are still missing answers, accountability and justice. It’s time that change.”

Republicans say Obama and his top aides attempted to deceive the public about the circumstances of a major, al-Qaida-linked terrorist attack during the final months of the 2012 presidential campaign - claims that the president and other U.S. officials reject. But administration officials didn’t mention intelligence suggesting the Benghazi attack was distinct from simultaneous, anti-American protests elsewhere in the Arab world.

Democrats have said the administration made a mistake by initially blaming the attack solely on anger over a YouTube video that was derogatory to Muslims and sparked protests throughout the Middle East.

The State Department, which ordered an independent review days after the assault, called the notion that it has stonewalled multiple, ongoing congressional investigations “just false.”

“We’ve produced tens of thousands of documents. We’ve done nine hearings, 46 briefings,” State Department spokesman Marie Harf said Friday. She called a select committee unnecessary: “How many more taxpayer dollars are we going to spend trying to prove a political point that in 18 months they haven’t been able to prove?”

The White House did not immediately respond to Boehner’s comments.

The front-runner to lead the investigation is said to be Trey Gowdy, a former state and federal prosecutor from South Carolina who defeated a Republican incumbent in the primary and then went on win his House seat in 2010. Gowdy has impressed leaders with his aggressive questioning of administration officials.

Issa, a California Republican, said the State Department withheld White House emails related to the attacks that he had demanded both in writing and by subpoena. He called the administration’s refusal to comply with his repeated requests for information “alarming” and illegal.

“Compliance with a subpoena for documents is not a game,” he said.

The emails were released in response to a separate Freedom of Information Act lawsuit from the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch. They include one from deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes to Susan Rice, then the United Nations ambassador, concerning talking points to use in media interviews about the U.S. response to the attacks.

Earlier this week, White House press secretary Jay Carney said Rhodes’ reminder was explicitly not about Benghazi but about the overall situation across the Arab world, where American embassies and consulates in several countries faced angry and sometimes violent demonstrations.

“The State Department’s response to the congressional investigation of the Benghazi attack has shown a disturbing disregard for the department’s legal obligations to Congress,” Issa, a California Republican,wrote in a letter to Kerry on Friday.

Harf said Kerry will be in Mexico on May 21, the day Issa wants him to appear, and said Republicans would have known that if they had asked first.

Boehner, as recently as last month, had resisted appointing a special committee. He told Fox News on April 8 that such a panel might be needed at some time but “at this point, it’s not.”

The emails changed that thinking, according to multiple aides who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Boehner was furious that the emails were withheld, the aides said, and is irritated by what he considers evasion and obstruction by the White House.

“The new emails released this week were the straw that broke the camel’s back,” a senior GOP leadership aide said.

Drew Hammill, a spokesman for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Friday afternoon that House Democrats had not been contacted by the Republican leadership about the committee.

Democrats dismissed the Benghazi focus as a witch hunt aimed at galvanizing the Republican base and a distraction from issues such as income inequality and immigration.

“There have already been multiple investigations into this issue and an independent Accountability Review Board is mandated under current law,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. “For Republicans to waste the American people’s time and money staging a partisan political circus instead of focusing on the middle class is simply a bad decision. While Republicans try to gin up yet another political food fight, Senate Democrats will remain focused on fostering economic growth forall hardworking Americans.”

Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said Democrats weren’t notified in advance of the Kerry subpoena and that Issa hadn’t checked whether the secretary would be in the country when the chairman wants him to appear before the panel.

“These actions are not a responsible approach to congressional oversight, they continue a trend of generating unnecessary conflict for the sake of publicity,” Cummings said in a statement.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, not Kerry, was U.S. secretary of state at the time of the attacks. Democrats have accused Republicans of using the Benghazi investigations partly to focus criticism on Clinton, a possible presidential candidate in 2016.

Issa has issued subpoenas to other Obama Cabinet secretaries in the past, including Attorney General Eric Holder over the “Fast and Furious” gunrunning operation, and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on the implementation of the 2010 health-care law.

The Republican-led House later held Holder in contempt for noncompliance. The House is to vote Thursday on whether to hold former Internal Revenue Service executive Lois Lerner in contempt for refusing to testify before Issa’s panel.

A separate, bipartisan examination by the Senate Intelligence Committee found the U.S. had insufficient security at the Benghazi post and spread the blame among the State Department, the military and U.S. intelligence for missing what now seem like obvious warning signs. It found no instances of the administration intentionally deceiving the public.

Information for this article was contributed by Derek Wallbank of Bloomberg News; by Jeremy W. Peters of The New York Times; by Wesley Lowery of The Washington Post; and by Bradley Klapper, Donna Cassata and Matthew Lee of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 05/03/2014

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