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 Ohio Republican John Boehner made his announcement days after a
conservative watchdog group released previously undisclosed emails
that it said showed the White House was concerned primarily with
protecting President Barack Obama's image in the wake of the attack
that killed four Americans.
"The administration's withholding of documents - emails showing
greater White House involvement in misleading the American people -
is a flagrant violation of trust and undermines the basic principle
of oversight upon which our system of government is built," Boehner
said in a statement.
Also on Friday, the House Oversight Committee said it issued a
subpoena for Secretary of State John Kerry to testify at a May 21
public hearing about the attack.
Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, a California Republican, said the
panel wanted Kerry to answer questions about the State Department's
response to the congressional investigation of the Benghazi attack.
Kerry did not become Secretary of State until 2013, but Issa said
the State Department had shown "a disturbing disregard" for its
obligations to Congress.
State spokeswoman Marie Harf said the department was surprised by
the subpoena and found it unusual that it was issued before an
official invitation to Kerry, who is due to be in Mexico on May 21.
"We have our suspicions that this is just another attempt to use
this politically," she said at a news briefing.
CLINTON 2016
Benghazi has become a favored political issue for Republicans, who
say Obama's administration did too little to help during the attack
and then misled the public to protect Obama's image as he ran for
re-election in November 2012.
It also is a way to attack Hillary
Clinton, a likely 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, who
enjoyed high approval ratings as secretary of state during Obama's
first term.
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Chris Arterton, a professor of political management at George
Washington University, said Benghazi would come up if Clinton runs
but voters were more likely to focus on the economy than an attack
that took place four years earlier.
"We're a long way up from a very deep and troubling deficit, and if
that continues... that will be much more important than something
like Benghazi," he said, explaining that an improving economy would
benefit Clinton, or any 2016 candidate from the party controlling
the White House.
The U.S. unemployment report released earlier on Friday showed that
employers hired workers in April at the fastest clip in more than
two years.
Select committees include members of both parties and are appointed
to perform a specific function or investigate a certain event. In
the past, they were created to investigate the Watergate scandal
during the Nixon administration and the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy.
A senior House leadership aide said one of the members being
considered to chair the new panel is South Carolina Representative
Trey Gowdy.
(Additional reporting by Lesley Wroughton and Thomas Ferraro,
editing by Bill Trott, G Crosse and David Gregorio)
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