House
Benghazi panel says State Deptartment to hand over documents today
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[July 28, 2015]
REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives committee investigating
the 2012 attacks on an American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya,
said the State Department has pledged to hand over 5,000 new pages of
documents related to the incident on Tuesday.
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"The State Department has informed the Committee it will make a
production of approximately 5,000 pages tomorrow - the second
largest production the Committee has received and the largest since
last summer," Republican Representative Trey Gowdy, the committee's
chairman, said in a statement on Monday.
The documents are not expected to include emails involving former
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has been embroiled in a
controversy over her use of a private email account while she was
America's top diplomat.
At least four emails out of some 30,000 from Clinton's private
account contained classified information, according to a government
inspector's letter to Congress last week.
Clinton, who is the front-runner for the Democratic presidential
nomination in 2016, was secretary of state when Islamic militants
attacked the Benghazi compound on Sept. 11, 2012, killing Ambassador
Chris Stevens and three other Americans.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2015/Jul/28/images/ads/current/LINCOLN_theater_011411.png) The State Department has provided the committee with thousands of
documents, but Gowdy has repeatedly said he is looking for
additional records relating to some of Clinton's staff as well as
the former secretary.
The South Carolina lawmaker says he wants all relevant documents
before Clinton testifies to the committee. Her campaign has said she
would testify in October, but the committee said the timing was not
set.
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In exchange for receiving the documents on Tuesday, Gowdy said, the
committee had granted a request from Secretary of State John Kerry's
chief of staff, Jon Finer, to postpone a hearing set for Wednesday
at which Finer was scheduled to testify.
"As a condition of postponing the hearing, we made the reasonable
request for a significant production of documents,” Gowdy said.
Republicans on the committee had been expected to grill Finer about
what they considered the State Department's slow pace in handing
over documents.
"If the State Department does not fulfill this production, or if
production continues to be anemic and underwhelming, we will move
forward with scheduling a compliance hearing before the Committee,"
Gowdy said.
(Reporting by Eric Beech; Editing by Sandra Maler and Mohammad
Zargham)
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