The State Department has agreed to release 5,000 pages of documents to the House Select Committee on Benghazi on Tuesday, the panel’s chairman said late on Monday evening.
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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. But for months Gowdy has said that State has largely failed to respond to his demand for the emails of Hillary Clinton’s top aides when she was secretary of state.
“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”, he added. The attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012 left four Americans dead, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher J. However, committee spokesman Jamal Ware said later in the day that the committee and Clinton’s lawyer were “still in negotiation” and nothing has been finalized.
Gowdy had offered Jon Finer, Kerry’s chief of staff, the option of producing documents to the committee rather than testify when he first called for Finer to appear last week.
Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said she accepted the invitation on Friday and will testify on October. 22. “The committee is not interested in drama, we want the facts”. Gowdy has repeatedly requested more documents related to Clinton and her staff in the days before the attack.
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Gowdy and other Republicans on the committee planned to grill Finer on what they consider to be the very slow pace by the State Department in turning over emails from Clinton’s top staffers, according to Politico.
