http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/trey-gowdy-benghazi-probe-222867 Gowdy says administration slowing Benghazi probe
Gowdy's investigation has been savaged for dragging late into election season — but he says it's not his fault.
By Rachael Bade
05/06/16 05:23 AM EDT
For months, critics of the House Benghazi Committee have slammed Chairman Trey Gowdy for dragging his investigation into the middle of the election cycle. Just last week, a top Pentagon official sharply rebuked the panel for making new interview requests 22 months after the probe began.
But the South Carolina Republican has an answer for his detractors: It’s the Obama administration’s fault.
Gowdy, in an interview with POLITICO, said the State Department, the CIA and the Pentagon are to blame for his investigation’s snail-like pace, arguing they’ve slow-walked the hand-over of documents and interviews with key witnesses.
“It’s taken way too long and way too much of our energy in simply gaining access,” Gowdy said. “There continues to be time wasted negotiating with executive branch entities who do not want to give us what I believe Congress is entitled to.”
Right now, for example, he’s sparring with the Defense Department over interviews with military drone pilots and camera operators who flew missions over Libya the night of the attack. The Pentagon doesn’t see the point of the interviews and said they would be a waste of resources.
But Gowdy remains unswayed by those objections: “There are witnesses we had to insist on and then we were told no, then we were told we can’t find them, and then we were told, ‘It would take X,Y, Z and you don’t want to do all that,’ and there were all these excuses… There is no way we can do this investigation without talking to these people… and it takes time.”
In the interview, the former federal prosecutor sounded frustrated, even peppering answers with one or two uncharacteristic expletives he rarely uses like “hell” and "damn." He said some document requests from his panel have taken a year to be answered. In other instances, documents still haven’t been turned over at all, including interagency meeting records from the week after the attack.
Democrats say Gowdy’s making excuses. They argue he wasted a full year and half of his time trying to unearth dirt on Hillary Clinton's leadership of State before pivoting this winter to probe the military response to the attacks — all in an effort to extend the probe. He could have done parallel probes of Defense and the CIA while working on State matters in 2014 and 2015, they say, blasting the panel for waiting until much later to focus on those agencies.
And even some conservative commentators like Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren warned last year that “dragging the investigation into 2016 looks political… sends a bad message about fairness.”
“This has nothing to do with federal agencies and everything to do with Select Committee Republicans not even making many of their requests until after their disastrous hearing with Secretary Clinton, which even Republicans criticized as a monumental flop,” said top Benghazi Democrat Elijah Cummings. “Republicans have been spending their time scheduling dozens of new interviews — which they could have conducted long ago — to justify their own existence, drag out this investigation as close as they can to the election."
Gowdy knows the longer he waits the more Democrats will pillory him — and it could potentially skew the public opinion of his findings: “Nothing gets better with time, except maybe wine — but investigations do not. I wanted to have this done in December 2015… But you have to have access to documents and witnesses — that is the lifeblood of an investigation… And when one side controls documents and the witnesses and the other group is trying to conduct the investigation, that creates something of a quandary.”
The slow-walking, Gowdy says, started early with a clearance problem. He tapped three-star Lt. Gen. Dana Chipman as his chief counsel in July 2014. But the former Army Judge Advocate General didn’t get his security clearance until January the following year.
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http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/trey-gowdy-benghazi-probe-222867#ixzz47shPLIg5
