As we have outlined (with considerable criticism) over the past year, the only substantive inquiry into the Benghazi scandal will have to be held in non-public settings. When you dig into the substance, and avoid the political aspects, everything that matters regarding the Benghazi fiasco is covered under U.S. national security protections.
There is little of value available to discuss in public hearings. If you understand the Benghazi Brief you understand why.
The CIA and the State Department were conducting a joint covert operation labeled “Zero Footprint” in Libya. That operation was expanded into Syria after Panetta left the CIA. The congressional intelligence oversight known as the Gang of Eight were fully briefed.
Hence, if House Select Committee Chair Trey Gowdy wants to discuss email use, or communication methods therein, during the tenure of Clinton and Panetta, around Operation Zero Footprint, Gowdy has to make those inquiries in private.
WASHINGTON — The chairman of the House select committee investigating the Benghazi attacks asked Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday to appear for a private interview about her exclusive use of a personal email account when she was secretary of state.
“The committee believes a transcribed interview would best protect Secretary Clinton’s privacy, the security of the information queried, and the public’s interest in ensuring this committee has all information needed to accomplish the task set before it,” the chairman, Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina, said in a letter sent Tuesday morning.
Mr. Gowdy said that the committee believed Mrs. Clinton’s “email arrangement with herself is highly unusual, if not unprecedented.” He said that her decision to delete all of her emails amid the congressional investigation into the attacks in 2012 on an American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, “only exacerbates our need to better understand what the secretary did, when she did it, and why she did it.”
In a letter to Mr. Gowdy on Friday, a lawyer for Mrs. Clinton said that an examination of the server that housed Mrs. Clinton’s email account showed it had no copies of emails she sent during her time in office.
The lawyer, David Kendall, said that in response to a request from the State Department in October, Mrs. Clinton’s representatives had determined which of her roughly 60,000 emails were personal and private. Then, a setting on the email account was changed to retain only messages sent in the previous two months, he said. The setting was changed after Mrs. Clinton provided the State Department in December with roughly 30,000 printed emails that her representatives said were government records, he said. (read more)
