Benghazi Investigation Deepens: Lawmakers Seek Interviews of 13 Officials Involved
5:16 PM, May 23, 2013
• By STEPHEN F. HAYES
As the investigation into the Obama administration’s handling of
the attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi intensifies, lawmakers on
Capitol Hill are seeking to conduct transcribed interviews with thirteen
top State Department officials in the coming weeks in order to learn
more. Those named in the letter include a wide range of current and
former State Department personnel, from senior advisers to Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton to mid-level career officials with responsibility
for diplomatic security.
Among
those officials: Jacob Sullivan, then deputy chief of staff and
director of policy planning (and currently national security adviser to
Vice President Joe Biden); Victoria Nuland, then State Department
spokesman; Raymond Maxwell, deputy assistant secretary of state for near
east affairs; Patrick Kennedy, undersecretary of state for management;
and Eric Boswell, former assistant secretary of state for diplomatic
security.
In a letter dated May 17, 2013, Representative
Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee,
wrote to Secretary of State John Kerry to request formally that Kerry
make these current and former State Department employees available. “The
State Department employees whose testimony the Committee is seeking are
critical fact witnesses who are positioned to shed light on what
happened before, during and after the terrorist attacks that claimed the
lives of four Americans in Benghazi.”
Issa reminded Kerry of his recent promise to run
“an accountable and open State Department,” but noted that State’s
“posture with respect to the congressional investigation of the Benghazi
attacks has not lived up to your commitment to ‘provide answers.’” The
State Department, Issa wrote, “continues to limit the Committee’s access
to relevant documents and witnesses.” The transcribed interviews are
likely a first step towards requesting—or demanding—congressional
testimony for several of those listed.
In addition to the thirteen State Department
officials, Issa’s committee will conduct a transcribed interview on June
3, with Ambassador Thomas Pickering, one of the two primary authors of
the Administrative Review Board report on the Benghazi attacks. That
investigation, which failed to interview Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton and other officials with knowledge of the attacks, has not fared
well under the additional scrutiny that it has attracted as more
information on the attacks has become public. Sources tell THE WEEKLY
STANDARD that the committee will likely seek to interview
Admiral Mike Mullen, the other chief author of the ARB report, at some
point in the near future.
Republicans on the committee hope that the next
round of interviews will provide a better sense of the State
Department’s role in providing security before the attacks, in the
deliberations about a military response during the attacks and in the
creation of the administration’s public narrative after the attacks.
Sullivan figured prominently in emails sent between
senior Obama administration officials about the formulation of Benghazi
talking points that were distributed to policymakers in Congress and
the executive branch in the aftermath of the attacks. An email from a
United Nations staffer to Ambassador Susan Rice, who would present the
administration’s case on five Sunday talk shows on September 16,
reported that Sullivan would work with officials from the intelligence
community on those talking points. Subsequent emails between Sullivan
and the U.N. staffer showed efforts to ensure that Rice was kept in the
loop on those talking points.
In another email exchange, this one with State
Department spokesman Victoria Nuland, Sullivan reports that he will make
edits to the talking points working with National Security Council
spokesman Tommy Vietor. Nuland had previously objected to some of the
language in the talking points, on the grounds that members of Congress
would be in a position to say things that she had not been allowed to
say and that members might criticize the State Department for ignoring
warnings about previous attacks.
Sullivan, in his email to Nuland, wrote: “I spoke
with Tommy. We’ll work through this in the morning and get comments
back.” Moments later, Sullivan reiterated the point: “Talked to Tommy.
We can make edits.”
The emails contradict claims from Jay Carney and
others that neither the White House nor the State Department played a
significant role in editing the talking points. Several major edits were
made to the talking points at or following a meeting of senior Obama
administration officials during a secure video teleconference on
Saturday morning.
Benghazi Investigation Deepens: Lawmakers Seek Interviews of 13 Officials Involved
5:16 PM, May 23, 2013
• By STEPHEN F. HAYES
Lawmakers want to ask Nuland about an email she
sent expressing her concerns and those of her “building leadership” at
the State Department to some of the contents of the talking points. In
another email, Nuland notes that State Department leadership would be
contacting the National Security Staff directly.
In testimony on January 23, Hillary Clinton claimed
that the talking points were “an intelligence product” and that the
“intelligence community was the principal decider about what went into
the talking points.” But her testimony is contradicted by an email from
the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs, which reported: “The State
Department had major reservations with much or most of the document. We
revised the document with their concerns in mind.”
Was Clinton involved in the revisions?
Beyond the talking points, lawmakers want answers
to questions decisions on security before and during the attacks.
Kennedy, who has testified previously about Benghazi, will no doubt face
additional questions about his role in refusing to send the Foreign
Emergency Support Team (FEST) to Benghazi when the attack began. CBS’s Sharyl Attkisson reported this week
that deployment of the FEST team to Benghazi was “ruled out from the
start,” a “decision that became a source of internal dissent and the
cause of puzzlement to some outsiders.” An official who spoke to
Attkisson said that Kennedy dismissed the idea.
Maxwell, who was placed on “administrative leave” last winter, recently told Josh Rogin of the Daily Beast
that he had nothing to do with decision making on Benghazi. “I had no
involvement to any degree with decisions on security and the funding of
our security at our diplomatic mission in Benghazi,” Maxwell said.
Maxwell’s punishment came after the release of the ARB report, and Rogin
reports that Maxwell has never had access to the classified version of
that report, where some of the State Department’s failures are laid out.
The same is true for Greg Hicks, former deputy
chief of mission in Libya, who recently offered in congressional
testimony a critical assessment of State Department leadership during
and after the Benghazi attacks. Victoria Toensing, who is representing
Hicks, says he has still not been allowed to review the classified
version of the ARB report, despite his having been interviewed for it.
This lack of access to the classified ARB report is
one of many questions Pickering will face when he is interviewed early
next month. Why not let Hicks and others interviewed for the report see
the final product?
In addition, lawmakers will press Pickering on a
report that many consider to be a whitewash. Not only did the ARB team
fail to interview Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, they didn’t speak
with lower-level personnel in the chain of decision making who had
volunteered to speak with them. One of those officials, Mark Thompson,
the State Department’s acting deputy assistant secretary of state for
counterterrorism, offered to share his experience from that evening with
the ARB, but was never contacted for an interview.
Thompson was one of a handful of State Department
officials who had a firsthand view of what was happening in Libya that
night. When he learned that Ambassador Chris Stevens was missing and
that others had sought safe haven, Thompson testified, he told his
leadership at the State Department “that we needed to go forward and
consider the deployment of the Foreign Emergency Support Team.”
“I notified the White House,” Thompson continued.
“They indicated that meetings had already taken place that evening” and
that FEST would not be deployed.
Did the ARB leadership believe this testimony
wasn’t relevant to their investigation? Or was it inconvenient to the
conclusion they wanted to reach?
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