WASHINGTON — Despite poor reviews following Thursday’s high-profile hearing with Hillary Clinton, Republicans on the House Select Committee on Benghazi said they have no plans to pull back on an investigation that seems to have no end in sight.
The next step is to schedule interviews with former military and intelligence leaders, several members said Friday, including former defense secretaries Leon E. Panetta and Robert M. Gates and former CIA director David H. Petraeus.
Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Susan Brooks (R-Ind.) said committee Republicans are also not finished digging through emails sent by then-Secretary of State Clinton and other department officials, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens, who was among the four Americans killed in the September 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya.
“We know (the State Department has) many more they have not given us, and not just of the secretary’s, but many more emails and communications and documents and discussions,” Brooks told reporters Friday off the House floor.
Republicans’ plans are under scrutiny after Thursday’s questioning of Clinton yielded few new details about the 2012 attacks. Democrats are increasingly charging that the panel is a partisan tool being used to damage their party’s presidential front-runner.
Clinton emerged largely unscathed from the 11-hour hearing, an event that served as a milestone for a House investigation that has been marred by allegations of political animus.
Even Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), the committee chairman, could not say after the hearing whether the GOP learned anything new during its questioning of Clinton.
Looking forward, committee members said Friday they are in the process of scheduling interviews with Panetta, Gates and Petraeus. Unlike Clinton’s appearance, those interviews are expected to take place behind closed doors.
“Over the next several weeks, the committee has scheduled two witness interviews with individuals whose identities must remain secret,” spokesman Jamal Ware wrote in an email.
“Other witnesses have been identified and invited, and we will conduct additional interviews during this timeframe. The committee also has a number of unfulfilled document requests that are still outstanding.”
Republicans planned to interview military and intelligence officials earlier in the process, but Democrats allege they changed their plans after the discovery that Clinton used a private email server during her time as secretary of state.
Since that news broke in March, Republican investigators have been focused exclusively on Clinton and her inner circle, Democrats argue.
GOP members say they have not yet questioned defense and other officials because they have not obtained enough records to help them prepare for the interviews. They also note that they held Clinton’s hearing Thursday to accommodate her schedule.
Clinton was back on the campaign trail Friday, speaking before the Democratic Women’s Leadership Forum in Northern Virginia.
“I finally got to answer questions, something I have been pushing for literally a year, and I am just grateful I recovered my voice, which I lost a little bit,” she said.
House Democrats met privately Friday to discuss the way forward as some members have threatened to leave the Benghazi committee in protest.
After the meeting, Democrats called for the panel to be shut down but said they would continue to participate “in order to make sure the facts are known and the conspiracy theories are debunked.”
Republicans on Friday declined to give a specific timetable for when their work might conclude, arguing that the State Department is stonewalling them on document requests and that witnesses are expected to have scheduling conflicts.
The investigation, which has lasted 17 months and yielded thousands of pages of material from the State Department, will eventually conclude with a final report. But the writing has not yet started, Brooks said.
“We are trying to get that definitive, fact-based investigative report finished,” she said. “That will happen as soon as we can possibly make it happen, but we’ve got to finish the interviews, we’ve got to get the documents, have to finish the interviews, and then we’ll get the report going.
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