Benghazi Committee gets 4,000 pages of documents and notes from State

The chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi announced Thursday that the panel has received more than 4,000 pages of documents and notes from the State Department’s Accountability Review Board (ARB) that examined the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack on a U.S. compound in Libya.

It’s the first time that proceedings from the ARB’s review of the attack have been turned over to Congress, and came after the committee reinitiated an outstanding subpoena that had been issued by the House oversight committee in 2013.

“I appreciate the historic nature of State’s document production and recognize the importance of State’s response,” said Rep. Trey Gowdy, South Carolina Republican and the committee’s chairman. “It is my desire to see similar breakthroughs reached on the committee’s outstanding document requests and subpoenas. If State will work with the committee, we can expedite the pace of the committees work.”

Democrats on the committee have said a handful of investigations into the attack have already been done and say Republicans are using the committee as a way to attack former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential frontrunner.

A House Intelligence Committee report last year, for example, largely cleared the CIA of wrongdoing in the run-up to the attack and rejected the claim that CIA security officers were told to “stand down” and try not to rescue State Department personnel.

But Mr. Gowdy said the committee has shown there is still more for Congress to consider and that it “continues to build the most comprehensive and complete record on what happened before, during and after the Benghazi terrorist attacks.”

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SPECIAL COVERAGE: Benghazi Attack Under Microscope

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He has also called on Mrs. Clinton to testify before the committee twice: once to explain her use of a private email system as secretary of state and another time to answer questions about the attack itself.

At the request of State and to ensure the integrity of the review, Mr. Gowdy would not characterize the specific content of the documents but said getting the production “is an important part of ensuring the committee has access to all the facts.”