SELECT COMMITTEE
Several standing committees of the House have been investigating aspects of the Benghazi attack since 2012 and will likely continue to do so. It’s not yet clear how a select committee would differ from them, aside from the fact that it would focus all of its attention on a single subject. Depending on mission they are given, select committees may or may not:
— Be bipartisan.
— Be able to compel witnesses to testify under penalty of law.
— Have the power to recommend legislation.
One of the best-known examples is the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities. Formed in 1973, the bipartisan Senate committee, chaired by Sen. Sam Ervin, D-N.C., was assigned to investigate the Watergate break-in and cover-up, as well as “all other illegal, improper, or unethical conduct occurring during the presidential campaign of 1972, including political espionage and campaign finance practices.” The committee’s investigation and nationally televised hearings contributed to President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974.
Bill Steiden
TWO VIEWS
“What else about Benghazi is the Obama administration still hiding from the American people? Four Americans died at the hands of terrorists nearly 20 months ago, and we are still missing answers, accountability and justice. It’s time that change.”
House Speaker John Boehner
“There have already been multiple investigations into this issue … For Republicans to waste the American people’s time and money staging a partisan political circus instead of focusing on the middle class is simply a bad decision.”
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
House Speaker John Boehner declared Friday he would create a select committee to investigate the Benghazi attack, saying emails released this week showed the White House has withheld documents subpoenaed by congressional investigators.
“What else about Benghazi is the Obama administration still hiding from the American people?” Boehner said.
He said U.S. officials misled the American people after the Sept. 11, 2012, assault on the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Libya that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans and have sought to keep secret details about what happened from becoming public.
“Americans learned this week that the Obama administration is so intent on obstructing the truth about Benghazi that it is even willing to defy subpoenas issued by the standing committees of the people’s House,” Boehner said in a statement. “These revelations compel the House to take every possible action to ensure the American people have the truth about the terrorist attack on our consulate that killed four of our countrymen.”
Separately, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee, one of several investigating the violence, said Friday he would subpoena Secretary of State John Kerry to testify about the administration’s response to the attack.
Issa called the administration’s refusal to comply with his repeated requests for information “alarming” and illegal.
“Compliance with a subpoena for documents is not a game,” he said.
The convening of a special committee most likely means that a contentious back-and-forth between the White House and House Republicans will carry on through the summer and into the November elections, with the prospect of more administration officials being called before Congress to testify.
Republicans have accused President Barack Obama and his top aides of seeking to deceive the public about the true circumstances of a major, al-Qaida-linked terrorist attack during the final months of the 2012 presidential campaign — charges that the president and other U.S. officials reject.
A previous, bipartisan examination by the Senate Intelligence Committee found the U.S. had insufficient security at the Benghazi post and spread the blame among the State Department, the military and U.S. intelligence for missing what now seem like obvious warning signs. It found no instances of the administration intentionally deceiving the public.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., predicted the House committee would be a “partisan political circus,” and the State Department, which ordered an independent review days after the assault, called the notion that it has stonewalled congressional investigations “just false.”
“We’ve produced tens of thousands of documents. We’ve done nine hearings, 46 briefings,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters Friday. She called a select committee unnecessary: “How many more taxpayer dollars are we going to spend trying to prove a political point that in 18 months they haven’t been able to prove?”
The White House did not immediately respond to Boehner’s comments.
For Boehner, a select committee raises the profile of one of the Republicans’ main points of attack against Obama ahead of November’s elections, which could swing the Senate to GOP control. A long-term investigation by a select committee could also provide a vehicle for raising questions about the competency of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton ahead of another potential presidential run in 2016.
Boehner has been under intense pressure from conservatives to appoint a select committee., and a senior Republican aide said Boehner could schedule a vote as early as next week Given the GOP’s control of the House, the vote is a formality. Democrats controlling the Senate have shown no interest in launching a similar probe.
Republicans have pointed to one passage in particular among the 40 or so emails obtained by the watchdog group Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act request. Three days after the attack, Ben Rhodes, then the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications at the White House, stressed the goal of underscoring in the administration’s public statements “that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader policy failure.”
The email was written the Friday before then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice appeared on the Sunday news programs and explained the Benghazi attack as the result of a protest over a YouTube video mocking the Islamic prophet Mohammed. Administration officials later acknowledged that the attack was the work of terrorists, and not a direct reaction to the video.
Earlier this week, White House press secretary Jay Carney said Rhodes’ reminder was not specifically about Benghazi but about the overall situation across the Arab world, where American embassies and consulates in several countries faced angry and sometimes violent demonstrations over the video.
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