Rep. Trey Gowdy (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
By Jason Devaney
Newsmax
Rep. Trey Gowdy said in a new interview the Obama administration is dragging its feet regarding the investigation into what happened during the 2012 Benghazi attacks that killed four Americans.
The South Carolina Republican told Politico claims that he is at fault for delaying the House investigation are false.
“It’s taken way too long and way too much of our energy in simply gaining access,” said Gowdy, who chairs the Benghazi panel. “There continues to be time wasted negotiating with executive branch entities who do not want to give us what I believe Congress is entitled to.”
Critics of the Select Committee on Benghazi say the investigation is a waste of time — and that Gowdy has extended it several times in an effort to find something Republicans can use against Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state at the time of the attacks.
“Republicans have been spending their time scheduling dozens of new interviews — which they could have conducted long ago — to justify their own existence, drag out this investigation as close as they can to the election,” Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Benghazi Democrat on the Benghazi panel, told Politico.
Gowdy said, “I wanted to have this done in December 2015… But you have to have access to documents and witnesses — that is the lifeblood of an investigation… And when one side controls documents and the witnesses and the other group is trying to conduct the investigation, that creates something of a quandary.”
State Department documents showed that Clinton told two versions of what happened in Benghazi in the days following the attacks. Clinton also reportedly missed a morning staff meeting the day after the attacks because she was sleeping.
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