The chairman of the Select Committee on Benghazi says President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry could end the more than yearlong investigation in a heartbeat — by telling everyone to hand over all the information they've been asked to.
In an interview on Fox News Radio's "Kilmeade and Friends," South Carolina Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy said if the committee were "to stop now, without interviewing" about 25 to 30 more people and without "nearly the document production" it's seeking, "the report would be inadequate, incomplete."
He added a document dump of about 4,000 emails Tuesday night from the State Department didn't reveal "a whole lot" on Benghazi, and that "if you want me to write the definitive report on Benghazi… I can't do it with 'some' documents."
The probe, however, could come to a quick and definitive end if Obama and Kerry wanted it to.
Obama "could pick up the phone today and say … 'Give him what he wants so he will please go away,'" Gowdy said. And Kerry "could decide, 'You know what, none of this happened when I was secretary of state, and I’m tired of the agency being cast in the light that it’s cast in, as being recalcitrant, give him the emails. They’re public record. Give them to him.'"
But "those two phone calls haven’t been made yet, so we continue to wait. So there’s a drip," Gowdy said.
The remarks come as former Secretary of State and Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton's campaign released a video calling the protracted probe a "political charade."
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Emails released earlier this week to the panel showed Clinton’s relationship with Sidney Blumenthal "was a whole lot broader than Libya," Gowdy said, and that "with respect to Libya and Benghazi, we didn’t learn a whole lot" because the memos were from 2009 and predated the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks that killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens.
Gowdy, without saying when Clinton might testify before the committee, added that since she's agreed to appear, but only once, that one time "is going to have be thorough and productive."