The State Department's plans to release more than 7,000 pages of Hillary Clinton's emails Friday is more of the materials that have been under demand for several months, Rep. Mike Pompeo said. But there are still important questions that need answered about how the Department of Defense responded to the news that the United States' diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, was under attack on Sept. 11, 2012.
"We just received these emails," the Kansas Republican, who serves on the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which questioned Clinton last week on the matter, told
Fox News' "America's Newsroom," accusing the White House of stonewalling the investigation.
"We asked Hillary Clinton if she spoke to the Secretary of Defense or the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and she testified that she did not," said Pompeo.
"We need to understand how the Department of Defense was deployed prior to that. To make sure good decisions were made to protect these folks and we need to understand all the detail about how they responded that evening in the aftermath of the attack on our facility in Benghazi."
During the hearing, it was revealed that Clinton had sent a few emails, including to her daughter, Chelsea, that described the attack as being like one al-Qaida would launch.
However, the initial narrative was that the attacks on the outpost and at a nearby CIA facility, in which Ambassador Chris Stevens, Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith, CIA contractors, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were killed, were spurred by response to an anti-Muslim video.
"Secretary Clinton lied to the family of Mr. Woods, she lied to the American people," said Pompeo. "We now know she believed within hours this was a terrorist attack."
Meanwhile, Democrats have been threatening to drop out of the committee for some time, not just after it grilled Clinton on the stand last week, said Pompeo — and it wouldn't matter much if they did leave.
"They've been threatening to get off the committee since its inception," he told the show.
"They haven't lifted a finger, and out of necessity stayed on the committee technically but they haven't done one stitch of work to help America understand how the first ambassador in 30 years was killed. I hope they stay on, but I what hope more importantly they begin to help us, not hinder us."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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