Today, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Joel Rubin is testifying before the House Select Committee on Benghazi about the slow-going process of providing the Commmittee with over 40,000 additional pages of documents regarding the before, during, and after of the Benghazi attacks in October of 2012.
Well, he’s trying.
In between bits of testimony, Democrats on the Committee have made it perfectly clear that they have reservations about participating in a Committee tasked with continuing the investigation into what the State Department did or did not know about events surrounding the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens, and three other Americans.
I understand the need for a bipartisan work product to come out of this Committee. If no Democrats sign on to the final report, it will be far too easy for the State Department, the White House, and the media to lampoon the thing as a partisan hack job. But from what Committee members are saying, it’s pretty clear that documents are trickling from the agencies to the Committee, and Republican members are losing patience.
Is the narrative evolving? Is the State Department’s unwillingness to admit its own mistakes (or even honest missteps?) giving rise to a new scandal rooted in a resistance to transparency?
Answering that question could be Chairman Trey Gowdy’s (R-SC) new, greatest challenge.
Update: You can watch the full hearing, and read the transcript, here, via C-SPAN.
You can also watch Chairman Gowdy lay into the State Department’s deputy here:
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY