WASHINGTON — (CNN) House Select Committee on Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy said Friday that the Obama administration could speed up the Benghazi investigation if they turned over the requested relevant documents, but they haven’t cooperated.
Gowdy told CNN’s Brianna Keilar that his panel has been specific with the administration about the documents needed to be turned over for the investigation.
“They begged us to narrow it so we narrowed it,” he said. “It’s still like pulling teeth to get the information.”
Gowdy told CNN that so far, the documents that have been turned over haven’t been helpful toward their investigation into the 2012 Benghazi attack.
“You know what we got last week? We got 3,600 pages, half of which were press clippings, including articles about Richard Gere,” he said. “So if that is their idea of complying with a congressional investigation, then we are going to be at this for a long time.”
He also told CNN that Hillary Clinton was wrong when she said that she’d never had a subpoena in her interview with CNN.
“That is demonstrably false,” Gowdy told CNN. “You have an obligation to preserve the public record.”
Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill told CNN that the former Secretary of State understood the question to be if she was under subpoena when the emails were deleted, this past December.
Gowdy said there were other subpoenas prior the one he issued to Clinton in March 2015 and that she has a “statutory obligation” to preserve public records.
“There are at least three separate legal obligations that should have informed and instructed her not to delete emails or wipe her server clean,” he told CNN.
The-CNN-Wire ™ & © 2015 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved. (Photo: CNN)
