Trey Gowdy’s Former Top Lawyer Undercuts The Benghazi Committee

Shortly before the House Benghazi committee ramped up its battles with the Department of Defense in its probe of the 2012 terrorist attack, the committee’s own top lawyer admitted at least four times in interviews with military officials that there was no more they could have done on that tragic night.

That’s according to a letter obtained by The Huffington Post that is being sent Monday to the chairman of the committee, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), from the top Democrats on the Benghazi panel and the House Armed Services Committee, Reps. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and Adam Smith (D-Wash.).

The Democrats are sending the letter after relations between the GOP-led Benghazi committee and military officials recently took a turn for the worse. The military accused the committee late last month of demanding increasingly frivolous interviews from irrelevant service members; Gowdy responded by calling that charge a “partisan attack.”

But in Monday’s letter, which includes four separate comments from Gowdy’s recently departed chief counsel, Democrats say Gowdy’s own staffer agreed with the military.

According to the letter, that staffer, former Gen. Dana Chipman, said in interviews with former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and former Defense Department Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash that the department did all it could on that night when Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed.

“I think you ordered exactly the right forces to move out and to head toward a position where they could reinforce what was occurring in Benghazi or in Tripoli or elsewhere in the region,” Chipman told Panetta in the committee’s January interview with the former defense secretary, according to transcribed excerpts. “And, sir, I don’t disagree with the actions you took, the recommendations you made, and the decisions you directed.”

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