Dem: Benghazi panel to vote on releasing former Clinton aide’s testimony

The top Democrat on the House Select Committee on Benghazi says the panel will vote July 8 on whether to release the deposition of Hillary Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal.

“House rules require a vote, Democrats insisted on that vote, and the Chairman has now confirmed that he will follow the rules and schedule a vote,” Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said Tuesday in a statement.

“The American people deserve to see what this transcript shows — how Republicans have been spending millions of tax dollars investigating Secretary Clinton and her personal relationships rather than the attacks on Benghazi,” Cummings said.

{mosads}Democrats had expected to lose the vote, being outnumbered on the 12-member committee 7 to 5. But last week, panel member Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.) told The Hill that the transcript of the nearly nine-hour deposition should be made public, putting Democrats one vote away from getting it released.

Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) has resisted making the deposition public, noting that the select committee hasn’t released transcripts of any of its previous interviews.

But Democrats argue that the panel has already released nearly 60 emails to and from Clinton that Blumenthal himself handed over earlier this month, making Gowdy’s concerns moot.

Democrats also believe the transcript will show GOP questions during the marathon, closed-door session were mostly political and not focused on the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including the ambassador.

Later Tuesday, Cummings announced the select committee had received 3,600 pages of new documents from the State Department, including emails from Clinton aides Jake Sullivan and Cheryl Mills.

The latest batch also includes communication from then-United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, who went on Sunday talk shows shortly after the attack and erroneously said it was sparked by an anti-Muslim online video.

The latest documents stem from a subpoena the House panel issued earlier this year for the emails from “seventh floor principals” at the State Department, according to a letter from the agency.

The panel requested the communications from aides in November and issued a subpoena for them in March. 

The request included messages from some of Clinton’s closest aides. Besides Sullivan and Mills, the list is believed to include Huma Abedin and Philippe Reines. It also covered Wendy Sherman, Patrick Kennedy, William Burns, Jeffrey Feltman and Thomas Nides.

The documents are different from the 55,000 that Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential front-runner, turned over to State from the private email server she used while serving as the nation’s top diplomat.

The State Department announced Tuesday it would release 3,000 more of those pages at 9 p.m. Tuesday.

In May, a federal judge for the District Court of the District of Columbia ordered the State Department to release Clinton’s emails in batches ever 30 days, rejecting an agency plan to roll them out in early 2016.

Speaking to a reporter during a briefing, State Department spokesman John Kirby said the release would comply with the judge’s order that it must contain at least 7 percent of Clinton’s message traffic.

— This story was updated at 6:24 p.m.