Benghazi Select Committee Witness List Could Bode Bad For Hillary Clinton

Cheryl Mills, left, walks with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, center, Senator Patrick Leahy, and Hilda Solis, the U.S. Secretary of Labor as Clinton arrives at Caracol, Haiti, Monday, October 22, 2012. Photo: Newscom)

The Chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi announced they will begin interviews with requested State Department personnel as early as next week.

“I am announcing an ambitious timeline for interviews consistent with my plan to speed-up the pace of the investigation” said Chairman Gowdy. “I intend to stay with this schedule and will issue subpoenas if necessary.”

Notable names on the list the House select committee intends to interview are top aides to Hillary Clinton, Cheryl Mills and Jake Sullivan. Former Deputy Assistant Secretary Raymond Maxwell told The Daily Signal that Mills and Sullivan were present at late-night Benghazi document-sorting session that he witnessed in the basement of the State Department. While neither the State Department nor the Justice Department, or the national media for that matter, have bothered to investigate the claim, it would appear Chairman Trey Gowdy intends to do just that.

But what of the former Secretary of State, herself, Hillary Clinton?

Sharyl Attkisson, a senior independent contributor to The Daily Signal, reported that both Democrats and Republicans want to schedule the appearance of Hillary Clinton “as soon as possible.”

However, Chairman Gowdy, a former prosecutor, said the State Department must provide documents that were initially subpoenaed in 2013 but yet to arrive. Gowdy says he wants time for the documents — which include those related to the State Department’s Accountability Review Board investigation and other relevant emails and the like — to be reviewed in order to “constructively ask questions of Secretary Clinton.”

The Benghazi committee also announced that next week it will begin interviewing three dozen firsthand witnesses, including “brave Americans who survived the attacks … and others who can provide indispensable firsthand accounts of what happened before, during and after the attacks.” However, the committee has not publicly provided the names of these witnesses, who will be interviewed between Feb. 10 and April 1.

The below list of names, which appears in alphabetical order, were sent in a letter to Ranking Member Elijah Cummings, D-Md., seeking Democrats’ input on witnesses in what the chairman said was another bipartisan attempt to get Democrats to focus on the substance of the investigation at hand, instead of process complaints.

“I welcome input from the minority and hope they will provide it expeditiously,” Gowdy said. “If not, I have been forthcoming and transparent about the Committee’s plan to move forward.”

1) William Burns: former State Department deputy secretary (Hillary Clinton’s No. 2). He retired from the State Department on Nov. 3, 2014.

2) Jay Carney: former White House press secretary, who was the face of what many, including Jon Karl at ABC came to realize were inaccurate political talking points pushed ahead of a president election. He resigned May 30, 2014.

3) Gen. Martin Dempsey: chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

4) Tom Donilon: former Obama national security adviser, who resigned on June 30, 2013. He was replaced by Susan Rice, who infamously repeated the “spontaneous demonstration” lie on at least five different Sunday shows.

5) Benjamin Fishman: former member of White House National Security Council, and principal officer responsible for U.S. policy toward Libya. He left the NSC in 2013 and is now a consulting senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

6) Patrick Kennedy: undersecretary of state for management, who reportedly transmitted the order to hold back the U.S.-based Foreign Emergency Support Team (FEST) during the Benghazi attacks, which contractors on the ground contend costs the lives of 4 Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. Obama officials argue they couldn’t have gotten there in time to help, but that has been directly refuted by military personnel.

7) Charlene Lamb: deputy assistant secretary for international programs, and the boss of the office that denied repeated security requests by U.S. personnel on the ground in Libya, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens. He is the man that Clinton and others claim intercepted the requests the former secretary claims she never saw from her “good friend.”

8) Denis McDonough: White House chief of staff and former Obama campaign adviser.

9) Cheryl Mills: former chief of staff to Secretary of State Clinton and former Hillary Clinton campaign adviser. Mills has a long history with the Clinton machine, which goes all the way back to her days as deputy counsel to President Bill Clinton. She defended him during his 1999 impeachment trial, and left the State Department on Feb. 1, 2013. She joined BlackRock’s board of directors Nov. 20, 2013.

10) Michael Morell: former deputy director of the CIA, who not only coordinated the Benghazi talking points, but removed all references to Islamic terrorism. He has been caught giving Congress conflicting testimony regarding the talking points. While Morell retired from the CIA on June 12, 2013, he joined Beacon Global Strategies in November 2013, which is a public-relations group run by Clinton and Obama lackeys.

11) Michael Mullen: retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who served as co-chairman of the Accountability Review Board. Mullen acknowledged coordinating with Clinton chief of staff Mills on at least one witness at the same time he served as independent co-chair of the ARB investigation. He didn’t, however, see fit to even speak to Clinton during the investigation.

12) Matt Olsen: former director of the National Counterterrorism Center and a top Obama terrorism adviser. Olsen left that job in July 2014.

13) Leon Panetta: former defense secretary. He left that post Feb. 27, 2013.

14) David Petraeus: former CIA director who resigned Nov. 9, 2012, amid a sex scandal the Obama administration knew about nearly 6 months before the controversy over the talking points. However, he was only sandbagged shortly after Obama’s re-election. It is thought that Petraeus was only fired and had his character publicly smeared because he refused to play ball with the administration on the talking points. His deputy, Michael Morell and others, were all too eager to do so instead.

15) Thomas Pickering: former U.S. ambassador who co-chaired the Accountability Review Board with Mullen.

16) Ben Rhodes: Obama deputy national security adviser. It is because of emails sent by Rhodes that House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, even agreed to vote on establishing the select committee. In emails the administration either refused to give to Congress or severely redacted, Rhodes coaches Susan Rice on a political narrative involving a spontaneous protest, which he said must be used in place of a greater foreign policy failure in answering questions from media.

17) Susan Rice: former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who repeatedly claimed — on five Sunday shows and beyond — the attacks were the result of a spontaneous demonstration )that included RPG fire) rather than coordinated acts of Islamic terrorism. Yet, in July 2013, she was promoted to Obama’s national security adviser.

18) Andrew Shapiro: former assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs. He left that post in 2013 and co-founded Beacon Global Strategies, which should sound familiar. It is the same firm of Clinton and Obama officials that employs Morell.

20) Mark Thompson: leader of the State Department’s Foreign Emergency Response Team (FEST), which was not allowed to respond to the Benghazi attacks. He is also deputy coordinator for operations in the Bureau of Counterterrorism.