The State Department gave the House Benghazi Committee 1,296 new pages of Ambassador Chris Stevens' emails Tuesday, only two days before former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is scheduled to testify before the panel about the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks, reported Breitbart.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., chairman of the committee, first mentioned the emails during an interview on CBS' "Face the Nation" on Sunday, noting that none of the seven previous congressional committees that investigated the attacks on the diplomatic compound in Libya "bothered to access the e-mails of our ambassador," who was killed in the incident along with three other Americans.
Clinton is scheduled to testify to the committee on Thursday about her failure to provide adequate security for Stevens leading up to the onslaught, as well as the State Department's response to the attack once it had started.
"If you want a window into Libya and what was happening in the weeks and months before these four were killed, why would you not look at the ambassador's e-mails? He was a prolific e-mailer," Gowdy told CBS.
State Department spokesman Alec Gerlach said the department was just now handing over the emails because it received a "recently prioritized request from the Committee," and that the department has produced some 7,000 pages of emails and documents in recent weeks that were sent and received by Stevens, reported The Daily Caller.
The committee "has long had possession of emails and cables from Ambassador Stevens pertaining to Benghazi and Libya," he said, adding, "They do not change our understanding of what happened before, during or after the attacks."
Gowdy, however, characterized the emails differently in his interview on Sunday, noting that in the same week Stevens started his job as ambassador in June 2012, he was already telling the State Department about an uptick in violence and asking for more security, a request that fell on deaf ears in Clinton's department.
Instead of providing help, Gowdy said that the State Department asked Stevens to craft a public relations message about the dangerous situation in Libya. Another time, the department asked Stevens to vet an intelligence report written by Clinton's longtime confidant, Sidney Blumenthal.
So Stevens continued to press for additional security. In a July 9, 2012 cable reviewed by Fox News, Stevens reported that, "Overall security conditions continue to be unpredictable, with large numbers of armed groups and individuals not under control of the central government, and frequent clashes in Tripoli and other major population centers."
Stevens said he would need a minimum of 13 security personnel for "transportation security and incident response capability."
In the end, not only did Clinton's State Department fail to honor Stevens' repeated requests, but it actually reduced security in Libya, noted PolitiFact.
"What I want to know is, while violence was going up in Libya, why was our security profile going down? It wasn't even staying the same. It was going down," Gowdy said Sunday.
"And in the past, John, [Clinton] has said, 'well, I had people and processes in place to handle that.' Well, you also have people and processes in place to handle drivel that is produced by a guy named Sidney Blumenthal. But that made it to your inbox," Gowdy said. "I want to know why certain things made it to your inbox, Madam Secretary, but the plaintiff pleadings of our own ambassador that you put in place for more security never bothered to make it to your inbox. I think that's a fair question."
