WASHINGTON — Gen. Carter F. Ham, who led the United States Africa Command on the night of the attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, has been interviewed at least nine times by investigators scrutinizing the events in 2012 that led to the deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.
But more than two years after House Republicans created the Select Committee on Benghazi, General Ham has yet to appear before that panel. He was finally supposed to do so on Thursday, but Republicans suddenly postponed the session until June 8, citing scheduling conflicts.
Whether by diligence or design, the committee’s grindingly slow pace has put it on track to deliver a final report shortly before the presidential nominating conventions in July, or even as late as the weeks before the November election — both points at which it could inflict maximum political damage on Hillary Clinton, who has been a central focus of the investigation since its inception.
Even some Republicans say the sluggishness of the committee, which has long been under fire from Democrats who describe it as a partisan witch hunt, risks feeding its reputation as an exercise meant to harm Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign. It also illustrates how a committee created to get at the truth of a terrorist attack that killed four Americans has expanded in multiple directions but could fail to come up with significant new information.
Continue reading the main story“The sooner you got through the investigation, the better it would be to do the report,” said Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, who is not on the panel. “I think the later it goes, the more politicized it seems.”
Though Mr. Cole said he trusted Representative Trey Gowdy, the South Carolina Republican who is chairman of the Select Committee, he offered some advice: “If you can’t get it done relatively soon, certainly don’t put it out the month before the election. That, to me, would discredit the hard work I know that committee has done.”
Mr. Gowdy blamed what he said was obstruction by the Obama administration and said Wednesday that he was trying to get the report out “before summer.”
Asked whether the report’s release might collide with the nominating conventions and bring accusations of a political hit job, Mr. Gowdy told a crowd of reporters, “I don’t look at it that way.”
Instead, he said, “I look at it as whether or not you are going to conclude an investigation before you have talked to all the witnesses and accessed all the documents.”
“The calendar is the calendar,” Mr. Gowdy added. “But, you know, the flip side of that is to say, ‘Yeah, we were owed documents, and yeah, we had witnesses who came in at the last minute, but because we were afraid of media criticism because of some conventions coming up, we went ahead and shortened our investigation.’ ”
Mr. Gowdy and Republican staff members say the report will contain important revelations, a prediction Democrats call laughable. They point to the committee’s eight-hour questioning of Mrs. Clinton at a hearing in October, which even some conservative commentators derided as a waste of time.
In a statement, the senior Democrat on the panel, Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, said he had no doubt about the Republicans’ true purpose. “The Select Committee has been a taxpayer-funded attack against a presidential candidate by an opposing political party rather than an objective effort to seek the truth,” Mr. Cummings said.
He added, “Despite Chairman Gowdy’s repeated claims over the past year that the committee’s work is close to being finished, he continues to request unnecessary and duplicative interviews from the Defense Department that are further delaying the report closer to the election.”
Mr. Gowdy, a former federal prosecutor elected to Congress with support from the Tea Party, has repeatedly denied claims that he and other Republicans on the committee have a political agenda. But that position was not helped when one of his best friends in Congress, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, told Fox News last fall that the committee had been an effective weapon against Mrs. Clinton and was an example of a conservative strategy “to fight and win.”
Democrats have accused Republicans of wasting millions of taxpayer dollars on the investigation, although independent assessments have found some of that criticism to be exaggerated.
Still, other assessments of the investigation have found that it has repeatedly shifted course and that for a long time, it focused more on Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state than on the Benghazi attack.
The hyperpartisan fighting between Republicans on the Select Committee and the Obama administration flared last month, when the assistant defense secretary for legislative affairs, Stephen C. Hedger, sent a scathing letter to Mr. Gowdy accusing the committee of making a “crescendo of requests” for testimony and documents and of demanding that Pentagon employees engage in speculation outside their knowledge and expertise.
Mr. Gowdy responded with a letter of his own. The war of words escalated this week after Mr. Gowdy appeared on Fox and seemed to undercut a central allegation that Republicans have made about Benghazi: that the military could have done more that night to help the Americans who were under attack.
Aides to Mr. Gowdy insist that his remark was not a departure from previous occasions on which he has said that a main question for Republicans is not whether American forces could have reached Benghazi to respond on the night of the attack, but why they could not do so.
“Whether or not they could have gotten there in time, I don’t think there is any issue with respect to that,” Mr. Gowdy said in the Fox interview. “They couldn’t. The next question is, why could you not? Why were you not positioned to do it?”
Republicans say those are among the questions they want to ask General Ham and the other Defense Department employees they have asked to testify.
White House officials have said repeatedly that the attacks were thoroughly investigated by several panels, including in Congress and at the State Department, and that concerted steps were taken to hold officials accountable for lapses and to improve security for diplomatic personnel.
Other Republicans who have been fiercely critical of Mrs. Clinton’s handling of the Benghazi attacks acknowledged that the Select Committee had had some tough moments, particularly the October hearing — one of just four public hearings held since the panel was created in May 2014.
“I did watch all 11 hours,” said Representative Darrell Issa of California, a former chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, who led his own investigation into Benghazi. “I can’t comment on anything other than it may have been a little like the O.J. prosecution. He was guilty as hell, but sometimes less is more, and a much shorter hearing that stuck to some very, very basic questions one time might have been helpful.”
Representative Lynn Westmoreland, Republican of Georgia and a member of the Select Committee, blamed the Obama administration for the slow pace of the investigation.
“If we had had the cooperation of the State Department, the D.O.D., the C.I.A., you know, we could have gotten through this a lot quicker,” Mr. Westmoreland said in an interview between House votes on Wednesday, using initials for the Department of Defense. “But, you know, when you are waiting six, eight, 10 months on documents and they dump ’em 18, 20,000 at a time, it delays it.”
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