State came forward with a startling allegation. That allegation was that former secretary of state Hillary Clintons aides ordered the destruction of documents to prevent congress and the arb from ever seeing them. Chairman dowdy called these allegations that the committee would be investigating this. What he failed to admit was that at the time of the chairmans fox news interview republicans had already investigated the maxwell claim and only found evidence against it. But when democratic staff spoke to that witness he said he didnt recall having been in the document review session that mr. Maxwell described. He also denied ever being instructed to flag information and documents that might be unfavorable to the department. He further reported that he never edge gauged in or was ever aware of any destruction of documents. That witness was perfectly willing to talk to democrats and has always been willing to talk to us. He also never asked to be treated as a confidential source. Hes never explained that. As a former prosecutor mr. Chairman, you understand that evaluating the credibility of witnesses and our allegations depends on whether the information that they provide can be coobama rated or not. Although your staff stated that they learning e. Ed nothing, in fact, it was learned that this claim was not substantiated by key witness and to me, thats incredibly telling. Unfortunately, because the facts didnt go into the conspiracy narrative, they failed to divulge that information to our side. If our goal is the truth, these interviews should have been conducted jointly with democrats and republicans in the room. Facts that do not guilty support allegations that we are investigating should not guilty and cannot be igs norred. I, for one, and not willing to sit by silently any long r. Maybe there is a good reason. They have yet to yield any new information that has not been uncoverered by the previous eight, count them agt, indepth investigations on the embassy in benghazi. If we sound a little frustrated today, well, its with good reason. Weve had enough of this pursuit and this quest to catch this mythical unicorn. Eight sprat investigations where both sides agreed on the rules have been conducted. nn if some member of the American Public were tried in a court of law, we would say that it was lunacy to expend the time, effort and money to continue to put them through that again. And, yet, here we are again. The American Public and the victims themselves deserve better. Im urging you to adont the rules that allow for participation of both republicans and democrats so that we can conduct credible nonpartisan and transparent investigation into this matter. In the time that i have remaining, i want to apologize to our witnesses. We kind of suspected that this is where it would end up. And i hate to say but those who were more cynical have the better argument. With that, i yield back the balance of my time. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I can assure i will never give veto power over subpoenas that thinks any entity that thinks no subpoena issish shooued. Mr. Smith said youre never going to get it. Youre never going to get all the answers. Youre never going to get all the documents. Thats an internal inconsistency and youre never going to make it out. Concerned, but youre speaking in seasons of the year. You said with some happiness, weve produced two witnesses since the fall. Isnt that ironic . That youre not speaking in ternls of days or weeks or months, but youre characterizing timing of the department of state in terms of seasons of the year. Now, youve come into this with an opinion, havent you, based on your past writings. You wrote a piece about the politicizing the benghazi attacks in october of 2012. Isnt that right . Let me read the first two paragraphs. I want to get your opinion and how that opinion intersects with today. So, you wrote, the killing of four american patriots in benghazi last month was an act of terror. Those four americans representeded the best of our country. They put their lives on the line to advance American Interests in a volatile region. They deserve the support of their Government Back home. Paragraph two. Instead of getting that support, their deaths are being made used as a partisan attack on president obama, part of a false narrative that the president failed them. What has failed them is our political system. Rather than supporting a serious, nonpartisan investigation into what took place and to what went wrong, waiting to get all the facts out, conservatives are trying to affix blame for their debts, for political advantage. Now, i recognize, mr. Reuben, theres been a lot of things coming off of capitol hill as it relates to benghazi, but you dont think this is a prif louse partisan investigation, do you . Chris stevens was friend of mine. I worked on capitol hill. I understand that. Sir, im sorry you think this is a frivolous partisan investigation . Sir, im not commenting on the question of is this a frivolous investigation because youre citing to accepting the reasonability department of state. And im interested in a simple question. Do you think that this investigation is frivolous and partisan . Whats your opinion . Sir, again, in 2012, after Chris Stevens was killed and i remember the morning because he was a friend and i remember when his name was announced on the radio and my heart sunk to my feet because i knew chris because he represented the best of the state department and im sorry, sir, his name at that time was not being used in the manner i felt respect. Mr. Reuben, is this frivolous . Im asking you an opinion about your opinion about this process today. Is this frivolous and is this partisan. Whats your answer . Can you not give an answer . The state department is and has been, from secretary on down, happy to comply and work with the committee as the chairman himself has said in a letter as well as in Public Comment that mr. Reuben, i thought that was an easy layup. I think it was an easy thing to think, no, of course this is serious and not partisan and lets get to it. I find it shocking that you cant give a straight answer to that simple question and youre not going to give it to me, so lets move on. I find myself oftentimes language up here, state department and youre in the business of understanding Foreign Language and you have misinterpreted the language because to come in here and to sort of claim that we are, youre gratified that your cooperation, let me translate for you. Hes not pleased with your cooperation, he durant think this is going well and he thinks youre part of the problem. Now, you claimed in your original testimony, in this role, i serve as chief liaison to the house, ensuring Foreign Policy issues, et cetera. So, your testimony is that youre responsible, right . That i am the chief liaison that the state department has a significant number of people working on a significant number of issues. In my job, i convey that, those issues as requested by congress and back and forth in the dialogue with the Foreign Affairs committee. Back in november, november 18th, a season ago, this committee requested the documents, the emails, communiques and so forth of 11 of the principles on the seventh floor. Now, i brought my computer here today and i know its mott the same thing. I dont want to oversimplify it through the sake of being gratuitous, but when i go to my email, which has thousands in it and i type in Something Like united airlines, for example, and i sort it, dozens and dozens of things come up within the twinkling of an eye. When can we expect you to use a similar enterprise, is there a date certain that we can rely on because the admonition that you have never said no is ridiculous. You dont have to say no. As a dad, when my kids could come to me, i would say, theyd ask to do something and i didnt want to do it, id say, let me think about it. Youre doing the exact same thing. Youre saying, were working on it. Remember that scene in raiders of the lost ark at the end when Indiana Jones goes in and is talking to the government guy and he says, wheres the ark . And the government guy says, we have top people working on it. And Indiana Jones says, what people . And the government guy says, top people. Youre the government guy. Youre standing up for top people. Youve got to bring your game. Quouf got to be the expediter. The one that sheds your past opinions about congressional investigations and takes on the job of being an advocate so that we can all get to the bottom of this. The other side doesnt get to argue in the alternative that its not moving fast enough and theyre being passive aggressive by not participating. It just doesnt work and its very flat footed. But what we need from you is a disposition of expedition, that is recognizes that a chairman is not happy. Dont misinterpret the charm and graciousness of the south. Im from chicago, we have none of that. And were trying to be very, very direct and that is to be to be part of the remedy, mr. Reuben, to be part of the solution and to get things done. As ive said, sir, and as i can assure you as i said in my testimony, we will begin with production of additional documents to the committee within days. We are also needing the guidance from the committee as to its top priority and sequencing. No, no. The committee had told us youre making an argument that says these things have to be consecutive requests. Theyre not. Theyre concurrent requests. You can walk and chew gum at the same time. Youve got 70,000 employees. So, to make the add machine igs of the committee that youve got to line up single file and youre going to be admitted in, were going to get you this piece of evidence if you ask the right way and that piece of evidence, come op. Thats an old trick. We have a record of cooperation with this committee. In recent days, we proactively offered to this committee a brief. Come on. We need documents. 11 people on the seventh floor. We need it promptly and and we are committed. My time is expired. I yield back. Chair, well go to the gentleman from california. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Still trying to figure out whos Indiana Jones in that analogy. I want to comment on a couple of things and im not sure that i have a question for any of the panelists. Thank you for spending your time with us today. Im not sure why youre here, but i appreciate your presence end mr. Reuben, looks like your reason for being here is so that we can beat up on you, which i think is grossly unfair to you and the state department considering that if were going to look to assess reasonability for the slow pace of this investigation, we have to look to ourselves before we look to the state department. Given that we didnt ask for a single new document from the state department for the first half year of existence of this select committee, it seems a bit disingenuous to be criticizing the state department for the pace of our investigation. The entire katrina investigation had finished its work before we requested a document from the state department. And certainly, before this point in our investigation. I think the problem here is not with the pace of the state departments response. The problem all along has been this committee has such an indefinite scope. We dont know exactly what were looking for. This was a big part of the reason why Many Democrats had reservation about participating in a committee or forming the committee. As the chairman pointed out. On the vote to form the select committee, originally, only seven democratic members supported it because unclear, other than the political purpose, what was the purpose of this select committee and in the reauthorization, which took place as part of the rules package, not a single democratic supported it. In fact, four republicans voted against the rules package, which reauthorized this committee and a big part of the committee is that even now, eight months later, we still dont know wh were looking for and this is a problem not only in terms of this select committee and investigation going on. Its also a problem in terms of which we can expect to get our document requests responded to. If we had a better idea of what we were looking for, of what was in controversy, then we could narrow our requests and im sure we could get it complied with with much more lackrity. Part of the reason why i think the charter for this select committee is brought as the chairman mentioned is that we didnt really know the purpose of this committee. Were we looking at gun running or nonexist ens stand down orders or military assistance that was ordered not to be provided or any number of myths. The challenge has been that on these issues, its not as if there was a factual controversy. There wasnt before this committee was established. Weve had innumerable investigations and we couldnt narrow in on a particular set of facts in dispute because it really wasnt the fact based dispute as much a political dispute. About how to interpret the events, so the charter was broad and for that reason, it was voted on on the party line basis, but the committee was established and we agreed to participate in the hopes that against our expectation, it would turn out to be different. And initially, it looked that way and im grateful the first two hearings were on a very productive course and that is what have we done in terms of recommendations where are we in the hunt frs those responses. We havent narrowed the scope at all. We still dont know what were looking for, but we know were looking for something. And its part of the reason why we feel its so important we agree on the scope of this investigation, otherwise, its going to go on forever. It will be a partisan fishing expedition or drawn out to affect the president ial election cycle. At the end of the day and i want to use an idea suggested by my colleague, we have never asked for veto over subpoenas. What we have asked for is to be notified of them. To have a chance to weigh in. Where theyre not disputed. Our Ranking Member and chairman can agree and where they are, we ought to have a vote on them. Thats not a veto. They have more members than we do. Provided their members agree with the question, with the subpoena request, they should always be improved, but we ought to have an open debate about it to prevent this from being a purely partisan exercise, unless thats the goal. So i think defining the scope is going to be important. Ifst going to have credibility. The final point i would make on this is if this investigation doesnt produce a bipartisan report, it will have been a complete failure. It will be a meaningless failure because if we dont produce a bipartisan report at the end of the day, it will have no credibility. So if were going to invest our time in this, lets make it worthwhile and that means lets make it bipart son. So, that the country and the families will have the confidence of knowing that this was a objective work product. But the manner in which you do that, whether youre a lawyer, as i am, former u. S. Attorney, whether you are a Law Enforcement official who conducts investigations, whether as my friend from illinois said whether you are a parent trying to get to the bottom of an incident, you have to ask questions. And you have to interview those who were involved. But when the incident involves numerous documents, typically in any investigation, you try to get the documents ahead of time so that you run an efficient, fair investigation when you get to ask witness questions, you have documents in front of you that you can ask them the most relevant questions. And that, i think, is has been the problem that we have had is that while you, mr. Ruben, have talked about cooperating, you have required us to prioritize rather than giving us, as ms. Roby talked about, the universe of documents. And so things have been, you know, dribbed and drabbed out to this committee over a period of time. And in large part because of that, that is why we have not had interview have not interviewed witnesses yet because weve been waiting on the documents for months, and i think when this committee was established, the state department knew, as we said we were going to take the work, the documents from the other committees, we didnt want to duplicate the effort. We wanted to take the documents from the other committee, and its taken a long time just to get those. What was produced ogr, what was produced to intel . So i just want to say, we are have tried in a very thorough, fair manner to try to extract the documents from the various agencies that have already given the documents to different committees. Our recommendations do plan to be very we do need to make bipartisan recommendations. I agree with that. But in order to conduct a fair, authorize re, thoughtful, efficient investigation, we have to have the documents first. Thats why we focused on the documents. And i have to ask how can we possibly learn from the attacks if we dont learn about the attacks . We cant make recommendations Going Forward if we dont have all of the facts about what happened before, during and after the attack. And there are documents that remain to be reviewed. Weve learned that. You have recently given us new documents that were never reviewed prior to the establishment of this committee, even though there have been eight committees that received and requested documents in the past, this committee is still getting new documents. And our challenge is we dont know how many more new documents are out there. And how can that be after two years, since this tragic incident, how can it be that we are still getting new documents . And the need to review those documents is anyone who conducts any investigation, that is critical prior to interviewing witnesses. Who have yet to tell their stories to congress. So many witnesses have yet to tell their story to congress. And i want to focus on our request to interview those witnesses. Our first two requests and there will be more requests, mr. Ruben our first two requests to the state department were to interview 22 state department personnel. 18 of whom were in benghazi in the months prior to the attack. And experienced firsthand the deteriorating Security Posture as well as the four who were in benghazi. None of those people have been interviewed by congress, to my knowledge, none. And so for the other side to, you know, really try and capture all thats been done, how is it that 22 people who have direct knowledge have not yet been interviewed by any committees in congress . So there are no asked and answered questions from 22 different people with firsthand knowledge. So were not seeking to duplicate any work thats already been done. T