Update on House Select Committee on Benghazi Public Hearing

Hearing 2
Date:
Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - 10:00am
Location:
HVC-210

Topic: Reviewing Efforts to Secure U.S. Diplomatic Facilities and Personnel



Witnesses:

Greg Starr

Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security



Steve Linick

The Inspector General, Department of State

Starr was one of three individuals to testify in the Committee's first public hearing back in September.

The Committee continues to do most of its work in a low-key manner behind closed doors, as promised early on by Chairman Gowdy. The public focus has been on the topic of implementation of the ARB security recommendations and the work of the IG, i.e., improving State's security efforts going forward and examining why improvements recommended many years ago were never implemented. This work is part of the charge of the committee and the decision was made to complete this mostly non-controversial, non-partisan part of the process early on, while behind the scenes the massive amount of work product from the various House committees continues to be indexed, categorized and studied.

The Committee must be re-authorized by House vote next month for the 114th Congress and Boehner has made clear it will be done, and that the Republican members of the Committee (Gowdy, Jordan, Roskam, Brooks, Westmoreland, Roby and Pompeo) will remain the same. No word on whether ranking member Cummings (via Pelosi) will maintain the same 5-member composition.