Benghazi committee rejects political bias allegations from fired staffer

The U.S. House Select Committee on Benghazi has rejected allegations from a former investigator that the Republican-led committee is carrying out a politically-motivated investigation against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is seeking the Democratic nomination in the presidential election.

Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy said in a statement released on Sunday that Bradley Podliska, who was fired as an investigator earlier this year, had never mentioned Clinton either during previous conversations or during an ongoing legal mediation, which is set to conclude on Tuesday. “But as this process prepares to wrap, he has demanded money from the Committee, the Committee has refused to pay him, and he has now run to the press with his new salacious allegations about Secretary Clinton,” Gowdy said.

The chairman added: “Until his Friday conversations with media, this staffer has never mentioned Secretary Clinton as a cause of his termination, and he did not cite Clinton’s name in a legally mandated mediation. He also has not produced documentary proof that in the time before his termination he was directed to focus on Clinton.”

Gowdy said he never instructed Podliska to focus on Clinton, and said he was equally confident that his supervisor, General Chipman, had not done so either.

Podliska, who was hired as a former intelligence staffer to focus on intelligence, told CNN this weekend that the committee trained its sights almost exclusively on Clinton after the revelation last March that she used a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state. That new focus flipped a broad-based probe of the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, into what Podliska described as “a partisan investigation.”