Attorney: Benghazi Whistleblowers Harassed by House Intel Cmte

Victoria Toensing, an attorney representing Benghazi whistleblower Greg Hicks, claimed that the House Intelligence Committee harassed witnesses during its investigation into Benghazi on Tuesday’s “Fox & Friends” on the Fox News Channel.

“They were told, they were accused that they were not telling the truth. They were threatened with ‘the committee is not going to pay your travel expenses,’ which committees always do for witnesses who come in from out of town, ‘because you’re writing a book and you’re going to make money, and by the way, you shouldn’t be writing a book.’ Now you say why would that happen with the Republican dominated House Intelligence Committee? Well, that chief of staff, the head of that staff that harassed these three brave men, a few months later went to work for Beacon Global Strategies. That is a Hillary organization … it’s like a Benghazi alumni association” she declared.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) denied these claims later on the same show, saying, “No, they were not threatened with perjury. What we did, it’s interesting. The lawyers asked that none of their testimony be released until after their book was out and being sold. So this is so horribly unfortunate. I think you have lawyers who have a financial interest in this, certainly making allegations that are far from true. We have professional investigators. I’m a former FBI agent. Our goal was to get the facts and put them on the record so that we could have a record, and the sad part about this is the State Department made some horrific decisions that I believe contributed to the death of those four individuals. That is all going to get lost in these folks, as I said, I hope everybody buys their book because these are very brave souls who served their country proudly who ended up driving into unknown circumstances and save them. That’s all really good. And so the only way if people buy the book is with some inflammatory comments. These are attorneys who have a financial stake in this. It’s unfortunate we’ve asked these transcripts be released and I think that’ll tell the truth and Americans can look at them find out the real truth.”

Toensing added that “I’d like to say something about Bob [the CIA Station Chief], who is really just a minor character in all of this. The whole reason that this occurred, he was put in that untenable situation was because the security was unacceptable and who made that decision? Hillary Rodham Clinton did. The ambassador asked for more security. When he went to Tripoli in May of 2012, there were 38 security personnel. When he went to Benghazi in September, how many, Steve? Do you know? Nine. They had shrunk his security and that decision was made by Hillary Clinton.”

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