WASHINGTON
— The Republican leaders of a House committee who have been in a bitter
partisan battle with Democrats are enmeshed in a new fight with one of
the committee’s former staff members.
A former investigator for the Republicans on the House Select Committee on Benghazi
plans to file a complaint in federal court next month alleging that he
was fired unlawfully in part because his superiors opposed his efforts
to conduct a comprehensive investigation into the 2012 attack on the
American diplomatic mission in the Libyan city rather than focus
primarily on the role of the State Department and former Secretary of
State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The
former investigator, Bradley F. Podliska, a major in the Air Force
Reserve who is on active duty in Germany, also claims that the
committee’s majority staff retaliated against him for taking leave for
several weeks to go on active duty. If true, the retaliation would
violate the federal Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act of 1994, which Major Podliska plans to invoke in his complaint, according to a draft that was made available to The New York Times.
Hillary
Rodham Clinton, then the secretary of state, testified in 2013 before
the House Committee on Foreign Affairs about the terrorist attack on the
American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, where Ambassador J.
Christopher Stevens and three others were killed. Credit Christopher
Gregory/The New York Times
Washington (CNN)A
former investigator with the House Select Committee on Benghazi is
accusing the Republican-led panel of carrying out a politically
motivated investigation targeting former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton instead of the thorough and objective fact-finding mission it
was set up to pursue.
Major
Bradley Podliska, an intelligence officer in the Air Force Reserve who
describes himself as a conservative Republican, told CNN 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."
Podliska,
who was fired after nearly 10 months as an investigator for the
Republican majority, is now preparing to file a lawsuit against the
select committee next month, alleging that he lost his job in part
because he resisted pressure to focus his investigative efforts solely
on the State Department and Clinton's role surrounding the Benghazi
attack. He also alleges he was fired because he took leave from the
committee to fulfill his military service obligations, which would be an
unlawful firing.
