A key member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said he believes the resignation of David Petreaus less than a week before he was supposed to testify on Benghazi is “not a coincidence.”
Petraeus was scheduled to be among the government officials addressing the Senate and House Intelligence committees behind closed doors on Thursday.
“He is probably the one that knows most about what happened or didn’t happen in Benghazi,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said on Fox last night. “And if this is looming over his head when he went to go brief the United States Senate, did that influence the way, the direction and the story that he told? Because a lot of senators don’t believe he was telling the truth, then. This begs more questions than it answers.”
Chaffetz, who easily won re-election to a third term last week, has been a leading congressional voice in keeping the Benghazi questions alive.
He echoed the frustrations of lawmakers that the scandal wasn’t immediately brought to the attention of President Obama.
“General Petraeus is not the head of Fish and Wildlife, for goodness sake; he’s the director of the CIA,” Chaffetz said. “I mean, what he eats for breakfast is going to be showing up on an intelligence reports. So, of course he’s immediately compromised and you have to deal with that immediately.”
“…This whole investigation, the genesis of this investigation, has to be something deeper than just one woman who was upset with another. And now you got stuff that is potentially classified information being shared out there in the public?”
Chaffetz stressed that there’s “no doubt” of a major cover-up on Benghazi. “The State Department, the Department of Defense, the CIA, they all owe the people the truth and justice. They know what happened, but even if their basic timelines they gave us, they don’t even agree, they don’t even match-up,” he said. “…If you made a movie about this, people wouldn’t even believe it.”
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