Benghazi panel chief fires back

WASHINGTON - The chairman of the House committee on Benghazi struck back Sunday morning at a fired staffer who is accusing the panel of engaging in a partisan probe to tarnish Hillary Rodham Clinton, with the lawmaker saying that the claims appear newly manufactured and that the staffer himself appeared obsessed with the presidential candidate.

Chairman Trey Gowdy, in his first public statement on the controversy, said committee investigator Bradley Podliska never mentioned any concern about Clinton or politics while fighting his dismissal from the committee staff this fall. In his formal complaints, Gowdy said, the investigator had repeatedly asserted only that the committee discriminated against him because he was an Air Force reservist who periodically had to leave his job for reserve duty.

"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," Gowdy said. "The record makes it clear he himself was focused on Clinton improperly and was instructed to stop, and that issues with his conduct were noted on the record as far back as April."

Podliska, a major and intelligence officer in the Air Force Reserve who describes himself as a conservative Republican, told the Post in a statement on Saturday that the committee trained its sights almost exclusively on Clinton after the revelation in March that she used a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.

"My non-partisan investigative work conflicted with the interests of the Republican leadership, who focused their investigation primarily on Secretary Clinton and her aides," Podliska said in a statement.

In an on-camera interview on CNN on Sunday morning, he said Gowdy's committee, which has spent $4.6 million over the course of its investigation, pulled resources away from other probes and has pursued a "partisan investigation" focused almost solely on Clinton and the State Department under her four-year tenure.