Less than a day after the House Select Committee on Benghazi held its first hearing, pressure is already mounting on its chairman to subpoena Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state during the 2012 terror attack and is considering a presidential run in 2016.
On Thursday morning, the anti-Clinton Stop Hillary PAC delivered to South Carolina Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy more than 120,000 signatures from supporters who want the former first lady to testify under oath, a day after the same group started running $100,000 worth of advertising attacking Clinton on Benghazi in key presidential states.
The petition is in the form of a faux subpoena, issued to Clinton, from Stop Hillary PAC’s Honorary Chairman Ted Harvey. “On behalf of the AMERICAN PEOPLE,” Harvey, a Colorado state senator, writes, “This subpoena is issued by the undersigned citizens in support for Rep. Trey Gowdy and the Benghazi Select Committee. You MUST agree to appear [under oath],” the letter states.
That’s on top of another roughly 98,000 signatures on a petition from the group supporting Gowdy, which were also delivered Thursday.
“Over the past few months 264,220 supporters from across the country have signed our petition to subpoena Hillary to testify so the truth can be uncovered,” Harvey said in a statement to msnbc.
Garrett Marquis, the group’s spokesperson noted that the Stop Hillary PAC was the first anti-Hillary PAC to file with the Federal Elections Commission. “We are the leaders in the movement to stop Hillary from becoming President,” he said. The group has raised about $1 million and signed up almost 600,000 Americans.
On Tuesday, the super PAC began airing some of the earliest Clinton-themed ads yet, demanding that Clinton testify under oath.
The petitions arrived at the Longworth House Office Building Thursday morning in five boxes holding more than 20,000 pages of printed out petitions.
Security protocols would not allow the boxes to be delivered directly to Gowdy’s office, however, so Marquis presented a staffer with two representative petitions and sent the boxes off to be screened by Capitol Police. They’ll be delivered to the chairman’s office about two weeks later, after clearing screening.
Alex Seitz-Wald