Susan Crabtree
The Washington Examiner
10/27/2014
…An ardent advocate for human rights at home and abroad, Wolf fought free-trade proponents in both parties to hold China and other countries accountable for human rights abuses. He has traveled extensively in the Middle East and Africa, and was an early and persistent proponent of U.S. intervention to stop the genocide in Sudan. More recently, he repeatedly bucked GOP leaders by calling for an independent panel to investigate the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
Earlier this year, a year and a half after Wolf called attention to the need for such a panel, Speaker John Boehner announced the formation of a Republican-led select committee on Benghazi.
Wolf, who is retiring in January to devote time to his human rights work, spoke to the Washington Examiner about the new terrorist threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and some of the highlights of his 34-year congressional career…
…Examiner: I know you were one of the strongest voices calling for a select committee early on after the attack [in Benghazi]. Why do you think your leadership dragged its feet for so long on that?
Wolf: I don’t know. Maybe I’ll read a story or a book about it. Yes. I felt very strongly about it. We were in touch with a lot of the people, the families. We were getting a lot of information from people out in Northern Virginia. I have an interesting district. I have the CIA, I have a lot of people from the FBI and the State Department. So we were getting all these calls. You could just sense there was something there. I just felt that we haven’t looked at it and then when you looked at State Department’s Accountability Review Board and they never interviewed the senior leadership and everyone vanished. So we were getting many different calls.
I think Rep. Trey Gowdy is the perfect choice to chair the Select Committee on Benghazi. But why [Speaker John Boehner] did not do it earlier? I don’t know…
Read the entire interview at The Washington Examiner.
