Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign encouraged a former State Department employee who helped set up her private email server to testify before the House committee on Benghazi.
Attorneys for Bryan Pagliano on Monday notified the committee that their client would invoke his Fifth Amendment right not to testify at a hearing next week.
An anonymous Clinton campaign aide told The New York Times that Pagliano’s decision was “both understandable and disappointing.”
“We had hoped Bryan would also agree to answer any questions from the committee and had recently encouraged him to grant the committee’s request for an interview,” the aide told the Times, adding that the campaign believes Pagliano “has every reason to be transparent about his I.T. assistance.”
The unidentified aide told the newspaper it makes sense that Pagliano, as a private individual, doesn’t want to participate in a “political spectacle.”
That aide’s comments were echoed by Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill, who told the Times that the former Secretary of State “made every effort to answer questions and be as helpful as possible and has encouraged her aides, current and former, to do the same, including Bryan Pagliano.”
