Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Republicans lied to the media when they said the Obama administration engaged in a cover-up on the Benghazi attack.

“For months my Republican colleagues have argued that the Obama administration has engaged in a cover-up surrounding an attack in Benghazi,” Reid said Thursday. “The emails prove there was simply no cover-up.”

The top Democrat on the House Oversight panel on Thursday joined the authors of the State Department's Benghazi review in demanding they be allowed to testify publicly.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) called on Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) to let the leaders of the Accountability Review Board (ARB) testify before the committee after Republicans questioned their report on State's handling of the deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya.

Retired Ambassador Thomas Pickering and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen wrote to Issa on Thursday refusing his request that they sit down for a transcribed interview with his staff before they can testify at a public hearing.

“House Republicans have politicized this investigation from the beginning, and they have recklessly accused Ambassador Pickering and Admiral Mullen of being complicit in a cover-up,” Cummings said in a statement. 

“It is time for the Chairman to honor his commitment to hold a hearing to allow these officials to respond to these reckless accusations, instead of imposing new conditions to keep them from testifying. Members of Congress and the American people should hear directly from these officials — in public — and the Chairman’s efforts to keep them behind closed doors undermines the Committee’s credibility and does a disservice to the truth.”

Pickering and Mullen say the closed-door meeting is an "inappropriate precondition" to their testimony.

The emails suggest the CIA initially thought the attack spun from a protest.

The House foreign affairs panel on human rights cleared three bills Wednesday in its first mark-up of the year.

The panel approved by voice vote legislation from chairman Chris Smith (R-N.J.) that would create new sanctions for the president to use against countries that refuse to return children abducted from the United States by one of their parents. The legislation is named after a New Jersey boy, Sean Goldman, who was abducted to Brazil for five years by his mother before being returned last year.

Smith's panel held a hearing last week on the legislation with Sean's father, David. The State Department's special adviser for children's issues warned at the hearing against sanctions and said the department's preferred approach was to get countries to comply with the United Nations treaty on parental child abductions.

Republican senators briefly hijacked a hearing on Iran Wednesday to lambaste the Obama administration on the largely unrelated issue of CIA cash payments to Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

The angry lawmakers took advantage of a rare appearance by the State Department's third-ranking diplomat to demand answers on the decade of cash payments that The New York Times brought to light last month. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman refused to answer in public.

“Delivering cash to an elected leader – does that help us root out corruption in that country?” Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) rhetorically asked Sherman. 

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) followed-up by questioning the example that the United States is setting. 

“Would we object if other nations delivered bundles of cash to President Karzai?” he asked.

A Senate panel is expected to vote next week on arming vetted Syrian rebel groups. 

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.) on Wednesday condemned comments from Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto that the use of "comfort women" in Japan during World War II was "necessary."

Royce described "comfort women" as a "state-sponsored program of sexual brutality" against thousands of women during the war. But this week, Hashimoto was reported as saying that these women were "necessary."

The Oversight Committee chairman wants the authors of the report to commit to a transcribed interview before testifying in the House.