By Susan Cornwell and Lesley Wroughton
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. State Department on Monday declined to say whether Secretary of State John Kerry would be willing to testify to a Republican-controlled congressional panel that is probing a 2012 attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya.
The panel's chairman, Representative Trey Gowdy, told CBS television on Sunday he would seek Kerry's testimony if the panel does not get "satisfaction" on why Kerry has been so "recalcitrant" in handing over State Department documents from the period of the attack.
Among other things, Gowdy is seeking emails from ten of Clinton's aides as part of his investigation of the Sept. 11, 2012 attack in Benghazi that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans.
The department said on Monday that it was preparing to release another tranche of emails from Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination who was secretary of state when the Benghazi attack took place.
State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the department had worked hard to be responsive to Gowdy's House committee and had already handed over 1,200 pages of emails from Clinton's staff in addition to some 44,000 pages of documents from State.
But on the possibility that Kerry would testify, Toner said: "I'm not going to speak to what he may or may not do. And frankly, we've gotten no requests for that."
The spokesman also said the department will release more of Clinton's emails from her tenure at the department on Tuesday.
Clinton has been criticized for her use of a private email address, connected to a computer server in her home, for her work correspondence while she was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.
The arrangement was made public in March, more than two years after she stepped down as secretary of state. Clinton said in March that she had provided her work-related emails to the State Department and she urged their release.
Last month a U.S. District Court judge set a schedule for the State Department to release the correspondence in monthly batches starting June 30. By next Jan. 29, all of about 55,000 pages are to be made public.
A select group of about 300 Clinton emails had already been made public before the judge set the schedule for release of the rest. The select group of correspondence dealt with the time period just before and after the Benghazi attack.