Megan Carpentier: The House Benghazi committee has always been of niche interest to anyone outside the Beltway and the conservative movement; that they managed to dig up anything (Hillary Clinton’s private email server) to fit into the well-worn the-Clintons-aren’t-trustworthy narrative is not surprising those of us who remember Whitewater and Travelgate. Using an ostensible investigation into some screwed-up situation to pry open the Clintons’ lives and find something only vaguely related with which to try to hurt them politically is literally part of the US history books (which is why I think that it’s so stupid for Hillary Clinton to give them anything with which to work).

The surprising thing, I think, is how effectively she’s navigating the questioning: there’s no mention of the “vast rightwing conspiracy” from the impeachment days; she seemed all but perfectly willing to let the Democrats on the committee do the work of making the case that this is a partisan fishing expedition, and she even managed to make a lot of the questioners look petty and focused on her instead of what they ought to be investigating. Her emotions only seemed to get the better of her when she was talking about the death of her friend (and trying not to smirk as committee chairman Trey Gowdy and ranking member Elijah Cummings sparred over the latter’s efforts to release transcripts of Sidney Blumenthal’s interview with the committee). Clinton treated the questioning seriously, but treated some of the questioners like benighted children ... and it worked.

Trevor Timm: It’s definitely Hillary Clinton at her most comfortable. If she had to testify in front of Congress every day, rather than give stilted speeches at campaign events, I don’t think she would have nearly the amount of political criticism she currently receives about being “inauthentic” . Stripped away from these hearings are all her flaws: she doesn’t have to repeat the same campaign-trail tropes, she doesn’t have to cynically triangulate her positions with her liberal base and her corporate donors. Her strength has always been that she is a technocrat who revels in the details, and it’s clear she knows the details here far better than any of her accusers.

Sometimes people forget that Clinton has been testifying in front of congressional committees for over 20 years now, and she even got her start as a staffer for the Watergate committee in the mid-1970s. So going in, she had to know what to expect.

The whole circus is a classic GOP move: they take an actual scandal – in this case, why was the US involved in Libya – and turned their investigation into a complete farce. Lost in the minute details of that one night in Benghazi is the much more critical question of why we ever decided to bomb Libya and remove Gaddafi in the first place, given the chaos and destruction that has followed. While Clinton’s Benghazi emails have been a hallmark of this presidential campaign, everyone seems to either forget or conveniently ignore that Clinton was the driving force behind yet another military intervention disaster by the US. And yet even in a more than five-hour hearing about the country, only one or two questioners even brought the subject up.

MC: Well, technically, the scandal they started off investigating was the loss of life in Benghazi, not the military actions in Libya: if they were investigating more than just the death of Chris Stevens and the State Department’s reaction to it (or more than just Clinton’s emails), one would think that there would be folks here from inside the White House and the Department of Defense (let alone the CIA). But as you’ve pointed out before, many of the Republicans in this room are hardly opposed to military intervention and, in fact, many of the ones running for president tend to be very military interventionist.

(It is strange to think that, 16 years ago, then-Governor George W Bush was promising an end to the Clinton years of nation-building; after 9/11, everyone’s attitude about that, including Bush’s, changed radically. I think it’s fair to say, between the Republicans and the Democrats running for president in 2016, we’re not looking at any serious candidate making a promise like Bush did lo those many years ago.)

The few lines the Republicans landed are maybe the ones that show how deeply involved Clinton was in the lead-up to the military intervention in Libya; though insiders know how involved she was, I’m not sure many Americans knew she was such a driving force behind military interventions, and perhaps more influential than Defense Secretary Robert Gates. But I also think, to my disappointment, that her involvement will be considered a positive thing by a lot of people (albeit not many Bernie Sanders supporters); Mark Penn was probably not wrong in 2008 when he counseled her that she needed to appear to be a certain kind of tough, and being involved in war planning shows that. It’s just he was wrong that her strength was all that she needed to show.

What I’m really curious about is whether the fear-mongering about Sidney Blumenthal really lands with other people. Do you get the sense that people know who he is and why they should be so worried that he was the weird old dude that sent Clinton unsolicited emails about Libya? Does anyone outside the Beltway know who he is?

TT: Well of course this specific committee has always been about the specific events in Benghazi, but the point is the Republicans almost always focus on one fairly standard tree in a completely twisted forest.

As for the presidential candidates in 2016, they are all trying to out-aggressive each other. Beyond Rand Paul, who is almost an asterisk at this point, almost all the candidates want the military to be more involved in Syria (but don’t say how, or for what ends). Even Bernie Sanders has endorsed Obama’s plans to not end the Afghanistan war and the continuing use of drones. It’s quite sad there remains no anti-war voice running for president, considering the last three large-scale military interventions by the United States (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya) have turned into complete disasters.

The fact that this committee hearing has devolved into a shouting match between committee members over Sidney Blumenthal and who had Clinton’s email address really says it all: no one really knows and no one really cares. In the end, the Republicans will have handed Clinton a victory.

MC: Can we just call it? The whole Benghazi committee investigation and this hearing was a boondoggle. It was just not as big a boondoggle as all the wars our presidential candidates want to get us into.