Hillary Clinton emerged from her showdown with the Republican-led House Benghazi Committee largely unscathed, fending off accusations that she failed to protect the four Americans who died in the 2012 attack — and avoiding any bombshells over her email account.

The 2016 Democratic front-runner had been eager to put the hearing in the rear view mirror, and her appearance at the punishing 11-hour event comes as she has the wind at her back. Last week she delivered a winning debate performance, and this week Vice President Joe Biden announced he would not challenge her for the White House.


Still, the former Secretary of State faced sharp questions from Republicans about her handling of the run-up and aftermath of the attacks in Benghazi, which claimed the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. GOP lawmakers repeatedly pressed her to explain why she didn’t know about Stevens’ requests for more security.

Clinton addressed those questions with the same cool and calm demeanor that she kept up for the duration, save for some exasperated looks and a moment of levity towards the end of the day when Rep. Martha Roby (R-Ala.) asked if she was alone for the entirety of the night of the Benghazi attacks. Clinton laughed when she confirmed that she had indeed been alone all night.

Ultimately, Clinton said security on the ground wasn’t her job — but should Stevens have asked her for help, he would have gotten it. Clinton also told the committee that she "lost more sleep than all of you put together" over the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks.

“I don’t want anything that is said to me or about me to take away from the heroic efforts that the diplomatic security officers exhibited,” Clinton said, before delivering a somber account of that night in Benghazi when Stevens and the security officers lost their lives.

Amid all the back-and-forth over security, the lingering email scandal was the subtext for several lines of questioning, particularly when Republicans zeroed in on exchanges between Clinton and her long-time ally Sidney Blumenthal, who had encouraged her to be bold in Libya. Republicans noted that while security requests from Stevens never reached her inbox, her old friend’s unsubstantiated Libya intelligence and policy advice did.

“Help us understand how Sidney Blumenthal had that kind of access to you, Madame Secretary, but the ambassador did not,” Benghazi Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) demanded.

And at the end of the marathon day, after the panel had covered much of the same ground that previous Benghazi inquiries had -- though sometimes in greater detail -- Republicans turned more directly to the question of Clinton’s private email server, and what they called her “changing story” on the matter.

Still, Gowdy seemed to suggest that the hearing failed to produce any major new revelations, at least at first blush. "I don't know that she testified that much differently today than the previous times she testified," Gowdy said after the hearing wrapped up around 9 p.m., although he said he would have to go back through the transcript.

As she has done before over the past months, Clinton stated firmly that “I turned over every work-related-email in my possession,” an answer that left Republicans fuming.

“Secretary Clinton, seems like there's a pattern, a pattern of changing your story,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). “You say one thing, the truth comes out, weeks and months later, you say something else. That's not being the ‘most transparent person ever.’ That's not even being transparent…. How can we accept your statement that you've turned over all work related e-mails and all e-mails about Libya?”

Clinton did refuse to answer questions about how her lawyers had selected which emails were work-related, and thus needed to be sent over the State Department to comply with record-keeping rules. She noted that the panel had already talked to her lawyer for “nine hours”— and deferred to her team for specifics.

As the day bled into evening and then night, Clinton increasingly chided the panel.

“I can’t help it that you don’t like the findings of [State’s internal investigation of the attacks],” she told Gowdy. “I can’t help it that you don’t like the findings of the other committees.”

Panel Democrats also proved to be a huge asset for Clinton during the hearing, bashing that committee as a waste of money that has produced no new information and dismissing it as a political circus.

“It bothers me when I hear people imply you didn’t care about your people,” Ranking Democrat Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said, as the room erupted in applause. “That’s not right….I don’t know what we want from you… do we want to badger you until we get the ‘gotcha’ moment? We’re better than that… we are better than using taxpayer dollars to try to destroy a campaign.”

For their part, Republicans kept hammering away at Clinton for what they said was her inability to grasp or get control of the deteriorating security situation in Libya. In a dramatic moment late in the evening, Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) held up a piece of paper and ripped it in half to demonstrate, he said, what happened to Steven’s request for more protections.

“Here’s what is what happened to their requests,” he said, tearing the paper in half with a loud rip. “They were torn up.”

But Clinton reiterated at several points that no one ever told her they needed to withdraw from Libya.

“There was never a recommendation … to shut down Benghazi even after the two attacks that the compound suffered,” she said. “And perhaps you’d wonder why, but I can tell you it was thought that mission in Benghazi… was vital to our national interests…No one ever came to me and said: We should shut down our compound in Benghazi.”

Republicans didn’t accept that answer.

Gowdy called up a series of June 2012 emails that he says show State’s Washington headquarters was not prioritizing the security needs of diplomats in the field.

In the emails — sent around the time an improvised explosive device exploded outside the Benghazi compound and a rocket-propelled grenade hit the British ambassador’s convoy, triggering the United Kingdom to shutter its consulate — Stevens requested more protection.

At the same time, Clinton’s top policy aide, Jake Sullivan, was emailing Stevens for his take on a Libya memo from Blumenthal, who Republicans believe may have personally pushed Clinton toward an aggressive Libya posture in hopes of furthering his business interests there.

Gowdy asked why Blumenthal’s emails reached her but Stevens’ didn’t.

Clinton said Stevens could have reached out and he would have been “immediately responded” to — but he did not.

“You know, Mr. Chairman, I’ve said it before, I will say it again: … I communicated with him about certain issues. He did not raise security with me,” she said. “He raised the issue with security professionals. Now I know that’s not the answer you want to hear … but those are the facts.”

Gowdy also questioned her on another email around that time from State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, asking Stevens for his advice on how to publicly “message” the violence in Libya.

“Having to stop and provide public messaging advice to your [press shop]” is not what Stevens needed, Gowdy said. “He didn’t need help messaging the violence. He needed help actually with the violence."

The two also tussled on whether Blumenthal’s emails were really “unsolicited,” with Gowdy asking her if she knew the definition of the word. When she said she did, Gowdy read a number of Clinton responses to Blumenthal, suggesting they weren’t unsolicited: “Another keeper, thanks and please keep them coming” or “any other info about it?”

Clinton then tweaked her statement slightly, saying: “They started out unsolicited.”

Gowdy pounced: “You didn't say they started off unsolicited. You said they were unsolicited.”

“Well they were unsolicited, but obviously I did respond to some of them,” she shot back.

Clinton repeated herself a number of times for emphasis: “Sid Blumenthal was not my adviser, official or unofficial, on Libya.” But Clinton did sometimes forward on his advice and unsubstantiated intelligence to her top aides.

Democrats have said Blumenthal is irrelevant and an attempt by the GOP to target her political allies.

California Democrat Adam Schiff said the GOP is obsessed with Blumenthal and Clinton politics, and said the GOP used the bulk of their interview with Blumenthal this spring to ask questions far afield of Benghazi.

“Republicans asked more than 160 questions about Mr. Blumenthal’s relationship and communications with the Clintons but less than 20 questions about the Benghazi attacks,” he said, launching into a bunch of comparisons. “Republicans asked more than 270 questions about Mr. Blumenthal’s alleged business activities in Libya but no questions about the U.S. presence in Benghazi.”

At times, Clinton appeared to get emotional, especially when asked how it felt to be the subject of an investigation that one Democrat said indirectly blamed her for the death of Stevens and three other Americans in the attacks.

“It’s a very personally painful accusation,” Clinton said, her voice shaking. “It has been rejected and disproven by non-partisan, dispassionate investigators but, nevertheless, having it continue to be bandied around is deeply distressing to me. I would imagine I’ve thought more about what happened than all of you put together. I’ve lost more sleep than all of you put together.”

But she fired back in kind if Republican questions got pointed. When Roskam accused Clinton of taking credit for the 2011 Libyan revolution when times were good, but disappearing the next year when things got sour, Clinton — looking annoyed — got the last word in.

“Well, congressman, that is only a political statement which you well understand, and I don’t understand what that has anything to do with what we were supposed to be talking about today,” she said.

Before the hearing began, the hundreds of public seats were entirely filled by people who had been in line for hours to get access to the room, anticipating Clinton's entrance and clamoring for pictures with smartphones.

By late morning, during some of the more technical lines of questioning, many of the public seats had emptied out. Several members of the public had fallen asleep, and former Rep. Tom Davis, seated in the front row of the public seating, had his eyes closed and hand over his head.

But while the audience may have been bored, there were several tense moments when Clinton faced off with Republicans — or when the Democrats jumped in to defend her.

Cummings blasted the committee as a partisan witch hunt out to get Clinton, saying Republicans formed the panel because they “did not like the answers they got” in previous probes — “so they set up this select committee with no rules, no deadlines and an unlimited budget.”

“They set them loose because you’re running for president,” Cummings said, raising his voice before calling for the panel to disband. “It is time for Republicans to end this … fishing expedition.”

It took Cummings only a few minutes into the hearing to highlight a number of embarrassing moments for Gowdy in recent weeks, including comments by Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Rep. Richard Hanna (R-N.Y.) and a fired GOP Benghazi investigator who all suggested the panel was either out to hurt Clinton or increasingly focused on investigating her.

Gowdy — who opened the hearing by responding to recent criticism that his panel is a waste of taxpayer money — assured Clinton that was not the case. He pushed back against recent claims that his panel is just a re-tread of a half-dozen committee investigations and State’s own internal investigation, calling them too “narrow” and “not thorough.”

Still, though, Republicans failed to produce a palpable hit, particularly on the email question.

Rep. Susan Brooks (R-Indiana), at one point, pulled out a large stack of Clinton emails on Libya in 2011 and compared them to a much smaller stack from 2012, pressing Clinton on why she wasn’t getting more updates on the worsening security situation in Libya in 2012.

“I can only conclude by your own records that there was a lack of interest in Libya in 2012,” Brooks said, noting that there were no Clinton emails about two attacks on the Benghazi mission that happened in April and then June of 2012. “There was a lot of communication to you or from you in 2011, and that is when [Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi] fell, but then when we go to 2012, Libya, Benghazi, Chris Stevens, they seem to fall off your radar — but it was getting much worse.”

Clinton noted that email was not her primary mode of communicating, so they didn’t show the full picture of how often she was getting briefed: “Most of my work was not done on emails with my closest aides, with officials in the State Department, officials in the rest of the government as well as the White House and people around the world,” she explained.