Besides Hillary linton herself, panel Democrats will be the first, immediate line of defense. | Getty Dems will have Clinton’s back at Benghazi hearing

Democrats on the House Select Committee on Benghazi have coalesced around a strategy to blunt any GOP attacks during Thursday's high-stakes hearing with Hillary Clinton: If Republicans get overheated, cut Clinton off, or try to corner her with loaded questions, Democrats will be ready to use their time to let her speak and set the record straight, according to interviews with several members of the panel.

And if things turn ugly, they’ve prepped a series of counterpoints that they say call into question the accuracy of their Republican colleague's statements and discredit the panel's investigation.


“We can certainly use our allotted time to make sure if the secretary is cut off, or unable to have the time she needs to answer, that we give her that time,” said Benghazi panel Democrat Adam Schiff of California. “I think we can also make sure that if she is asked questions in a misleading fashion because of selective quote from documents, or they mischaracterize the statements that have been given by witnesses, that we make that record clear."

Besides Clinton herself, panel Democrats will be the first, immediate line of defense for the 2016 Democratic front-runner when the cameras are rolling and the nation tunes in to watch her testimony. While the pro-Clinton group Correct the Record has set up an entire 30-person war room to rebut any GOP accusations during the hearing, Benghazi panel Democrats are the only ones who can come to her rescue in real time if the hearing breaks down into bickering.

A committee spokesperson for the Democrats did not respond to requests for comment, but ranking Democrat Elijah Cummings in a brief interview Tuesday said any counters they make will be in the name of fairness, not Clinton personally.

“I believe that Hillary Clinton can defend herself,” the Maryland Democrat said. “I’m not in the business of defending Hillary Clinton; I’m in the business of defending the truth.”

While panel Republicans have been on the defense for several weeks amid accusations that they’re out to hurt Clinton on the campaign trail, Clinton also needs to make her case to some voters: A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Tuesday shows Americans are unsatisfied with her response to the 2012 terrorist attack by a 2-to-1 margin.

Ahead of the hearing, it’s unclear how far Democrats will go when they face with their GOP counterparts on Thursday — that, Schiff said, will depend on how the majority behaves.

Republicans have said Clinton is simply one witness in their investigation, that they’re not out to get her and that she’ll be treated fairly on Thursday.

The question is how long the hearing will stay civil and professional, given weeks of partisan rhetoric around the investigation and Clinton's appearance.

Democrats are expected to bring up evidence they say acquits Clinton of wrongdoing on certain long-held GOP Benghazi theories. They may, for example, point back to a report they released Monday claiming the 50-plus interviews the committee has conducted have turned up “no evidence” of Clinton ordering a stand-down order for help the night of the attack.

Sources close to Clinton have said she will try to stay above any bickering and carry herself in a presidential manner. Panel Democrats agree that’s the way it should be.

“If you’re talking about correcting the record on the facts on Benghazi, yes, she’ll be doing that — but she’s not going to engage on the partisan stuff," Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), who dismissed the panel as a “colossal waste of taxpayer money.”

While Democrats have long accused panel Republicans of targeting Clinton, they’ve sharply escalated their attacks in the weeks leading up to her appearance, blanketing the press corps with news releases and repeatedly highlighting GOP gaffes that suggested the panel has partisan motivations.

Just the day before Clinton’s hearing, for example, Democrats released the entire transcript of a closed-door Cheryl Mills’ interview with the committee — an effort to show Clinton was not personally denying requests for additional security at the U.S. Benghazi compound or had ordered the military to stand down the night of the Sept. 11, 2012 attack. Republicans had asked them not to.

And they’ve capitalized on Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s brag that the panel hurt Clinton in the polls as well as allegations from a fired GOP staffer that the committee was narrowing in on Clinton. Those, they’ve said, are proof that the panel has lost its way and is focused only on hurting Clinton.

They’ve also gone hard after Chairman Trey Gowdy, highlighting the South Carolina Republican’s mistakes. For example, when Gowdy claimed during a television appearance that he had interviewed 50 new witnesses, Democrats called those numbers "inaccurately inflated." A number is closer to about 45, but it shrinks to about 30 if one takes into account interviews conducted during State's own internal investigation.

Just this week, Democrats on Tuesday said Gowdy was “inaccurate” when he said he had new, never-seen emails from Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was killed along with three other Americans in the Benghazi attacks. That, they said, was because the Oversight Committee years ago had received a small batch of some Stevens emails. Gowdy has received more than 7,000.

And when the CIA over the weekend contradicted Gowdy’s claim that Clinton had a classified CIA source's name on her email, Democrats made sure everyone knew about the goof.

Schiff brought that very example up in a phone call with POLITICO, saying it’s fair game for Thursday: “These are things we have to point out, and clarify, and rebut.”

While he would not comment on strategy, Cummings said his goal is to ensure the hearing doesn't become an exercise in bashing the witness, as he said House Oversight Committee Republicans recently did with Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood.

"I’m hoping they will not treat her like Republicans treated Ms. Richards ... It's like a machine-gun questioning and then she didn’t have a chance to answer," he said. If that happens, he added, they will ensure Clinton has a chance to defend herself, and "if there are things that are not accurate, we will point them out.”

At least one Democrat expressed interest in learning new information from Clinton — if there is any, she said. Panel Democrat Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, who lost parts of both her legs serving in Iraq, said although she feels the committee has been a “campaign against the secretary on the Republican side,” she’s “not going to let that stop me from doing my job, which is to make sure we safeguard Americans who work in our embassies abroad into the future.”

“I’m going to focus my questioning on what we can do better,” she said. “I’m very mission focused — me, broken-down old soldier — my mission is to how we can save Americans … I refuse to dishonor our heroic dead by getting into a partisan battle.”