No clear wins for GOP at Benghazi hearing

Mary Troyan | USA Today

Show Caption Hide Caption Clinton to panel: 3 things we learned from Benghazi Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressed the House committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi. In her opening statement, Clinton shared three things she believes the country has learned from the tragedy.

WASHINGTON — Former secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s testimony before a special House committee on Thursday provided new insights into her management decisions before the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi. But partisanship, not proof of any conspiracy by Clinton, was the dominant theme.

Clinton defended her record against allegations — often contained within questions asked by Republican members of the House Select Committee on Benghazi — that she engineered the U.S. intervention in Libya just to boost her political standing, then failed to make sure her diplomats there were safe.

Republicans, led by chairman Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, say they exposed shortcomings in Clinton’s leadership of the State Department, but there was no smoking-gun moment proving Clinton orchestrated any attempt to cover up misconduct.

Clinton’s controversial decision to use a personal email account for official business at the State Department came up late in the hearing when Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, accused her of hiding documents.

“If your story about your emails keeps changing, how can we accept the statement that you’ve turned over all your work-related emails and emails about Libya?” Jordan asked.

Clinton repeated earlier statements that using the private email system was a mistake.

“But email was not my primary means of communication,” she said.

Republicans' assertion that they never got all the documents they needed likely will feature heavily in whatever final report the committee issues.

Thursday’s public hearing, the fourth one the Benghazi committee has held since it was created 18 months ago, was still going at 8:45 p.m.

Republicans pressed Clinton on poor security at the State Department’s outpost in Benghazi, despite rising violence and requests for more protection. Four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, were killed when terrorists overran the outpost on Sept. 11, 2012.

In her 11th hour before the committee, Clinton referred to the partisanship that Democrats allege has infected the panel's investigation, saying, “It is deeply unfortunate that something as serious as what happened in Benghazi could ever be used for partisan political purposes."

Republican Rep. Peter Roskam of Illinois at one point accused Clinton of shunning requests to increase security in Benghazi because that would have amounted to an admission that the situation in Libya was deteriorating after Clinton had argued strongly for intervening there.

“And that didn’t fit your narrative of a successful foreign policy,” Roskam said.

“You got it wrong, congressman,” Clinton said. “I absolutely did not forget about Libya after Gadhafi fell.”

Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, R-Ga., questioned why Stevens’ requests for additional security — which were mostly rejected — weren’t reviewed by Clinton personally.

“He took his requests to where they belong — to the security professionals,” Clinton said.

Clinton said Stevens never advocated closing the Benghazi compound because of concerns over his safety.

“He never said to anybody in the State Department, ‘You know what? We just can’t keep doing this and we can’t stay here,’ ” she said.

In her opening statement, she defended Stevens’ brand of diplomacy, which sometimes requires Americans to be in dangerous places.

“Retreat from the world is not an option," Clinton told the committee. "America cannot shrink from our responsibility to lead ... We have learned the hard way when America is absent from unstable places, there are consequences."

The most dramatic moment of the day, however, didn’t even involve Clinton.

She sat silently as Gowdy and the committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, shouted each other down in an unusually personal confrontation three and a half hours into the hearing.

Gowdy and Cummings impugned each other’s motives, a reminder of the partisan acrimony that has surrounded the entire investigation.

Cummings accused Gowdy of violating his own pledge that the inquiry would remain non-political. Gowdy responded that it was fair game to ask Clinton why she received advice on Libya from a longtime friend and political ally, Sidney Blumenthal, in the months leading up to the attacks.

The committee eventually voted along party lines, 7-5, against releasing the full transcript of its interview with Blumenthal, who was not a federal employee but emailed Clinton directly about conditions inside Libya.

The contentious exchange between Gowdy and Cummings underscored the increasing pressure on the committee to produce evidence of misconduct by Clinton or forever be labeled a taxpayer-funded political attack designed to damage her presidential campaign.

The Benghazi committee had spent about $4.3 million through the end of August, mostly on staff salaries.

In his opening statement, Gowdy said his panel's work was necessary because "previous investigations were not thorough." And he said criticisms that the committee's main purpose is to damage Clinton politically, are unjustified.

"This investigation is about four people who were killed representing our country on foreign soil," Gowdy told Clinton. "Not a single member of this committee signed up to investigate you or your email."

Cummings used his opening statement to accuse Republicans of "squandering millions of taxpayer dollars on this abusive effort to derail Secretary Clinton’s presidential campaign."

Seven previous congressional investigations, plus an independent review of the State Department, concluded that security at the agency's outpost in Benghazi was insufficient, despite multiple requests for improvement, and the U.S. military was too far away to attempt a rescue. They also concluded that while there was increased violence in the region, the intelligence community did not have a specific warning about the threat to the Benghazi facility.

Committee member Adam Smith, D-Wash., said the Benghazi panel has learned "absolutely nothing" not already uncovered by the previous probes.

“Have we found anything substantive that tells us something different about what happened in Benghazi?" Smith said. "The answer to that question is no."

Gowdy and Cummings spoke briefly during the lunch break, and the bickering subsided when the hearing restarted in the afternoon. Gowdy picked back up on his line of questioning about Blumenthal, noting that a member of Clinton’s staff asked Stevens to respond to one of Blumenthal’s emails the day after the diplomatic compound was attacked by an improvised explosive device, or IED.

“He needed security help," Gowdy said of Stevens. "He didn’t need help messaging the violence. He needed help with the violence."

Clinton repeated that Stevens never raised security issues with her personally, only with the diplomatic security office.

“I know that’s not the answer you want to hear,” Clinton said. “Those are the facts, Mr. Chairman.”

In one heated exchange, Rep. Jordan said Clinton knew almost immediately that the attack did not result from a protest against an anti-Muslim video, as administration officials initially said after the incident. He accused Clinton of intentionally misleading the American people by trying to downplay the terrorism angle for political reasons ahead of the 2012 presidential election.

“You knew the truth, and that is not what the American people got,” Jordan said.

Clinton said there was conflicting information “that we were trying to make sense of.”

“There was not conflicting information the day of the attack," Jordan countered. "You’re the ones who muddied it up.”

Gowdy has said Clinton is just one of dozens of witnesses, including several more yet to be interviewed, indicating the committee’s investigation will continue well past Clinton’s appearance.

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