All about Hillary? The Benghazi Select Committee appears to have become all about Sidney -- as in Sidney Blumenthal, the longtime Clinton confidant who appeared to email her regularly.

During his first round of questioning for the former secretary of State, Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.) noted that Blumenthal clearly had Clinton's personal email address and wondered if Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, who died in the Benghazi attacks, did as well.

"If I had been Mr. Stevens and I had had a relationship with you, and I had requested 20 or more times for additional security to protect not only my life but the people that were there with me, I would have gotten in touch with you some way," he said.

Clinton said she did not believe Stevens had her email address but that he had a direct line to key officials at the State Department. "He was in constant contact with people," she said.

Next, Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) wondered why Clinton did not personally see hundreds of cables that included requests for additional security while 150 of Blumenthal's emails "reached your desk."

"You asked for more of them. You read them. You corresponded with him," he said of her emails with Blumenthal. "And yet the folks that worked for you didn't have the same courtesy."

Clinton repeated that Blumenthal was simply a friend who "sent me information he thought might be of interest."

"Some of it was, some of it wasn't. Some of it I forwarded to be followed up on," she said. "The professionals and experts who reviewed it found some of it useful, some of it not. He had no official position in the government. And he was not at all my advisor on Libya."

And then Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), the panel's chairman, picked up the torch from his colleagues, using his first exchange with Clinton to methodically question why Blumenthal seemed to play such an important role without a formal position in the administration, noting his connections to the Clinton Foundation and to Democratic-affiliated groups.

He said that Clinton forwarded information from his emails to other State Department or administration officials, often without identifying him as the source.

"Our ambassador was asked to read and respond to Blumenthal’s drivel," Gowdy said.

But he noted Clinton did not forward emails from Blumenthal that seemed to criticize the president or other officials.

"I don't know what this line of questioning does to help us get to the bottom of the death of four Americans," Clinton responded at one point.

Blumenthal is among the witnesses with ties to Clinton who have been called to testify before the committee in private.

In the batches of Clinton emails released each month by the State Department, Blumenthal's name is among those that appear most frequently. His notes were sometimes personal but more often included detailed memos on global hotspots, with intelligence culled from his own sources. He also offered advice -- most often seemingly unsolicited -- about how Clinton could leverage world events to boost her public standing.

Democrats at various points used their questioning time to try to correct what they portrayed as misleading Republican points, and the hearing descended into a procedural fight when the panel's top Democrat sought approval for entering the transcript of Blumenthal's full testimony into the record.

As the committee members squabbled, Clinton watched with a mix of amusement and confusion, rubbing her temples as the spectacle went on.