Sides spar at Clinton Benghazi hearing
WASHINGTON — A longawaited hearing of the House Benghazi committee moved from high-minded statements to partisan snarling Thursday, with former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton watching, bemused, as Republicans and Democrats battled.
During more than four hours of testimony so far about the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in the Libyan city, Clinton maintained a relentlessly calm and smiling demeanor as she sought to seize a rhetorical high ground above the partisan fray.
She noted repeatedly that after previous attacks on diplomatic facilities during the Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations in which hundreds of Americans were killed, members of both parties “rose above politics” to examine what had gone wrong.
Similarly, in investigating the deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi, “Con-
gress has to be our partner as it has been after previous tragedies,” she said.
“We need leadership at home to match our leadership abroad,” Clinton said in her opening statement, “leadership that puts national security ahead of ideology.”
As the panel neared a lunchtime recess, the committee supplied Clinton with a sharp contrast to the statesmanlike image she sought to project as Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., and Democrats Elijah Cummings of Maryland and Adam Schiff of California engaged in an angry procedural fight.
At issue was whether to release the transcript of the committee’s interrogation of Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime friend of Clinton’s and aide to her husband.
As Clinton watched, smiling, Cummings, shouting across the committee dais, accused Gowdy of selectively releasing Blumenthal’s emails in order to make false allegations. Gowdy accused the Democrats of attempting to disrupt the committee’s proceedings before vowing to investigate Clinton’s old friend further.
“If you think you’ve heard about Sidney Blumenthal so far, wait until the next round,” he said before stalking out of the committee room.
When the committee reconvened, the members voted 7-5 along party lines not to release the transcript.
The hearing has been eagerly anticipated for its potential impact on next year’s election. Partisans on both sides anticipate that if Clinton ends up as the Democratic nominee, mobilizing each party’s supporters will be a higher priority than finding or converting the relative handful of voters who remain undecided about her.
Both parties think the committee proceedings could help that effort.
On the Republican side, “Benghazi” has become a watchword on the campaign trail — an almost all-purpose label for various sins of both omission and commission that Republican voters perceive in the former secretary of state’s record.
Democrats are equally convinced that the committee provides an example of Republican unfairness and excess. From Cummings’ opening statement until the committee recessed, Democrats made more than a dozen references to the committee’s $4.7 million price tag, saying that the GOP was wasting taxpayer money in a partisan endeavor.
Republicans have hoped the hearing would produce gaffes or other slip-ups by Clinton that could be used to mobilize opposition in next year’s election. An exasperated outburst she made when she last testified about Benghazi, almost three years ago, has become a GOP talking point.
Democrats, always nervous about Clinton’s tendency to become defensive when criticized, watched to see how she parried GOP attacks.
The one thing that would surprise both sides is actual new information about the deaths of the four Americans. Nine reports already have been published providing hundreds of pages of government findings on what went wrong and what needed to be done differently.
Thursday’s hearing began with Gowdy’s insisting in an opening statement that the panel was seeking “the truth” in the 2012 attacks.
Although seven previous congressional investigations have examined the Benghazi attacks, “those previous investigations were not thorough,” Gowdy said.
Cummings, the panel’s senior Democrat, used his opening statement to denounce the majority for conducting a “taxpayer-funded fishing expedition.”
As the questioning unfolded, Republican members of the panel pursued several disparate lines of questioning.
Rep. Peter J. Roskam, RIll., sought to portray Clinton as the chief architect of U.S. policy toward Libya, implying that she forced a reluctant Obama administration to take an active role there.
Several other committee members asked questions that suggested she had not been paying attention during 2012 as the security cooperation in the country deteriorated.
Some of the most personal questioning came from Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who suggested that in the days after the attack, Clinton had tried to hide information about the motivation of the attackers in order to influence the 2012 election.
“It’s just 56 days before an election,” and “you can’t be square with the American people,” Jordan said. Clinton and other Obama administration officials had downplayed the terrorist nature of the attack “because Libya was supposed to be this great success story,” Jordan said.
“Americans can live with the fact that good people sometime gives their lives for this country,” he said, but not “when their government’s not square with them.”
With a rare note of irritation entering her voice, Clinton shot back that “the insinuations that you are making do a disservice” to government officials who were trying to do “the best we could with the information we had.”
The GOP allegation that she had failed to take security requests seriously is “a very personally painful accusation,” she said a few minutes later. “It has been rejected and disproven by nonpartisan and dispassionate investigators.”
“I’ve lost more sleep than all of you put together,” she told the panel members.
GOP giddiness about the panel’s work already had damaged its credibility. The seven Republican lawmakers on the special committee are heading into the hearing on the defensive, after comments by colleagues — House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, in particular — bolstered charges by Democrats that the inquiry is a partisan hit job.
Gowdy, a former federal prosecutor from South Carolina, and other GOP members focused much of their questions on emails from Stevens to the State Department warning that the security situation at American installations in Libya was deteriorating and needed to be bolstered. The administration did not heed his warnings.
The attacks in Benghazi began when dozens of attackers overran guards at the U.S. diplomatic compound there and ran through it, setting fire to buildings, including the one in which Stevens and another State Department employee were hiding. The two died of smoke inhalation. The attacks continued till the next morning, when mortar rounds were fired at a nearby CIA annex, killing two more Americans.
Clinton last testified about the attack in January 2013, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Clinton famously scolded the committee for its focus on the motivations of the attackers and how the Obama administration initially got it wrong.
“What difference, at this point, does it make?” she said in a testy back-and-forth with committee Republicans. “It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again.”