PLENTY OF FIREWORKS, NO SMOKING GUN
‘You got it wrong,’ former secretary of State argues
Former secretary of State Hillary Clinton was mostly calm in her testimony before a House Benghazi committee on Thursday, but there was plenty of drama between Rep. Trey Gowdy, RS.C., and Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., as they shouted each other down in unusually personal attacks.
Former secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s testimony before a House committee on Thursday provided insights into her management decisions before the terrorist attacks in Benghazi in 2012. But partisanship, not proof of conspiracy by Clinton, was the dominant theme.
Clinton defended her record against allegations that she engineered the U.S. intervention in Libya just to boost her political standing, then failed to make sure her diplomats 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 workrelated emails and emails about Libya?” he asked.
Clinton repeated that using the private email system was a mistake. “But email was not my primary means of communication,” she said.
Thursday’s public hearing, the fourth one the Benghazi commit- tee 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 Christopher Stevens, were killed when terrorists overran the outpost Sept. 11, 2012.
Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., 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.
“You got it wrong, congressman,” Clinton said. “I absolutely did not forget about Libya after Gadhafi fell.”
Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, RGa., 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.
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 misleading the American people by trying to downplay the terrorism angle for political reasons before 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.”