Longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin appeared on Capitol Hill on Friday to testify before the House Select Benghazi Committee investigating the 2012 attack that killed four Americans. “I wanted to honour the service of those lost and injured in the Benghazi attacks”, Abedin said, adding she was “honoured” to work for Clinton at State and “proud” of her service there. His comments echoed a Thursday night statement from the Clinton campaign, which said “it remains unclear why the committee is focused on her, given her lack of knowledge about the events surrounding Benghazi”.
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The special investigation faces fresh scrutiny 17 months after it was empanelled, with Democrats charging it is more interested in ruining Clinton’s presidential bid than reaching conclusions about how the executive branch handled the attack and its aftermath. In the broader country, Hillary Clinton’s numbers on the questions of whether she’s considered honest and trustworthy have been in a state of pretty serious decline for the last six months and it’s hard not to think that the e-mail thing has something to do with that, so it’s not a non-issue. She says she wants to ensure diplomatic security has changed since the attacks.
The 65-year-old congressman is also a veteran of another Benghazi investigation, one conducted by the House Intelligence Committee.
“She just happened to be leading the State Department at this time, and it would be wrong of us not to ask her questions”, Brooks said.
He did not reveal the questions that prompted such answers.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., took the unusual step on Thursday of chiding a fellow Republican, who said the investigation was designed in part “to go after” Clinton.
That consultancy was founded by a Bill Clinton adviser, Doug Band, and a former diplomat in Clinton’s State Department, Declan Kelly. Gowdy has been keeping a relatively low profile amid a barrage of criticism lately from the Clinton campaign and a fired committee investigator, among others.
But the committee has been knocked back on its heels in recent weeks as a trio of key Republicans have essentially admitted its goal is to sink Clinton rather than get to the bottom of what happened in Benghazi.
“There are seven members of the Benghazi Committee who are intimately familiar with the work of the committee, the motives behind the work, and the results of that work”. The assault is also the focus of a federal trial in Washington. Trump has publicly spared with Fox News, in particular anchor Megyn Kelly, criticizing her tough questioning of him during the first GOP debate. But she says she’d be interested in hearing from her about what has been done to implement recommendations made in previous reports and what the government has learned from them.
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Defense lawyers also urged Cooper to dismiss other counts, such as carrying and firing a firearm during a crime of violence, that were brought under laws they said were specifically intended by Congress to cover domestic crimes, not ones that occur overseas. “He has put forward his plans with passionate intensity and I have put forth mine and just think of the difference between us and the Republicans who have put forward nothing but the same old out of touch, out of date policies”, she said of Sanders, a senator from Vermont who is running to Clinton’s left.
