That’s what we learned.
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This week, the Select Committee on Benghazi finally got its hearing with democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. But Republicans on the House select committee signaled at the outset that they were more interested in roughing up the Democratic frontrunner than exploring the events that led to the seizure of the diplomatic outpost. Is this thing forever? “But they were. And so, in a lot of ways, DOMA was a line that was drawn that was to prevent going further”. You can’t knock her down. With Clinton’s testimony concluded, that decision is likely to be revisited.
You and your Democratic colleagues on the panel have been criticized for participating and giving legitimacy to the investigation. The morning ended in a fight as the Democrat Elijah Cummings of Maryland demanded that Gowdy release the full transcripts of the committee’s interviews with Blumenthal. “Asking questions about the security situation?”
The Benghazi panel could damage her chances of reaching the White House.
“I recognize that there are many currents at work in this committee”.
“The reality is that after 17 months, we have nothing new to tell the families”. It would have been nearly impossible for her to sit through a barrage of meticulously tailored questions for that many hours and emerge with her day’s allotment of honesty intact. Hillary could only respond that security requests were the purview of the “security professionals” below her. She had no answer as to why the security professionals did not want to beef up security when other countries were bailing out of Benghazi. And why did the administration change its story about the nature of the attacks in the weeks afterward? Republicans on the committee believe she bungled the 2012 incident when it occurred and tried to cover up her missteps, charges she refutes.
“You’ll never see anything like this”, under a Trump presidency, the bombastic billionaire candidate said.
There is also a damning September 12, 2012, call from Clinton to Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Qandil, in which she says, “We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film”. The hearing revealed to the public for the first time that within hours of the attacks, Clinton emailed her daughter that Americans had died at the hands of an al-Qaeda like group.
Broadly speaking, the prevailing sense among observers is that Clinton not only weathered her marathon grilling, but managed to come out the other end with a bit of wind in her political sails, having projected an air of measured-maybe even presidential?-control over the course of the day’s heated exchanges. Republicans said they were pressing hard to learn more about the manner in which President Barack Obama and his top aides characterized the attack. It gave her a high-profile platform to show her self-control and command of foreign policy, but also left her vulnerable to claims that she helped politicise the Benghazi tragedy. “She had it in her mind to make it a political grandstanding occasion”.
And two of her other challengers – former Virginia Sen.
Clinton rejected the charge, shooting back at Jordan: “I’m sorry that it doesn’t fit your narrative, congressman”.
McCarthy had boasted that Clinton’s previous appearance before the committee had driven her polls numbers down.
“In terms of her testimony?”
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