According to Smith, Republicans asked Blumenthal “160 questions about his relationship with the Clintons, fewer than 20 questions about the Benghazi attacks, more than 50 questions about the Clinton Foundation, four questions about security in Benghazi, 270 questions about his business dealings in Libya and no questions about the United States presence in Benghazi”.
Advertisement
But hours of questioning uncovered no new revelations in a deadly incident that has been the subject of a half-dozen other congressional investigations and an independent inquiry.
Stevens and three other Americans were killed when the US diplomatic facilities were attacked on September 11, 2012.
“In terms of her testimony, I don’t know if she testified that differently today than she’s previously testified”, Gowdy said. “I’m just saying, maybe you should wonder if you’re overdoing it if you have more sequels than The Fast and the Furious”, Noah said. “I have been wracking my brain about what more could have been done or should have been done”.
Given that Republicans campaigned off that oft-repeated soundbite, the lack of an indelible image from Thursday’s hearing will have suited Mrs Clinton’s campaign.
But when asked by a reporter after the hearing about what new information the committee had gleaned from the hearing, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-South Carolina) didn’t have an answer.
Although they had long ago convicted her in their own minds of all of the above, they didn’t come close to pinning Clinton with greater personal responsibility for the fatal security failures than she has already accepted.
“I think the core theory is this – that you deliberately interfered with security in Benghazi and that resulted in people dying”, he told Clinton. “I can only tell you what the facts were”, Clinton said.
Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, R-Ga., questioned why Stevens’ requests for additional security didn’t personally reach Clinton. The American people are entitled to the truth about Benghazi, he said, but “they’re also entitled to the truth about our committee”. But as the day wore on, she seemed to be increasingly impatient with the Republican line of questioning and with the constant interruptions from the GOP members on the panel.
At one point, Clinton impassively stacked papers while Gowdy and senior Democrat Elijah Cummings argued loudly over Cummings’ request that the closed-door testimony of Clinton friend Sidney Blumenthal before the committee in June be publicly released.
In her opening remarks, Clinton appealed to the committee to put politics aside and “resist denigrating the patriotism or loyalty of those with whom we disagree”. They didn’t get through to you.
This committee has spent over 17 months or 532 days investigating (the committee started in May 2014) — longer than the Watergate committee investigation. And so, what you have here is another big test for Hillary Clinton, and another big test that she appears to have passed.
In one tense moment, Republican Jim Jordan accused Mrs Clinton of deliberately misleading the public by linking the Benghazi violence at first to an internet video insulting the Prophet Mohammed. “So they’re picking up a fire sale because other consulates are pulling out”. Clinton’s appearance before the panel follows months of controversy about her use of a private home email server for her State Department work, a disclosure that emerged in part because of the Benghazi committee’s demand previous year to see her official records.
Gowdy and fellow Republicans became increasingly agitated as Thursday’s hearings wore on.
“Why wouldn’t you let a neutral third party judge determine which emails belong to the taxpayers, which ones don’t, instead of you making that determination with your lawyers?”.
Advertisement
The hearing was punctuated by a series of increasingly pointed exchanges, especially among Democratic and Republican committee members.
