Many in the media, including pundits, have asserted that the hearing was pointless and that Clinton won the day.
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Nothing new there. Nothing to see here. “There is a lot for him and the President to keep doing in the next year and a half”.
The hearing by the U.S. House Select Committee on Benghazi was, indeed, a dismal affair [“Perpetual Partisanship”, Opinion, October 26].
There is still a year of politicking ahead as well for the 2016 presidential candidates, so it is as yet unclear how the continuous barrage of questions and accusations will ultimately impact Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.
As Hillary Clinton stated it herself, with far more integrity than most of those on the committee, she hopes that “statesmanship triumphs over partisanship, and non-partisan solutions be found to such tragedies”.
These hearings have cost the American people $4.5 million.
To paraphrase Ms. Clinton, our country is in dire need of more statesmanship and less partisanship. Pompeo, who had previously made the false allegation that Clinton got “most of her intelligence” on Libya from Blumenthal, asked whether Stevens had Clinton’s personal email, her cellphone number, fax or home address or visited her at home.
Fast forward to Clinton’s first appearance before the Benghazi committee and she gained fame for “What difference does it make…?” Instead, most of the news coverage was devoted to describing the Republican Party’s ulterior motives to the hearing, Clinton’s strong composure and emotional statements, or the effects it will have on her campaign moving forward. Thursday’s marathon hearing, which stretched over 11 seemingly interminable hours, revealed no new relevant details about the attack or the response from the government.
This contradicted what Clinton said at Andrews Air Force Base three days later when she claimed in a speech and in private comments to Charles Woods, father of Tyrone Woods, a retired Navy Seal killed in the attack, that the attacks were due to outrage over an anti-Muslim video.
Sixty-six percent of respondents said they would support immediate impeachment for Clinton, while only 24 percent said they would oppose it. Ten percent said they were not sure, according to the poll. Nor did she demur when President Obama was still decrying the video in his speech to the United Nations September 25. “It was a planned attack – not a protest”.
Green starts by explaining that at the time of this attack, Libya had just come off its first civil war. Do all politicians lie? Obama was seeking re-election on a platform of, in Joe Biden’s words, “Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive”. The Benghazi attack undercut the narrative that al-Qaida was on the run.
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Gowdy went on to say that Clinton was “cooperative” in that she “answered the questions”, but clarified that he “always injected an element of wholeness and completeness and also truthfulness in the definition of cooperative”. You don’t gain as much power and influence as she has based only on a name. One recurring theme in Thurs.’s hearing was in that if leadership failures contributed to the safety failures, as Clinton & the State Department have acknowledged, why have been mid-level officers the one ones to be disciplined?
