November 2, 2015 Issue
The Hillary Hearing
Illustration by Tom Bachtell
The moment Hillary Clinton seemed to realize that her testimony Thursday before the House Select Committee on Benghazi was not going to be a big problem for her or for her campaign came about forty-five minutes in. When the hearing opened, she had regarded the chairman, Trey Gowdy, of South Carolina, with irritated skepticism. She looked as if she might say something rash, if not throw something, and perhaps she might have. Nearly three years ago, in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Benghazi, she lashed out after having been asked many times about U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice's comments on the Sunday talk shows about what had instigated the attack, on September 11, 2012, in which four Americans, including Chris Stevens, the Ambassador to Libya, died. "What difference, at this point, does it make?" Clinton demanded. Out of context, she sounded unmoved by the men's deaths. Now, in the House hearing, it seemed to dawn on her that the proper response to her Republican interrogators was not outrage but pity.
Peter Roskam, of Illinois, was laying out a scenario in which Clinton's assumption of a leadership role on Libyan policy "didn't come easy," when he stopped and said, in case he might be overwhelming her, "I can pause while you're reading your notes from your staff." Clinton replied, "I can do more than one thing at a time, Congressman—thanks." A minute or two later, Roskam said, "Go ahead and read the note if you need to." This time, Clinton laughed. "I'm not done with my question," Roskam said; he was just doing her a "courtesy." "That's all right," Clinton responded, with a friendly wave of her hand. From then on, she was in control. "I'm sorry that doesn't fit your narrative, Congressman. I can only tell you what the facts are," she told Jim Jordan, of Ohio, who is the chairman of the Freedom Caucus. As he spoke, she rested her chin on the palm of one hand, as if he were not much more than a loud boor at a party who, puzzlingly, doesn't seem to know how he sounds. When Lynn Westmoreland, of Georgia, informed her that he spoke slowly, Clinton laughed again and said, "I lived in Arkansas a long time. I don't need an interpreter."
But in one sense she did need interpreters, and she got them. There was plenty of combat in the course of the hearings, but on Clinton's side it was waged, for the most part, by the Democrats on the panel, who served as her anger translators. Elijah Cummings, of Maryland, repeatedly called out his Republican counterparts on conspiracy theories mooted and on inaccurate statements made, such as the charge that Clinton had personally turned down requests from Ambassador Stevens for more security. ("Four Pinocchios!") Cummings, in his opening statement, asked why the committee existed at all. The answer that he suggested—"to drive down Secretary Clinton's poll numbers"—seems almost a truism by now; indeed, it has been confirmed by a number of prominent Republicans in less guarded moments.
There have now been seven full investigations of the circumstances surrounding the Benghazi attack, five in the House and two in the Senate. The Tampa Bay Times's PolitiFact Web site noted recently that it was largely accurate to say that all the investigations found things that could have been done better (such as intelligence sharing) but none found "overt wrongdoing." (Meanwhile, the Obama Administration's larger Libya policy and its real failures have hardly been discussed.) Gowdy, whose defensiveness was palpable, said that his committee was better than the others: he has found more e-mails and more witnesses, even though they have led farther away from the burning compound in Benghazi.
One such witness was Sidney Blumenthal, the writer and longtime Clinton friend. (He has worked for the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation and, in the nineteen-nineties, for The New Yorker.) Blumenthal sent Clinton a number of e-mails about Libya, some of which she passed on to others in the State Department. As a result, he was questioned by the committee, in a closed hearing, for almost nine hours, despite having no real knowledge of what unfolded in Benghazi; his name has become one that Clinton's opponents obsessively allude to. "I honestly don't understand this fixation," Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, said.
Gowdy's rationale was essentially that the people in the State Department might have been as distracted by Blumenthal as he apparently is, and in a way that harmed national security. "It's relevant because our ambassador was asked to read and respond to Sidney Blumenthal's drivel," he said. (Gowdy was also bothered by the fact that one of Clinton's aides, Huma Abedin, had sent her an e-mail about milk.) There is plenty to debate in Clinton's use of a private e-mail server and the potentially overlapping interests of the State Department and the Clinton Foundation without lapsing into that sort of illogic. Any Americans who are not yet tired of hearing about Clinton's e-mails may finally have had their fill. (As Representative Schiff said, "I feel like channelling Bernie Sanders.")
During this hearing, Clinton did convey that she saw Ambassador Stevens and the other Americans who died—Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods, and Glen Doherty—as human beings. She spoke about sleepless nights spent worrying about diplomats' safety and "racking my brain about what more could have been done." Gowdy, speaking next, used his time to rail against Schiff, who, several minutes earlier, had called the hearing a "prosecution." At one point, the proceedings turned into a shouting match between Gowdy and Cummings. Clinton straightened the papers on the table in front of her, pausing occasionally to contemplate Gowdy or to smile at Cummings. There were several more rounds of questions, in which her interrogators manifested all of Washington's pathologies—dysfunction, partisan squabbling, insularity—in such extreme form that Clinton came across not only as a grownup, as her supporters had hoped, but as the most normal person in the room.
Clinton has been immersed in politics for decades, and yet the panel managed to make the contrast between her manner and the ways of Washington look stark. She appeared to be a sensible outsider. At 7:15 P.M., nine hours after the hearings began, Martha Roby, of Alabama, asked Clinton about her movements when she went home on the night of the attack. "Were you alone?" she asked. Yes, Clinton said. "The whole night?" Clinton started to laugh once more. "I don't see why that's funny," Roby said. Not funny, perhaps, but, like the Benghazi committee itself, absurd. ♦
This article appears in the print edition of the November 2, 2015, issue.
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