Clinton Takes Responsibility for Benghazi

Hillary Clinton said that she accepted responsibility for a lethal 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya and that she sought afterward to improve security for State Department workers abroad, as a House panel investigating the incident began a hearing that may prove a turning point for her presidential campaign.

The Benghazi committee’s inquiry on Thursday features Clinton, the former secretary of state who is the frontrunner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, as the sole witness. House aides said that her interrogation may stretch into the late afternoon.

Clinton and her allies expect the hearing to be a highlight for her campaign, which already got a boost Wednesday when Vice President Joe Biden announced that he wouldn’t compete against her for the Democratic nomination. She invoked the memory of slain U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens to defend her approach to diplomacy, saying they shared a common philosophy on the need for American leadership even in the most troubled parts of the world.

"I was the one who asked Chris to go to Libya as our envoy," Clinton said. "I was the one who recommended him to be our ambassador to Libya. After the attacks I stood next to President Obama as Marines carried his casket and those of the other three Americans off the plane at Andrews Air Force Base. I took responsibility."

Clinton was not invited to speak until 27 minutes after the hearing began, after the committee’s top Republican and Democrat exchanged political barbs. She initially focused on acknowledging the work of Stevens and other Americans killed in the attacks. Stevens was an extraordinary diplomat, she said, who spirited himself into Libya on board a Greek cargo ship as a revolution broke out against the country’s former dictator, Muammar Qaddafi.

"We owe them, and each other, the truth," Republican Trey Gowdy, the panel’s chairman, said of the families of those killed in Benghazi. "The truth about why we were in Libya. The truth about what we were doing in Libya. The truth about what led to the attacks and the truth about what our government told the American people after the attacks."

‘Expeditionary Diplomacy’

Clinton said that after the attacks she "launched reforms to better protect our people in the field and reduce the chance of another tragedy." The Republican-led Congress, she said, has delayed acting on a State Department review board’s recommendations to improve security for U.S. diplomats.

Clinton entered the packed hearing room shortly before the inquiry began, accompanied by her lawyers Cheryl Mills and David Kendall and Jake Sullivan, a top aide at her campaign who also worked with her at the State Department. She greeted members of the committee from both parties, shaking many of their hands.

The hearing attracted an unusual assortment of Washington luminaries, including New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, Republican pollster Frank Luntz and Tom Davis, a former Republican representative from Virginia. Democrats on the committee have threatened to discontinue participating in the investigation after today’s hearing, but the party made a show of force for Clinton’s appearance.

Several Democratic members of Congress who aren’t on the committee sat in the audience, including Joseph Crowley of New York, Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, and John Lewis of Georgia. The civil rights icon arrived late and had trouble finding a seat. Republicans Louis Gohmert of Texas and Scott DesJarlais of Tennessee also watched from the audience.

House Republicans created Gowdy’s Benghazi committee in May 2014 expressly to investigate the attacks. Seven other congressional committees have previously investigated the incident, which resulted in the deaths of four Americans including Stevens. House Democrats have accused Gowdy’s panel of targeting Clinton in the hopes of hurting her chances at the presidency, and have noted that the committee’s work has cost millions of dollars and lasted longer than the investigation of Watergate.

"Previous investigations were not thorough," Gowdy said in defending his committee’s work.

Two Republican lawmakers, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California and Representative Richard Hanna of New York, have fueled Democratic skepticism about Gowdy’s committee. McCarthy publicly boasted that the investigation has hurt Clinton’s poll numbers, while Hanna said the probe was designed to target Clinton.

Priorities USA, a super-PAC supporting Clinton’s candidacy, on Tuesday released its first television ad, which cited the McCarthy remarks and accused Republicans of using taxpayer money to undermine Clinton’s campaign.

Correct the Record, another super-PAC supporting Clinton, blast e-mailed its first release to reporters less than 15 minutes after Clinton started speaking, elaborating on her charge that Congress is holding up funding for a training facility for diplomatic security and foreign service personnel. Meanwhile, her social media staff tweeted out excerpts of her speech, while the committee’s Democratic staff began e-mailing reporters "fact-checks" on statements made by the panel Republicans.

Clinton, meanwhile, took the high road in her remarks. The best way to honor the legacy of the four Americans who died in Benghazi, she contended, is to ensure that the U.S. government does all it can to protect its diplomatic corps, even in regions where there’s no American military presence -- a concept she calls "expeditionary diplomacy."

"America must lead in a dangerous world, and our diplomats must continue representing us in dangerous places," Clinton said. U.S. diplomats cannot represent the nation from a "bunker," she said.

Politicians back home, she said, should "rise above partisanship and reach for statesmanship."

Republican Assertions

From the outset, the hearing featured moments of political theater. Clinton used her testimony to demonstrate her extensive experience in diplomacy and foreign affairs, polishing her presidential credentials.

"I have been in a number of Situation Room discussions," she said at one point.

Representative Peter Roskam, an Illinois Republican, meanwhile dramatically interrupted his own question to give Clinton "an opportunity" to read notes passed to her by her aides.

"I can do more than one thing at a time," Clinton retorted.

Susan Brooks, an Indiana Republican, sought to portray Clinton as distracted when Stevens was in Libya. She plopped two large piles of documents in front of her on the hearing room’s dais. One pile, she said, was copies of 795 e-mails Clinton sent or received regarding Libya in 2011. The other pile was just 67 Libya e-mails from 2012, she said.

"I can only conclude by your own record that there was a lack of interest in 2012," she said.

"I did not conduct most of the business I did on behalf of our country on e-mail," Clinton responded, saying she did much of her work by phone and in-person meetings. She joked that there were probably a lot of emails from Sidney Blumenthal, a friend and occasional adviser, in the larger pile.

"We’ll get there," Brooks said.

Clinton seemed to go out of her way to be friendly to her most hostile inquisitors, including Martha Roby, a 39-year-old third-term Republican from Alabama who appeared nervous as she asked a question. "I get what you’re saying, congresswoman," Clinton said, before launching into an explanation of plans for diplomatic facilities in Libya.

Before Roby could even finish her exchange with Clinton, Correct the Record issued a more than 1,100-word email undercutting her line of questioning.

Confrontational Hearings

In 2013 congressional testimony on the Benghazi attack, Clinton chastised Republicans over accusations that the Obama administration had misled the public about the impetus of the attack.

"The fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night and decided they’d go kill some Americans?" she said at the time. "What difference, at this point, does it make?"

Democrats on the Benghazi committee released a report Oct. 19 seeking to debunk what they called unsupported assertions about the former secretary of state’s handling of the 2012 attacks, including that she had ordered the military to stand down on the night the U.S. mission was overrun by extremists.

"This report shows that no witnesses we interviewed substantiated these wild Republican conspiracy theories about Secretary Clinton and Benghazi,” Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the panel’s top Democrat, said in a statement.“It’s time to bring this taxpayer-funded fishing expedition to an end.”

Democrats contend that much of the committee’s work has focused on probing Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server for official business while secretary of state. Revelations about her server emerged as a result of Gowdy’s investigation, and the resulting controversy has weighed on her bid for the Democratic nomination.

"You had an unusual e-mail arranagement," Gowdy said to Clinton in his statement opening the hearing, blaming the delay in accessing Clinton’s communications for his decision not to call her to testify earlier. "When you left the State Department, you kept the public record to yourself for two years."

Obama ‘Stonewalling’

Last week, Cummings criticized the committee for interviewing long-time Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, saying that she had no policy or operational role in the Benghazi matter. Republicans defended bringing Abedin before the panel for several hours of questioning on Friday, saying her role as a top State Department aide to Clinton made her testimony essential to learning more about Benghazi.

House Speaker John Boehner has defended the committee’s work, saying that its focus remains on getting to the bottom of what happened in Benghazi. He accused the Obama administration of stonewalling the investigation and credited the panel for unearthing Clinton’s use of the e-mail server, which he said had eluded previous inquiries.

“If it weren’t for the stonewalling from the administration in terms of turning over documents, this would have been done a long time ago,” Boehner said in an Oct. 20 Fox News interview. “Nobody else got to these documents until we got to the select committee.”

Thursday’s hearing was more than a year in the making, as Gowdy’s staff grappled with Clinton’s lawyers over the terms of her appearance. Clinton’s team insisted on a single public hearing, instead of private interviews, and Gowdy agreed in late July.