http://www.nationalreview.com/node/425903/print Republicans Map Out Battle Plan for Clinton’s Benghazi Hearing
By Joel Gehrke — October 21, 2015
Hillary Clinton will make her only appearance before the House Select Committee on Benghazi Thursday, and her Republican interrogators are determined to make the most of it.
Public congressional hearings have a tendency to dissolve into empty theater, but the panel’s GOP lawmakers have taken steps to ensure that doesn’t happen in Clinton’s case. They’ve spent hours on their own preparing their lines of questioning, and most of them met as a group Tuesday to map out a plan for the hearing.
Committee chairman Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.), a former prosecutor, will manage the questioning by choosing the order in which each lawmaker speaks. “That’s based on different people and their lines of inquiry that they’re going to do,” a Republican lawmaker on the panel tells National Review. “Every member’s questions, they [will] build on the previous questioner.”
It’s the kind of moment GOP leadership had in mind when it formed the committee early last year. “When John Boehner constituted the committee, he chose members whose dispositions fit into a more disciplined approach,” the lawmaker says. “There is really nothing that you can do to mitigate the unknown, with the exception of putting people in that have the capacity to not be incentivized to just go on television.”
The lawmakers have tried to preempt any competition for the right to ask the most dramatic question by basing the inquiries on the expertise of each investigator. Most of the Republican members of the committee met Tuesday morning for several hours to coordinate the questioning, although Gowdy was unable to attend. “There’s been extensive preparation of questions,” says another GOP source familiar with the preparation process. “We tried to find [lines of inquiry] closer to [each member's] subject-matter expertise.”
#share#Lawmakers are expected to ask Clinton about the events of the Benghazi terrorist attacks and their immediate aftermath, her reliance on Sidney Blumenthal’s advice, and information revealed by newly released e-mails from the late-Ambassador Christopher Stevens and other State Department officials.
“The hearing is probably going to be a strange hybrid . . . of a hearing and a deposition, because there’s going to be so many documents that are going to be central to this,” according to the committee-member.
Such detailed questioning may create difficulties for Democratic members who have declined to participate in most of the committee’s closed-door questionings. “So if I’m a Democrat and I’m on this committee, I’m getting nervous after the first or second round [of questioning], because you can only say ‘Secretary Clinton, you’re fantastic’ so many times,” the lawmaker says. “And I think their problem now is a strategic one, because they’ve been insincere in their approach.”
But the committee’s Republicans also recognize that House majority leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) gave Democrats an opening to dismiss the proceedings as a politically motivated witch hunt in his now-infamous comments to Sean Hannity earlier this month.
“There’ll be theater on her side, there’ll be theater from the Democrats on the committee as well,” the second source says. “All you can do is make sure you’re armed with the facts. I think it’s fair to say we have that.”
