http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/blogs/what-expect-hillarys-benghazi-hearing_1050516.htmlWhat to Expect at Hillary's Benghazi Hearing
Stephen F. Hayes
October 21, 2015 3:55 PM
The Benghazi Select Committee holds an open hearing with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Thursday. Clinton has said she is willing to stay as long as there are questions.
The much-anticipated hearing comes as Republicans and Democrats have traded accusations that each side is politicizing Benghazi, the investigation, and Clinton’s appearance. Democrats have argued that the investigation has focused inordinately on Clinton, a dubious claim given the full scope of the committee’s work. But the hearing Thursday will necessarily focus on Clinton since she’s the only witness and it will no doubt have the effect of seeming to confirm the allegations that Republicans too focused on Clinton.
Adding to the challenge for Republicans is the fact that the hearing will almost certainly be covered primarily as a political story, rather than a national security hearing, by a Washington media dubious of the investigation from the outset.
Some of the subject matter is predictable, but we are told the committee’s investigation has produced new information with a direct bearing on Clinton’s earlier claims. Here are some things to look for over the course of a long day of testimony.
THE ACCOUNTABILITY REVIEW BOARD.
Hillary Clinton will hide behind the State Department’s Accountability Review Board report.
Clinton regularly cites the ARB report in defense of her role on Benghazi. She used it extensively in her book, Hard Choices, to shield herself from criticism. Clinton points to the ARB report frequently in media appearances, including twice in her recent interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper. There’s a reason she does this: The ARB report fixed blame for the attacks and the security lapses that preceded them on mid and low-level State Department bureaucrats and, aside from a few critical lines, largely exonerated Clinton.
But the ARB wasn’t a serious investigation and the report wasn’t a serious report. The ARB never interviewed Secretary Clinton. It never sought to obtain her emails and never learned that she had set up a private server. The ARB chose not to interview State Department officials who were likely to offer testimony that contradicted the Obama administration’s preferred narrative, including Mark Thompson, the senior counterterrorism official at the State Department on duty the night of the attacks, who repeatedly offered to testify but was never contacted by the ARB investigators. ARB co-chairman Admiral Mike Mullen warned senior State Department officials that Charlene Lamb, a State Department official preparing to appear before Congress, would be a bad witness for the administration. And Mullen admitted in a transcribed interview with the House Oversight Committee that he provided a draft copy of the report to Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff, for her review. It’s unclear how many changes to the report Mills made, but we do know that in one instance she removed the word “grossly” to soften the report’s assessment of the State Department’s negligence on security before the attacks.
None of this should be surprising given one highly relevant fact about the creation of the committee: Clinton handpicked the ARB’s co-chairmen, Mullen and Ambassador Thomas Pickering, charged with providing the State Department’s official assessment of State Department performance.
SECURITY
Among the issues that have dominated the attention of investigators is the matter of security before the attack. In previous congressional testimony, Clinton has volunteered that she was ultimately responsible for what happens at the State Department under her watch. But on specific questions about her responsibility for the lack of security at U.S. diplomatic facilities in Libya, Clinton has punted. In an interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer to promote Hard Choices, Clinton said: “I was not making security decisions.” She told Sawyer that “it would be a mistake” for a secretary of state to be involved in setting security policy for U.S. facilities. In her book, Clinton argued that while cables regarding security policy in Libya were addressed to her, she never saw them. “That’s not how it works. It shouldn’t. And it didn’t.”
Of course the secretary of state shouldn’t be expected to read every memo addressed to her and can’t be expected to make personnel and security decisions for all US diplomatic outposts around the world. But Libya was different. US facilities there were increasingly under threat and those responsible for securing them – and those who worked in them – were sounding alarms about inadequate security. A long trail of documents make clear that Clinton was intimately involved virtually every aspect of Libya policymaking and was receiving detailed reports from both formal State Department channels and from outside advisers (Sidney Blumenthal and others). The obvious question: Why did Clinton have time for virtually everything other than security?
EMAILS
When the hearing turns to Clinton’s emails, it is likely to focus on two issues. First, Clinton will be asked to explain the many discrepancies in her claims about the emails. We covered some of those problems here.
Clinton at first claimed she turned over all work-related emails to the State Department. False. (The committee later found emails between Clinton and both Sidney Blumenthal and David Petraeus that were not included by Clinton in her initial production.) She claimed that she turned over her emails in response to a routine request the State Department made of former secretaries. False. (A State Department spokesman acknowledged the request for Clinton’s emails was triggered by the revelation that she had a private server.) She claimed she never received a subpoena for the emails. False. (Gowdy produced one publicly to demonstrate that Clinton’s claim was untrue.) She claimed she used only one email device as secretary of state. False. (Clinton herself has acknowledged using multiple devices, and FOIA requests make clear that she used at least an iPad and a BlackBerry.) She claimed that she withheld her “personal” emails because of her private communications with her husband, among others. False. (A spokesman for Bill Clinton said the former president has sent just two emails in his life, both when he was president.) She claimed she never sent classified information on her email. False. (Reviews by the inspector general for the intelligence community found dozens of Clinton’s email exchanges included classified information.) She claimed that everything she did with respect to her email was allowed. False. (Clinton’s email setup indisputably violated the record retention requirements of the Obama administration, and the chief transparency officer at the State Department said the arrangement was “not acceptable.”) She claimed Blumenthal’s emails to her were “unsolicited.” False. (Clinton repeatedly solicited more information from Blumenthal in their email exchanges.)
In addition, there remain significant gaps in the emails that Clinton and the State Department have provided to the committee – gaps that sometimes coincide with periods of intensive interest and activity from the administration on Libya policy. How does she explain these gaps?
And, second, she will be asked why she had time to read, share and respond to a regular stream of emails from Blumenthal, who was barred by the Obama administration from working at the State Department, but did not have time to read urgent reports from State Department officials responsible for addressing the deteriorating security situation in Libya.
BLUMENTHAL
Sidney Blumenthal will be a subject of some questioning but the hearing will not focus on him. That’s not to say he doesn’t deserve further scrutiny. He does. Several sources on the committee believe Blumenthal may have perjured himself during his testimony on June 16, 2015.
During that appearance, Blumenthal downplayed his potential business interests in Libya. According to a friendly Politico article after he testified, Blumenthal summarized his business pursuits in testimony by saying he had merely discussed a “humanitarian-assistance idea for medical care in which I had little involvement, [that] [n]ever got off the ground, in which no money was ever exchanged, no favor sought and which had nothing to do with my sending these emails.”
But an email that Blumenthal sent Clinton on July 14, 2011, painted a picture of his business interests starkly at odds with that dismissive characterization. In that email, which Blumenthal sent Clinton in preparation for a meeting she was to have about the Libyan opposition, Blumenthal described at length the qualifications of an American security firm seeking contracts in Libya.
According to Blumenthal, the firm, Osprey Global Solutions, had unique experience in chaotic wartime security environments. The training and assistance they could provide the Libyan opposition could break the stalemate between the rebels and the Qaddafi government. The opposition, Blumenthal wrote, had finally recognized that Qaddafi would not fall on his own and that they needed American assistance to force him out. Blumenthal argued that Osprey was the firm to provide that assistance and noted that he and two associates had secured an agreement between Osprey and the Libyan opposition.
In his testimony, Blumenthal claimed that they project was merely a “humanitarian-assistance idea for medical care,” but in his email to Clinton he wrote at length about the military dimensions of his efforts and the “strategic imperative” of organizing Libyan opposition forces and scoring a military victory to oust Qaddafi. David Grange, a retired U.S. general who ran Osprey, can “train their forces and he has drawn up a plan to take Tripoli…” In his testimony, Blumenthal claimed that he’d had “little involvement” in the deal, but in his email to Clinton he suggests he’s responsible for it, claiming credit for “putting the arrangement together” and “keeping it moving.” And in his testimony, Blumenthal said his business interests “had nothing to do with my sending these emails,” but he sent the email about his business interests twice to make sure Clinton received them. The subject line of the first email was: “H: IMPORTANT FOR YOUR MEETING, Sid.” And the second: “H: Pls call before you leave for Turkey. Important re your trip. Sid.”
It’s not clear why Blumenthal would offer testimony contradicted by his own words in the email to Clinton. But at the time of his testimony, the State Department had chosen to withhold the email from the Benghazi committee as beyond the committee’s jurisdiction. That decision was later reversed after the departure of a State Department staffer who had been particularly uncooperative with the congressional probe.
There is wide consensus on the Republican side of the committee that Blumenthal offered misleading testimony, but for now Gowdy is cool to the idea of pursuing perjury charges against Blumenthal, concerned that doing so would distract from the focus on Benghazi and with an understanding that perjury convictions are hard to win.
TALKING POINTS
Obama administration defenders have worked hard to suggest that the controversy surrounding the administration’s “talking points” on Benghazi was the product of fevered imaginations on the right. While there’s no question that some congressional Republicans allowed their conclusions to race ahead of the evidence available to them, it’s equally true that the flaws in the talking points were more than the product of a chaotic bureaucratic process.
Democratic Representative Stephen Lynch accused National Security Adviser Susan Rice of using “scrubbed” talking points to deliver “false information” to the American public. "Absolutely, they were false, they were wrong," said Lynch.
"There were no protests outside the Benghazi compound there. This was a deliberate and strategic attack on the consulate there,” he said. Lynch added:
"It was false information. There's no excuse for that."
Some of the changes to the talking points produced by the intelligence community came after requests from the State Department. In one email protesting language in the talking points, Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, asked for revisions to satisfy objections from “my building leadership.”
The White House produced a second set of Benghazi talking points, written by Ben Rhodes, a top White House adviser, urged Rice to use her Sunday show appearances “to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy."
What was Clinton’s role in creating this false narrative?
THE YOUTUBE VIDEO
Critics of Clinton on Benghazi are most angry about the exchange she had with surviving family members at the solemn ceremony held to receive the bodies of the victims. Pat Smith, the mother of information specialist Sean Smith, who was killed in the attacks, says Clinton told her that the Obama administration would bring to justice the man who made the anti-Islam video that the administration initially blamed for the attacks. “She blamed the video just like all the rest of them did and she also told me she was going to get back to me.”
Charles Woods, father of Tyrone Woods, a NAVY Seal killed in the attacks, says Clinton told him the same thing. “She said we’re going to have the person responsible for that video arrested. I knew she was lying. Her body language, the look in her eyes…I could tell she wasn’t telling the truth.”
But contemporaneous documents and testimony from US officials who were in Libya during the attacks make no mention of the video that would become the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s public narrative about the attacks. Indeed, in messages as the attacks unfolded and in the hours and days that followed, show security and intelligence officials immediately placing blame on al Qaeda and affiliated fighters and pushing back on suggestions from Washington that the video had played a role. Senior State Department officials, including Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, were copied on emails indicating Ansar al Sharia had claimed responsibility for the attacks.
Michael Morell, deputy CIA director at the time of the attacks, and a loyal water-carrier for the administration on Benghazi, testified that the video was simply not part of the intelligence picture during and after the attacks. “There was no mention of the video defaming the Prophet Muhammad as a motivation for the attacks in Benghazi. In fact, there was no mention of the video at all.”
Why did Clinton promise to pursue the filmmaker after the US government understood that the attacks were not a result of an out-of-control protest over the video?
Unless Clinton makes a major, obvious gaffe or misstatement of fact, the media will declare her the “winner,” heap scorn on committee Republicans and conclude that the hearing largely replowed ground that had already been tilled repeatedly.
But it’s important to remember that while the session with Clinton will undoubtedly be the committee’s most high-profile public hearing, it may not be the most important thing the committee does and will certainly not be the last.
The committee intends to interview nearly two-dozen additional witnesses before completing its investigation. And the administration continues to stonewall many of the committee’s document requests, including emails from senior State Department and White House officials at the center of the controversy over Benghazi.
