Yesterday was supposed to be a very important day in the lives of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the House Select Committee on Benghazi. 24 hours later it doesn’t dominate the headlines and very little came out of Ms. Clinton’s visit to “The Hill.”
For those looking for a smoking gun, or that key sound bite that will sink the presidential campaign for Clinton, after 11 hours of testimony it didn’t happen. What we know today is pretty much what we knew going into the hearing.
Those love and respect Ms. Clinton still love and respect her today perhaps even more after the hearings and she will still be the frontrunner for the 2016 Democratic Presidential Nomination. Meanwhile, for those who hate Ms. Clinton likely still hate her and feel like maybe something worthwhile came out of the hearings.
As one might expect the long day essentially broke down into Republicans accusing Clinton of a dereliction of duty in failing to adequately respond to requests from the U.S. officials in Benghazi for increased security, and for favoring messages from Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime aide of Bill and Hillary Clinton, over those of Ambassador Christopher Stevens.
That line of questioning was countered by Clinton who defended her actions while the Democrats on the committee concluded that she was ultimately responsible for Stevens and the other Americans at the diplomatic mission, but that security requests were routed to proper people in the chain of command at the State Department while she was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.
But with the partisan bickering left us no closer to finding out what really happened when Ambassador Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods were killed in the 2012 terrorist attacks on the US compound in Benghazi.
Even the committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) was at a loss to name anything compelling that came out of the 11 hours of testimony. He had this to say to reporters after the hearings: “I think some of Jimmy Jordan’s (R-OH) questioning. When you say new today, I mean, we knew some of that already, we knew about the emails. In terms of her testimony? I don’t know that she testified that much differently today than she has previous times she’s testified.”
Here are the key video clips that you are likely to see come out of this. First let’s look at the clip where Clinton spoke about “Fog of war and the search for Chris Stevens.”
For the GOP it was Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH) talking about Clinton and what she told her family that he felt wast different from she was telling the American people.
