Hillary Clinton will appear before the House Select Committee on Benghazi Thursday in an attempt to settle the last remaining questions about the Sept. 11, 2012 terror attack.
While her team has cast the congressional probe as a political exercise in rehashing the past, investigators have never nailed down answers for lingering loose ends in the official account of what took place at the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, nor have they determined exactly how the government chose to present the attack to the American people based on intelligence that was later proven false.
Armed with thousands of documents that no other investigators have ever seen, Chairman Trey Gowdy and the rest of the select committee may finally be in a position to press Clinton on why more resources were not deployed, the nature of the CIA’s presence in Benghazi and how gaps in the administration’s Libya policy allowed mounting violence to continue unchecked in the run-up to the attack.
Clinton has already testified twice about her role in Benghazi: once to the House Foreign Affairs Committee and once to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in back-to-back hearings on Jan. 23, 2013.
Democrats on the select committee have argued Clinton should not be a focus of the investigation because previous probes indicated she was not aware of security requests from Amb. Chris Stevens, who asked the State Department to provide more protection before he was killed in the 2012 raid.
Chairman Trey Gowdy has said he plans to ask Clinton why informal and occasionally false updates about Libya from confidant Sidney Blumenthal rose to the level of her office, but requests for more security from the U.S. ambassador to that country did not.
“The specific security requests pertaining to Benghazi, you know, were handled by the security professionals in the department. I didn’t see those requests. They didn’t come to me. I didn’t approve them, I didn’t deny them,” Clinton said during the Senate hearing.
Clinton and Benghazi committee Democrats often point to an internal Accountability Review Board report about the attack as the “definitive” record of what occurred. The former secretary of state cited it extensively in her previous testimony.
But Republicans note Clinton herself chose members of the ARB, and that her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, had access to a draft copy of the report, to which she suggested changes.
Panel Democrats published the transcript from a closed-door interview with Mills Wednesday that shed new light on how Clinton’s staff viewed the attack.
According to the Mills transcript, the State Department initially received reports that Stevens and others were safely sheltered on the Benghazi compound before the second wave of violence hit the facility later that evening.
Mills recalled having a sense that Stevens must have been hiding somewhere and “didn’t know it was safe to come out” when the agency first received reports that the ambassador was missing.
As officials scrambled to find Stevens, they tried to track the signal of a cell phone that he had with him but that Mills said did not belong to him.
During her interview, Mills also referenced “the agency that had another facility that was there,” likely referring to a CIA annex on the diplomatic compound.
Rep. Elijah Cummings, the committee’s top Democrat, was the only minority member to attend Mills’ interview.
The presence of the CIA at the compound has raised questions in the past about how the government’s post in Benghazi was actually used.
The mission in Benghazi was established in Nov. 2011, less than a year before the raid, according to the ARB report.
According to Clinton’s 2013 Senate testimony, the Benghazi compound was not a permanent diplomatic facility, but a site chosen by Stevens himself as the hub of U.S. presence in the city as it evolved into the stronghold of the Libyan revolution. While the compound lacked adequate security, it was in “a much better location, in terms of security than the alternatives,” Clinton said.
But critics of previous investigations have argued government officials have yet to provide a full explanation of why the U.S. had set up such a poorly protected facility there and why the ambassador was visiting on Sept. 11, 2012. Officials have previously testified that Stevens was in Benghazi due to staffing gaps.
Clinton herself noted the presence of the CIA annex during the Senate hearing, acknowledging that the facility “was not well known.”
“We had a very good relationship with the annex in Benghazi. We helped them, they helped us,” Clinton said during her testimony, likely referring to the CIA.
Democrats have dismissed reports that the Benghazi facility was being used in the transport of weapons from Libyan rebels who fought against Muammar Gadhafi as Republican conspiracy theories.
In Dec. 2012, the Sunday Times of London reported on a U.S.-led “covert operation” that steered weapon stockpiles, purchased from the former Gadhafi regime, to Syrian rebels fighting against President Bashar al-Assad.
The New York Times said the U.S. had funneled weapons to the Libyan uprising through Qatar.
In 2013, CNN reported that the CIA was discouraging dozens of its agents from talking to Congress or the media about their alleged operations at the annex on the Benghazi diplomatic compound. The agency officially disputed that report.
Pentagon documents made public in May showed weapons were shipped from Benghazi to two ports in Syria in August of 2012, the month before the Benghazi attack.
During her previous testimony, Clinton acknowledged the fact that Libya was “awash” in weapons amid the internal conflict.
After Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., asked Clinton about tracking the flow of weapons in Syria during the Jan. 2013 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Clinton said the U.S. presence in Benghazi involved searching for and seizing weapons stockpiles.
“One of the reasons that we and other government agencies were present in Benghazi is exactly that,” Clinton said. “We had a concerted effort to try to track down and find and recover as many MANPADS and other very dangerous weapons as possible.” She was referring to man-portable air-defense systems.
Asked Tuesday whether the committee plans to press Clinton on the possibility a covert gun-running operation had been based in Benghazi, Rep. Mike Pompeo, a Republican member of the panel, said members may not be able to raise the issue in the open forum of the hearing Thursday.
“Some of the questions we’re going to ask may not be able to be covered in the open part of the hearing, which will be the majority of the question,” Pompeo said during an appearance on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom.” “But I can assure the American people that this will be an investigation that is complete and thorough and gets all the questions that are outstanding for all of us.”
If some questions Thursday require classified answers, the committee could conduct those portions of the hearing in a classified session, a committee aide said.
Democrats blasted Gowdy for requesting documents about the alleged weapons transfer, noting none of the 54 witnesses interviewed previously by the committee had any knowledge of such an operation.
The panel may also force Clinton to address controversial talking points blaming the violence on a protest that were given to Ambassador Susan Rice the Sunday after the attack. Rice appeared on political talk shows that day and falsely said the raid was the result of a demonstration over an anti-Muslim YouTube clip that had escalated out of control.
Subsequent intelligence indicated the attack was premeditated. Clinton and others have argued the mistake reflected the evolving nature of the government’s understanding of what happened, while Republicans have suggested it was a deliberate attempt to mislead the American people on the eve of President Obama’s re-election.
Documents made public earlier this week by Judicial Watch, a conservative nonprofit, indicate the State Department contacted YouTube about a video clip on the night of the attack as the agency pursued different ways to quell the violence.
However, the “Pastor John” clip referenced in the document dated Sept. 11, 2012 was not the one on which the government ultimately attempted to blame the attack. That video, “The Innocence of Muslims,” was not yet mentioned.
“I wasn’t involved in the talking points process,” Clinton said during her Senate testimony of the controversial Rice statements blaming the attack on a spontaneous response to a YouTube clip.
Given the discovery of her private emails in the two years since she last testified, Clinton will likely face fresh questions about what she knew about the origin of the attack and when she knew it.
It was Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., who pushed Clinton to utter the most famous words of the Benghazi scandal in 2013.
“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 would go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?” she snapped in response to questions about the talking points.
Gowdy and other panel Republicans may again try to coax Clinton into an outburst of candor Thursday when they grill her on the still-unknown details of the attack.
Unlike the seven previous congressional investigations of Benghazi, the select committee has reviewed 2,450 pages of Clinton emails that she kept hidden from other investigators, 7,000 pages of Stevens’ emails and hours of testimony from dozens of witnesses that have never before been interviewed.
While Clinton will almost certainly face questions about her private email server, Republicans are under enormous pressure to keep the hearing from straying too far from the core facts of the Benghazi attack, many of which have been obscured by political spin on both side of the aisle.
