After grilling former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for 11 hours Thursday during her testimony before the House Select Committee on Benghazi, Chairman Trey Gowdy says he still can’t identify “what she’s taken responsibility for.”
The Republican South Carolina congressman told Fox News Friday evening that Clinton made it clear during Thursday’s testimony that she was not responsible for unfulfilled requests for additional security at the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya, ahead of the attack that left four Americans dead on Sept. 11, 2012.
“We heard for several hours yesterday that it wasn’t [Clinton], she was very clear about that, that she takes responsibility, but apparently not for the request for more security,” Gowdy told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren.
Related Story: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2574118/
He added, “I’m not going to give you a name because it wouldn’t be fair to that person but I can tell you that if her position is, despite what the previous [Accountability Review Board] said about taking personal responsibility and personally review it, if her position is that she didn’t do it, then we need to find out what level that decision was made so we can make sure it never happens again.”
Gowdy also weighed in on emails introduced by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, during Thursday’s hearing that were sent by Clinton to her daughter and the Egyptian prime minister hours after the Benghazi attack occurred. In the emails, Clinton identified the incident as a “planned attack” by an “al Qaeda-like group” and indicated that she knew it “had nothing to do with the [anti-Islam] film” that she and President Obama publicly blamed it on afterwards.
“If you listen to the people who were in Libya and Benghazi, they were saying not a protest and if you listen to Secretary Clinton’s private conversations, she wasn’t talking about a protest or a video. It was only in public when it came time to talk to the American people that we heard this spun up story about a video,” Gowdy said.
“She told the foreign leader that it had nothing to do with a video so there’s this dichotomy between what we tell the American people versus what we tell folks in private,” he added.
Gowdy also said Clinton, who’s previously testified before House and Senate committees on Benghazi in January 2013, was “a good witness” and delivered a “certain level of candidness … on some responses.”
However, in an impromptu press conference following the hearing Thursday, Gowdy told reporters that in terms of Clinton’s testimony, “I don’t know that she testified that much differently today than she has the previous times she testified.”
