Monday night, it was revealed that Hillary Clinton used a personal email account the entire time she served as secretary of state. Not only does conducting official business with a private account violate federal law, it raises a host of concerns ranging from whether or not her communications were secure from foreign intelligence services, to whether we’ll be able to piece together an accurate historical record. Given Hillary Clinton’s legal troubles in the 1990s relating to keeping track of documents, it seems implausible she was not aware of the illegality of what was going on.
But one aspect of this story that deserves special focus is what this revelation about the former secretary of state’s peculiar email habits tell us about how thorough the investigations of Benghazi have been to date. Indeed, the notion that investigators did not have access to Hillary Clinton’s email would suggest that investigators lacked crucial information. And yet, the media largely bought the spin from Clinton’s camp and the White House that GOP investigations into Benghazi had crossed into overreach. Journalists even propagated a cutesy social media gimmick to make this point.
However, the media’s obvious desire to attack the credibility of the GOP Benghazi inquiries has always been far from justified. When the House Intelligence Comittee released a report last November the media eagerly spun the report as the GOP “debunking a series of persistent allegations hinting at dark conspiracies.” Granted, there are a fair number of questions regarding the competence of the congressional Republicans’ investigations into Benghazi. But it’s also true that the media misread the report badly, and did not dwell on the fact that report completely discredited the New York Times’ faulty claim that “no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault.” Unsurprisingly, the media did not dwell on their own failures and continued to cover Benghazi as domestic partisan debate rather than take responsibility for ascertaining how four Americans, including an ambassador, died in a terror attack and whether or not there was any political cover-up.
While the New York Times deserves credit for breaking the story that Hillary Clinton was illegally using private email for official business, its report notes, “The existence of Mrs. Clinton’s personal email account was discovered by a House committee investigating the attack on the American Consulate in Benghazi as it sought correspondence between Mrs. Clinton and her aides about the attack.” As CNN’s Dan Merica put it, “GOP aides on the Benghazi committee have long said they were going to find something others hadn’t. And they did.”
Now the question is, what else about Benghazi do we not know? The Times report also includes this remarkable detail: “It was only two months ago, in response to a new State Department effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices, that Mrs. Clinton’s advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal emails and decided which ones to turn over to the State Department.” In other words, Hillary Clinton was allowed to decide which of her emails she would turn over to the State Department. It seems very unlikely that any of those emails would happen to provide evidence of any incriminating behavior.
At the State Department, shielding Hillary Clinton from Benghazi scrutiny has been standard operating procedure since the beginning. In her most recent book, Hard Choices, Clinton presented the findings of the State Department’s Administrative Review Board (ARB) as central to her defense of her conduct regarding Benghazi. And should Benghazi come up again in, say, a presidential campaign, it seems likely that Clinton would also point to the ARB for exoneration. So then, it’s worth pointing out again that the ARB was deeply, deeply flawed. In September of 2013, THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s Steve Hayes reported several disturbing revelations about the ARB, including the following:
*Cheryl Mills, the chief of staff and senior counselor to Secretary Clinton, was intimately involved with the ARB panel from the beginning. She called the leaders at Clinton’s behest to ask them to serve, she was briefed regularly on the investigation as it unfolded and she received a draft copy of the report before it was finalized.
*Several senior Clinton advisers were provided draft copies of the ARB report before it was released to the public.
*The chairman of the panel acknowledged at least one instance in which language in the report was softened after an early draft was sent to Clinton and her top aides. “The draft, as I believe it went to her, said the security posture was grossly inadequate for Benghazi, period. And we made the editorial correction recognizing that there was certainly a very real point that ‘grossly’ was probably not applicable to Benghazi in light of the changes that the State Department had made, but it was clearly applicable to dealing with the specific circumstances of the attack.”
*The ARB did not speak with nine key military officials on the ground in Libya or Germany who were deeply involved in the US response to the attacks. Among those who was never interviewed: Lt. Colonel Steven Gibson, who was on the ground in Tripoli and whom State Department official Greg Hicks has testified was on the receiving end of the “stand-down” order that Obama officials have repeatedly disclaimed.
*Although the ARB did not interview Secretary Clinton as part of its investigation, they provided her with a two-hour briefing about the details of the report before it was finalized and released to the public.
*The board did not interview either Cheryl Mills or Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Nides, another close adviser to Clinton.
*None of the interviews the ARB conducted were recorded in any fashion – no audio, no video, no court reporter.
*The ARB did not investigate the Obama administration’s public response to the attack or the role that senior State Department officials played in shaping that narrative.
And now that we know Hillary Clinton was using a private email account, Hayes notes it prompts another crucial question about the ARB:
Did #Benghazi Administrative Review Board have access to any emails to/from Sec Clinton? Were they requested? The ARB never interviewed her.
— Stephen Hayes (@stephenfhayes) March 3, 2015
Also worth noting is the fact that ARB was required by statute to keep and segregate any materials relevant to its investigation. As of a couple weeks ago, they were refusing to share them with the House Select Committee on Benghazi. (THE WEEKLY STANDARD has emailed House Select Committee on Benghazi to confirm if the State Department is still withholding pertinent materials and has yet to hear back.) This is indefensible given that the State Department has shown little desire to do a thorough investigation. And after the GOP-led committee has unearthed such a huge blind spot in the results of previous Benghazi investigations, it’s time to stop downplaying Republican investigative efforts. The American people deserve a full accounting of what happened in Benghazi. It’s more obvious than ever that there’s much we may not know, in no small part because Hillary Clinton and the State Department have thrown up considerable roadblocks to getting at the truth.
