Hillary Clinton will face questions about her contacts and priorities before, during and after the 2012 terror attack in Benghazi during a highly-anticipated hearing Thursday before the panel tasked with investigating the attack.
Led by Chairman Trey Gowdy, the House Select Committee on Benghazi is under enormous pressure to demonstrate its objectivity as Democrats on and off the panel escalate calls to end the investigation altogether.
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Gowdy has said he will ask Clinton why informal advice about Libya from Sidney Blumenthal, her longtime confidante, rose to the level of her State Department office but requests for more security from diplomats on the ground in the country did not.
Democrats have repeatedly pointed out that Clinton herself did not dismiss security requests from Amb. Chris Stevens, who was killed in the Sept. 11, 2012 attack.
“What I want to know is, while violence was going up in Libya, why was our security profile going down? It wasn’t even staying the same, it was going down,” Gowdy said Sunday during an appearance on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
“And in the past, John, she has said, ‘Well, I had people and processes in place to handle that.’ Well, you also had people and processes in place to handle drivel from a guy named Sidney Blumenthal, but that made it to your inbox. I want to know why certain things made it to your inbox, Madame Secretary, but the plaintive pleadings of our own ambassador that you put in place for more security never bothered to make it to your inbox. I think that’s a fair question,” Gowdy added, addressing host John Dickerson.
Rep. Mike Pompeo, a fellow Republican member of the committee, said Tuesday the panel would likely ask questions about how officials handled news of the raid on the night of Sept. 11.
“I expect we’ll have many questions about all of the U.S. government’s response post-incident — that is, after the first news of the attack on the compound reached our government officials in Tripoli and then in Washington, D.C.,” Pompeo said during an appearance on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom.”
“I expect we’ll have many questions about who acted, who spoke and why it was the case that the response was insufficient to address the needs of the men on the ground,” he added.
Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan said he expects his committee’s questions to fall into four categories: what happened before the attack, during it, and after, as well as Clinton’s private email server.
Clinton has tried to discredit the Benghazi investigation by noting that seven other congressional committees have looked into the attack, but the select committee is the first to have uncovered official emails related to Benghazi that were shielded on Clinton’s personal email network.
Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democratic committee member, told Reuters he and his fellow minority members would consider stepping down from the panel after Clinton’s testimony, but that they would work Thursday to ensure Clinton was treated fairly.
In dozens of previous interviews, committee Democrats have asked the same set of questions all witnesses.
Some of those questions related to whether Clinton ordered the military to stand down rather than intervene in an attempt to rescue the ambassador.
