Republicans hoped Thursday would be Hillary Clinton’s day of reckoning, but after 11 hours of questioning from the GOP-led House Benghazi Select Committee, journalists and commentators on the right are largely in agreement that the Democratic presidential candidate made it out relatively unharmed.
Months ago, the hearing was supposed to be the climax of years worth of investigations into the 2012 attack on an American consulate in Libya, which resulted in the death of four Americans. It was meant to be the ultimate opening for Republicans to find evidence of negligence by the former secretary of state.
But in the days leading up to it, expectations fell flat. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy had suggested in a Fox News interview that the committee was created to do political damage to Clinton, rather than to get to the bottom of why there wasn’t sufficient security when the compound fell under attack.
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The actual hearing elicited little of anything new, as stated by the committee chairman, Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy. “I don’t know that she testified that much differently today than she has the previous time she testified,” Gowdy said after the grilling was over, referring to a previous testimony from Clinton on Benghazi in 2013.
Conservatives in the political media agreed.
“The hearings are a waste of time because everything about it is politicized and nothing is going to happen,” wrote conservative radio host and blogger Erick Erickson. “There will be no scalp collection … Most of the rest of the committee just wants to grandstand for the folks back home as either prosecutors of or defenders of Hillary Clinton.”
Republicans spent much of the hearing questioning Clinton on emails she had received during her tenure at the State Department from her friend Sidney Blumenthal. He had emailed Clinton regularly and offered advice on matters in Libya. Republicans pointed out that no emails appeared to have come from Libya Ambassador Chris Stevens, who died in the attack.
But that point didn’t seem to resonate for conservative pundits.
“The fact that Sid had the email address and the ambassador didn’t is a point but it’s a very minor point,” conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer said Thursday on Fox News. “It’s not going to persuade anybody.” He said that Gowdy “wasted a lot of his valuable time” on the issue.
In The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan wrote, “She suffered through and survived, and will soon be saying what she wanted to say: I took any and all questions, there is nothing to add, the issue has been addressed. Next.”
Friday On MSNBC, former GOP congressman Joe Scarborough, host of “Morning Joe,” said Clinton’s performance was a “TKO.” “It wasn’t even close,” he said.
Even so, cable news had fixated on the hearing from the moment they started around 10 a.m. CNN and MSNBC aired it from start to finish at 9 p.m. But, maybe sensing that there really wasn’t much to see after all, Fox News had cut away to resume normal programming at 5 p.m.
