The House Select Committee on Benghazi Thursday asked questions of Hillary Clinton’s former chief of staff for about nine hours, and announced at the end of the day that the testimony of Cheryl Mills would remain classified.
“Ms. Mills answered all the committee’s questions, the dialogue was professional and fact-centric,” Gowdy told reporters after the closed hearing broke up. “The members of the Benghazi Committee on our side are going to treat the conversation as if it were classified.”
Mills was expected to be pressed on everything from Clinton’s reaction to the 2012 Benghazi attack when she led the State Department, to its review of its response, to decisions related to how Clinton managed her own private email system. Those emails, which the State Department has been releasing in redacted form for the last few months, are a key piece of the puzzle for the committee.
Clinton’s camp has said for months that all government-related emails were handed over to State, and that only her private messages were destroyed.
Despite the partisan tensions surrounding Gowdy’s investigation, the top Democrat on the committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., seemed cordial by the end of it.
“I would agree with the chairman that Mills answered every single question,” Cummings said. “We on the minority side gave up a lot of our time because we wanted to make sure that Republican members had plenty of time to ask every single question they had to ask.”
But Cummings again indicated that he and other Democrats would prefer Mills’ testimony to be made public. Cummings hinted that Mills’ testimony favored Clinton, by saying it’s “clear” why Mills wanted to testify in the open.
Mills herself spoke briefly to reporters, and thanked the committee members for their professionalism and “respect” that they showed her.
On Friday, another top Clinton aide, Jake Sullivan, will testify in another closed-door session.
Huma Abedin is also expected to appear before the committee in the coming months.
