2005-03-02

Hillary Clinton / House Benghazi Committee hearing -- 2015-10-22


2015

2015-10-22 Clinton Benghazi Committee testimony


YouTube / Fox News Network video of FULL hearing (11:11:28)

Benghazi Select Committee (Hearing 4) from The Select Committee on Benghazi (5:56:25)
Benghazi Select Committee (Hearing 4 B) from The Select Committee on Benghazi (5:20:43)

Full transcript of the 11 hour hearing, per the Washington Post



2015-10-23-NYT-hillary-clinton-benghazi-committee
Benghazi Panel Engages Clinton in Tense Session
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
Washington Post, 2015-10-23

[The NYT's lead story on Hillary's marathon 2015-10-22 appearance before the House Benghazi committee.]

...

The committee repeatedly cited Mrs. Clinton’s relationship with Mr. Blumenthal
[Sidney Blumenthal, a former aide to her husband and a friend],
who worked in the White House during Bill Clinton’s presidency
but had been barred by the Obama administration
from working for Mrs. Clinton at the State Department.

Well known in Washington but not a household name outside the Beltway,
Mr. Blumenthal in some ways became the surprise star of the lengthy hearing,
his name popping up again and again.

In several instances, Republicans said Mrs. Clinton
had been preoccupied with reading homemade [sic!
The point is: what was Blumenthal's motivation?
The "elite" NYT avoids mentioning his business interest.]

intelligence memos from Mr. Blumenthal
instead of worrying about security at the outpost.
The Republicans said that it made no sense
that Mr. Blumenthal had unfettered access to Mrs. Clinton,
yet Mr. Stevens did not have her email address.

Republicans also suggested that Mrs. Clinton had ignored requests by Americans in Benghazi for more security.
Representative Mike Pompeo of Kansas asked Mrs. Clinton why she had not responded to more than 600 requests for security from State Department employees in Benghazi even though she often responded to Mr. Blumenthal.

“The folks that worked for you didn’t have the same courtesy,” Mr. Pompeo said.

Mrs. Clinton responded that Mr. Blumenthal was “a friend of mine,” but that it had been proper to leave questions about the provision of security in Benghazi to the State Department officials who regularly handled security issues.

Mr. Gowdy pressed Mrs. Clinton on why requests to get supplies to Libyans made their way to her, yet emails requesting more security from Mr. Stevens never reached her inbox. Mrs. Clinton repeatedly told Mr. Gowdy that Mr. Stevens had communicated with her staff, including a senior policy aide, Jake Sullivan, and security personnel in the State Department.

“He did not raise security with the members of my staff,” she said. “He raised security with the security professionals.”

...

2015-10-22-HP-hillary-clinton-benghazi-victims
Sister Of Benghazi Victim:
Hillary Clinton's Marathon Hearing Failed To Provide 'Real Answers'

by Marina Fang
Huffington Post, 2015-10-22

Relatives of the four Americans killed in the 2012 Benghazi, Libya, attack had hoped
Thursday's 11 hours of questioning of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton
by members of the House Benghazi committee
would shed light on the violence.

But Kate Quigley, whose brother, Glen Doherty,
was killed in the attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound,
told CNN's Anderson Cooper that
"a lot of the real answers that we were looking for
were kind of brushed off" during Clinton's marathon session.

"I thought she did a fairly good job answering some of the questions,"
Quigley said after the hearing concluded.
"As expected, a lot of the real answers that we're looking for
were kind of brushed off or not answered in the detail that we would like,
but in general, it was what I expected it to be."

In her opening statement,
Clinton mourned the deaths of each of the Americans, including Doherty,
a CIA contractor working in Libya.

"I'm here to honor those we lost
and to do what I can to aid those who serve us still,"
she said.

But Quigley criticized Clinton's initial response to the attack.
She said when Clinton met with relatives of the victims,
she expressed regret for Libyan protests against an anti-Islam video,
which at the time was reported to have stirred the attack.
State Department officials later revealed the protests never happened.

"She spoke to my family about
how sad we should feel for the Libyan people
because they are uneducated, and that breeds fear
[sic! The deceit of the "elite" -- an overemphasis on what education can achieve.],
which breeds violence and leads to protest,"
Quigley recalled on Thursday.
She added that she thought "it was very strange" for Clinton to mention that.
"When I think back now to that day and what she knew, you know,
it shows me a lot about her character
that she would choose, in that moment,
to basically perpetuate what she knew was untrue."



2015-10-23-ap-fact-check-dubious-claims-about-benghazi-hillary-clinton-email
AP Fact Check: Dubious claims about Benghazi, Hillary Clinton email
Associated Press, 2015-10-23

[Also available from the Washington Post here.]

WASHINGTON (AP) — More than a few facts got mangled as a showdown between Hillary Rodham Clinton and her Republican questioners turned into an 11-hour slog.

The sole witness in a congressional hearing, Clinton stuck with her insistence that using a personal email account as secretary of state was "allowed" by the government. Republicans gave a distorted picture of what diplomats do, and of their own history of investigating the deadly 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya.

A look at some of the claims in the House hearing Thursday where lawmakers quizzed Clinton, now a Democratic presidential candidate:

CLINTON: About the emails she's turned over, she said: "You know, the State Department had between 90 and 95 percent of all the ones that were work-related. They were already on the system." Later, she added, "We learned that from the State Department."

THE FACTS: It's unclear where that figure comes from, but it doesn't appear that all those emails were saved at State.

Asked about Clinton's claim at Friday's press briefing, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said: "Ninety to 95 percent is something that her campaign has been using. I'm not aware of the source of that."

The Clinton campaign used that same figure in a news release in March, saying that 90 percent of her work-related email, as pulled from the private server she kept in her home, included an addressee with the department's official "state.gov" email address. Clinton repeated that assertion at the hearing to indicate those emails should have been captured and kept by the State Department.

But the State Department didn't have any centralized mechanism for collecting emails or for finding Clinton emails in other employees' government accounts. Clinton's lawyer and former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, acknowledged that in her own testimony recently before the Benghazi committee.

Mills said she would have anticipated that all such emails would be saved in the State system. "I've come to learn that that is not, obviously, the case," she said.

...


2015-10-23-Kelly-excoriates-media
Megyn Kelly Excoriates Media for Declaring Hillary ‘Victorious’ in Benghazi Testimony
Megyn Kelly on
Fox News "The Kelly File", 2015-10-23

Fox News host Megyn Kelly excoriated the media on her program Friday night, blasting journalists from all corners for declaring Hillary Clinton victories after her 11-hour marathon testimony before the House Select Committee on Benghazi.
“The major media outlets have not only ignored the single biggest piece of news to emerge from yesterday’s hearings, they have declared Hillary Clinton victorious,” Kelly told her viewers.
She displayed several headlines from the media to support her argument.
Kelly continued, “This, despite clear-cut evidence she, and other administration officials, repeatedly misled the American people in the days and weeks after the terror attack.”
The Fox News host said evidence brought out during Clinton’s Thursday testimony proved she misled the American people.
“For the first time the public saw an email detailing a conference call detailing a conferee call Hillary Clinton had on September, 12, 2012 with the Egyptian Prime Minister,” she said. “Her words? ‘We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack — not a protest.”
“And yet, to watch most of the media today, you would think we never saw that email,” Kelly concluded. “To the contrary, the messing today was uniformly, ‘She won and it is over, move on!’”

(9:56, published by "LatestNews")


[Isn't it amazing that the MSM seems to be ignoring such issues?
Might interfere with their coronation of Queen Hillary.

The MSM really, really, don't give a shit about pointing out the holes in Clinton's testimony.

Is it not obvious how biased they are
when they crown Hillary as triumphant after the Democratic debate,
after the Benghazi hearing,
without pointing out the deficiencies in her statements?

For example, after the Democratic debate,
many of the media commentators fell all over themselves
to declare Hillary the winner on account of her demeanor:
"She seemed presidential."
But they ignored the on-going problems with the substance of what she was saying and ignoring.]




2015-10-23-Commentary-Rothman-washington-sickness-exposed-benghazi-committee
Washington’s Sickness Exposed
Noah Rothman
Commentary, 2015-10-23

Even by today’s standards of rabid partisanship, the breast-beating threat display from Democrats and members of the press alike to which voters were privy yesterday was something to behold. The message has been clearly received: Republicans, back off from the nest in which Barack Obama’s anointed Democratic successor is incubating.

Media elites raced to confirm the conventional wisdom that Clinton’s more-in-sorrow tone, her theatrical shows of boredom, and her policy knowledge handed her a “win,” as though the verbiage of a petty contest was appropriate to describe an investigation of such objective gravity. The gushing over the beatified Clinton’s poise under pressure has reached levels of hagiography the left once reserved exclusively for Beyoncé Knowles. The number of political reporters who chose in their reaction to the hearing not to distinguish themselves markedly from partisan Democratic communications operatives is too copious to recount fully.
...

Surely, if they say it enough, they’ll hope it becomes its own truth.
And it very well might;
many honest political analysts have evaluated Clinton’s performance as they would a Broadway play.
Her posture, her composure amid withering and extended questioning,
and her general command of the issues was indeed impressive.
The notion, however,
that nothing had been revealed that was previously unknown by the Benghazi committee
is nothing short of a lie.

[Like many other critics,
Rothman goes on to dissect blaming the motivation for the Benghazi attacks
on an anti-Islam YouTube video.
I, personally, do not know enough about what Hillary and the State Department said
to criticize them for what they said.
There was certainly room for initial uncertainty about why the attack was made;
the key issue is how long the Obama administration (Hillary, State, Rice)
kept to the story about the video being the motivation.
Again, I don't know and don't have the time to research
exactly how tenaciously they stuck to that false narrative.
However, I believe Hillary said even in her 2015-10-22 testimony
that she STILL believes the video played a role.
From what I know (I'm no expert, but read some of the reporting)
that view seems indefensible today.]





2015-10-25-Harbaugh-Stevens-Blumenthal
Some comments by the author of this blog about the 2015-10-22 Benghazi committee hearing:

The media seems to have dropped the ball in failing to connect two things Hillary said:

On the one hand, when committee members questioned her about the multiple times that Amb. Stevens asked for things from the State Dept. but was turned down,
she repeatedly said, in effect,
"He never contacted me.
He contacted the appropriate, responsible people in the State Dept. for those issues, not not me."

On the other hand, she indicated, I believe, that while Sid Blumenthal, and apparently many other people, had her personal email address, Amb. Stevens did not.
See, in particular the Q&A with Rep. Westmoreland around the sentence
"I do not believe that he had my personal e-mail"
in the full transcript:

WESTMORELAND: Just to follow up on one thing about Ambassador Stevens. You got a lot of e-mails from Sidney Blumenthal. And you say that Mr. Blumenthal was a friend of yours. And he had your personal e-mail address.

You say Chris Stevens was a friend of yours. He asked numerous of times for extra protection. Now, if I had been Mr. Stevens -- and I think anybody out there -- anybody watching this would agree.

If I had been Mr. Stevens and I had had a relationship with you, and I had requested 20 or more times for additional security to protect not only my life but the people that were there with me, I would have gotten in touch with you some way.

I would have let you know that I was in danger, and that the situation had deteriorated to a point, I needed you to do something. Did he have your personal e-mail?

CLINTON: Congressman, I -- I do not believe that he had my personal e-mail.
He had the e-mail and he had the direct line to everybody that he'd worked with for years. He had been posted...

WESTMORELAND: But not your...

CLINTON: ... with officials in the State Department. They had gone through difficult, challenging, dangerous assignments together. He was in constant contact with people.

Yes, he and the people working for him asked for more security. Some of those requests were approved. Others were not.
...

So the question, to which I do not know the answer,
and would appreciate some responsible people asking her, is:
"If Amb. Stevens did not have your personal email address,
just how could he contact you
without going through the channels through which he had already gone,
and which had already denied his requests?"

My opinion, FWIW, is that the media
refuses to challenge a great number of Hillary's half-truths,
such as this one.
They are unwilling to point out the holes in her arguments,
as they almost unfailingly do for those people whom they do not desire to help.



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