Squandered questions

WASHINGTON—A newfound energy surged through former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in late October after she appeared before a congressional panel investigating the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans.

“How about those 11 hours of testimony yesterday?” a gleeful Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe said as he introduced Clinton at an Alexandria rally. “This is why she needs to be our commander in chief!”

Republicans on the House Select Committee on Benghazi had billed Clinton as a key witness: They blasted the State Department–commissioned Accountability Review Board for not making her a central part of its probe and said the 5½ hours she spent testifying in previous Benghazi hearings were insufficient. But rather than explore critical questions that could have broken new ground, Republicans spent most of their time reviewing old ground and bickering with Democrats.

No one asked about the former Clinton aide who, in September, invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to testify (see “Looking for Mr. Butterfield,” in this issue); or what murdered Ambassador Christopher Stevens may have discussed with Turkey’s Consul General Ali Sait Akin in a meeting shortly before the attack; or about disciplined State Department official Raymond Maxwell, who says he was scapegoated after discovering Clinton’s top aides purging sensitive documents.

“There was so much more they could have asked,” said former CIA officer Clare Lopez, who is a member of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi, a group of former military and intelligence personnel independently investigating the attack: “It just kind of meandered all over the place.”

Lopez said the committee should have asked Clinton why the administration decided to overthrow former Libyan leader and ally Muammar Qaddafi, back jihadi militias, and then facilitate the delivery of weapons to some of those groups. She said lawmakers were armed with detailed questions but didn’t use them.

Although many hailed the hearing as a Clinton victory, it did include devastating admissions. Clinton, after playing a key role in the 2011 decision to topple Qaddafi, made no apologies for ignoring Libya amid chaos the next year. More than 600 Benghazi security requests went to underlings, but none reached her desk. She doesn’t remember if she spoke with Stevens—whom she called a friend—after his May swearing-in, but she knows he didn’t have her email address or cell number. During that time, though, she reviewed more than 150 reports from Sid Blumenthal, a Clinton Foundation employee the Obama administration barred from working at the State Department.

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, accused Clinton of originating the story that Benghazi was the result of a spontaneous protest over an obscure YouTube video—an accusation she never denied. Clinton accurately described the assault in a 2012 call to the Egyptian prime minister: “We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack—not a protest.”

Yet four days later Susan Rice, former ambassador to the United Nations, peddled the YouTube video narrative on five Sunday talk shows, while Clinton did the same to families receiving the bodies of their loved ones at Andrews Air Force Base.

“She lied,” Patricia Smith, mother of slain foreign service officer Sean Smith, said after the hearing. “She told me at the casket ceremony, when they brought the caskets in, that it was the fault of the video, and yet everybody knows it wasn’t the fault of the video—then, now, or ever.”

Smith wants to know who, if not Clinton, was responsible for ignoring security requests, for telling the CIA station chief in Benghazi to hold back rescuers, and for deciding there wasn’t time to launch an air rescue: “All the questions I wanted answered didn’t come up.”

The committee may answer at least one of Smith’s questions: It is reportedly investigating Patrick Kennedy, a high-ranking State Department official lawmakers believe is responsible for the Benghazi compound’s porous security.