Whoa, before the campaign caravan moves on: Did you see what happened?
We’ve spent the week digesting news media autopsies of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 11 hours before a U.S. House committee investigating the raid on American compounds in the Libyan port city of Benghazi. By most accounts Thursday’s hearing was a bastardized baseball game — the mound crowded with hurlers pitching wildly, and a lone batter adroitly swatting everything they threw at her.
To a point, that’s spot-on: Chairman Trey Gowdy of South Carolina focused on the murders of Ambassador Chris Stevens, foreign service officer Sean Smith and CIA contractors Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods. But too often his Republican colleagues descended into frantic sneering. On demeanor, style and effectiveness, Clinton won the ballgame.
But that’s just part of the story. Only one person in that hearing room wants to be president of the United States. And as the day lengthened, Americans watching for more than impressive theatrics peered through a new window into her trustworthiness. As a result, events arguably shaped by the presidential campaign of 2012 are shaping the presidential campaign of 2016.
The Benghazi probe is unveiling records that don’t flatter Clinton or her State Department. Recall the context:
On Sept. 6, 2012, President Barack Obama told the Democratic National Convention: “A new tower rises above the New York skyline, al-Qaida is on the path to defeat, and Osama bin Laden is dead.” Five nights later, attackers hit the outposts in Benghazi. Had an administration that boasted of quelling terrorism left the four Americans vulnerable to terrorists on the anniversary of 9/11?
About 10 p.m. that night, Clinton issued a statement that said in part, “Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior, along with the protest that took place at our Embassy in Cairo yesterday, as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet.”
But on Thursday we learned that, at 11:12 p.m., Clinton emailed her daughter, Chelsea: “Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an Al Qaeda-like group.” No hateful video, no protest. On Sept. 12 Clinton revealed more. According to State Department notes, she told Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Kandil, “We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack — not a protest. … Based on the information we saw today we believe the group that claimed responsibility for this was affiliated with Al Qaeda.”
Yet on Sept. 14, when the four flag-draped coffins returned to Joint Base Andrews, Clinton said at the Transfer of Remains Ceremony: “We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with. It is hard for the American people to make sense of that because it is senseless, and it is totally unacceptable.” Tyrone Woods’ father, Charles, who took notes, says Clinton said to him, “We are going to have the filmmaker arrested who was responsible for the death of your son.”
Did Clinton convey her knowledge of “a planned attack — not a protest” to her confidante Susan Rice, then the U.S. ambassador to the U.N.? Hard to know. In several TV appearances on Sept. 16, Rice blamed the Benghazi assault on the video. Obama, too, went uncorrected publicly by Clinton after he told a Sept. 20 forum hosted by Univision: “What we do know is that the natural protests that arose because of the outrage over the video were used as an excuse by extremists. … ” In a Sept. 25 speech at the U.N., Obama cited the video six times.
For a solid two weeks, then, the administration emphasized a narrative that, apart from questions of accuracy, offered shelter from pre-election criticism.
Pressed Thursday on her conflicting public and private statements, Clinton blamed early confusion. Maybe so, although for three years she hadn’t volunteered that she was saying different things to different people about such a deadly, embarrassing event, let alone why.
The hearing should silence complaints that because other committees explored Benghazi, this investigation can reveal nothing new. The committee has interviewed some 55 witnesses and will question 20 others by year’s end. The committee and its staff have been relatively quiet about their findings, which will come in a written report.
All of us can see in this probe that patience yields fresh findings. So does a long campaign. Americans complain about these multiyear marathons. But the longer the cycle, the more we learn.
Yes, this is a new window into a candidate’s honesty but perhaps not the last, most revealing window. Maybe Clinton now will explain to voters why, with her Benghazi outpost in cinders and her ambassador dead, she didn’t publicly acknowledge a terror attack — and why she let Rice and Obama speak mistakenly.
With more witnesses to testify and many more emails from Clinton’s private server to become public, no one knows whether more revelations — exculpatory or damning — await discovery.
We do, though, know why those witnesses will speak and why we even know about Clinton’s emails such as the startling one to her daughter: because this House committee has been digging where earlier investigators didn’t bother to look.
— The Chicago Tribune
