She Botched It
What we’ve learned about Hillary Clinton’s performance at the State Department
NOV 9, 2015, VOL. 21, NO. 09 • BY JAY COST
weeklystandard.com
The mainstream media, liberal pundits, and even some conservative analysts gave Hillary Clinton high marks for her performance at the October 22 hearing of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, and they scored congressional Republicans negatively. The day was widely deemed a huge win for Clinton and a crucial moment in turning her campaign around.
OH, MY ACHING MEMORY
MELINA MARA / THE WASHINGTON POST / GETTY
Certainly, Clinton won a solid victory in the news cycle. And squaring off against House Republicans will boost her among Democratic primary voters, who revile the congressional GOP. Combine that with Joe Biden’s decision not to run for president and Clinton’s steady performance in the Democratic debate, and it is an easy bet that her poll numbers will rise.
But to leave matters there would be to miss the forest for the trees. A careful look at the transcript of the hearing strongly suggests that as secretary of state Clinton BADLY BOTCHED the Libya conflict. Moreover, at the hearing she significantly undermined her previous statements about her private email server.
Clinton is running for president as a sagacious and trustworthy steward of the national interest. Yet the Benghazi hearing revealed that some of her decisions were irresponsible, and her handling of her email records has been OUTRIGHT DISHONEST.
Going into the hearing, the media anticipated a debate between Republican members of the committee and Clinton, to be scored as a forensic contest. So did Clinton, and she played to the media’s expectations. So did the Democrats on the panel (with the exception of Tammy Duckworth, who emphasized policy reforms).
Most conservative commentators focused on Clinton’s exchanges with congressman Jim Jordan, about the Obama administration’s shifting accounts of the cause of the attack on the American facilities in Benghazi on the night of September 11, 2012. Jordan produced an email Clinton sent to her daughter Chelsea around 11 p.m. the night of the attack that identified the attackers as “an Al Qaeda-like group.” This was shortly after Clinton had suggested in a first-person statement released by the State Department that a YouTube video had been the cause.
The point was important. It provided further evidence that the administration’s public spin of the Benghazi attack was knowing and deliberate—as it would be, two months before an election, with the president campaigning on the claim that al Qaeda was “on the run.” Even so, exclusive focus on the email to Chelsea actually understates the scope of the Republicans’ case and overlooks data they proffered to support their argument.
The GOP’s contention is that Clinton cared about Libya mostly for political reasons. She was eager to take credit for the perceived victory when longtime dictator Muammar Qaddafi was toppled by rebels, with NATO air support, in August 2011. She had little interest, however, in managing the tasks assigned to the State Department in connection with the post-Qaddafi transition, though she did keep open a back channel on that country with her old political associate Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime confidant at the time employed by the Clinton Foundation. Not all of the Republicans’ assertions rang true, but the questioners did marshal an impressive array of data points to suggest that Clinton should have been more interested in the policy, and less in the U.S. domestic political value, of the intervention in Libya.
Peter Roskam led the questioning for the GOP. He presented evidence that Clinton was the principal Obama official championing U.S. participation in the Libya intervention. Roskam indicated that Clinton overcame objections from domestic officials as well as foreign governments. He also showed how interested Clinton was in receiving public credit. He mentioned a memo from her adviser Jake Sullivan written in August 2011 that applauded her “leadership on Libya,” where she provided “a critical voice” and became “the public face of the U.S. effort.” Two months later, that memo was the basis for a glowing report in the Washington Post. Roskam also cited an email from Clinton herself suggesting that she fly to Martha’s Vineyard after the Qaddafi regime fell to appear with President Obama.
Politicians naturally like to take credit for any positive development, so this alone is hardly grounds for criticism. But it sets the stage for the line of questioning pursued mainly by Susan Brooks, Martha Roby, Mike Pompeo, and Lynn Westmoreland: that Clinton lost interest in Libya after Qaddafi fell and did not react appropriately to copious warnings that the security situation in that country was deteriorating badly.
Brooks produced the most striking illustration of Clinton’s lack of interest. She showed a stack of 795 Clinton emails about Libya from February 2011 through December 2011 and compared it with the paltry 67 Clinton emails in 2012. “In this pile in 2011, I see daily updates, sometimes .??.??. hourly updates from your staff about Benghazi and [U.S. representative in Libya] Chris Stevens. When I look at this pile in 2012, I only see a handful of emails to you from your senior staff about Benghazi.”
Clinton responded:
Well, Congresswoman, I did not conduct most of the business that I did on behalf of our country on email. I conducted it in meetings. I read massive amounts of memos, a great deal of classified information. I made a lot of secure phone calls. I was in and out of the White House all the time. There were a lot of things that happened that I was aware of and that I was reacting to.
This is, of course, true—but it would have been equally true in 2011 and in 2012. Why the drop-off? The emails are not meant to be a definitive, comprehensive account of the secretary’s actions on Libya, only a metric to gauge her overall level of involvement. And a reasonable one at that: If Clinton’s email correspondence on Libya fell so precipitously in 2012, does it not stand to reason that her attention to the matter did, too?
Roby pushed this point, citing an email between State Department staffers on the Libya desk suggesting Clinton’s lack of interest in February 2012: “The secretary also asked last week if we still have a presence in Benghazi. I think she would be upset to hear, yes, we do. But because we don’t have enough security, they are on lockdown.” Clinton said she could not comment on what any staffer heard or misheard, which is also true. But that’s a second ad hoc assertion to defend her level of involvement: Her email correspondence doesn’t reflect her overall work effort, and this State Department staffer misunderstood.
There was a third ad hoc explanation from Clinton, offered at the end of the hearing. Brooks asked: “Did you ever personally speak to Ambassador Stevens after .??.??. you swore him in in May [2012]?” Clinton answered yes, she had, although she could not recall when. Her memory is not the only thing lacking on this matter, for as Brooks noted: “There are no call logs with him. There’s nothing from the ops center with him that we have found. We have no record that you had any conversations with the ambassador after you swore him in and before he died, and you were his boss.”
Maybe Clinton did remain interested in Libya, and the emails are an inaccurate measure of her true involvement, that staffer misheard her, and her conversation with Stevens simply did not make it into the copious record. But these three independent facts all point in the same direction: After Qaddafi was toppled, she lost interest.
The context for this apparent lack of interest is important. Westmoreland and Pompeo provided it. Westmoreland pointed out that there were 20 security breaches at the Benghazi facility before the fatal attack (though Clinton said she knew of only 2). Pompeo noted the rapid increase in the frequency of requests for additional security for Benghazi through 2012 leading up to September 11. Yet the documentary evidence suggests that Clinton remained unengaged, the security of the facility remained inadequate, and none of the many requests reached her desk.
Clinton’s catchall answer was that the security experts made these decisions, and anyway Stevens never asked for the facility in Benghazi to be closed. As she told Westmoreland:
But, you know, we have a process, and the experts, who I have the greatest confidence in, and who had been through so many difficult positions, because practically all of them had rotated through Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, other places—they were the ones making the assessment. The Republicans pushed back on this rejoinder in two ways, and Clinton did not have a good answer for either. First, they provided evidence that Clinton should have been more involved. Second, they showed that she was quite prepared to be involved when the messages came from Blumenthal.
Pompeo produced a recommendation from the 1998 Accountability Review Boards after suicide bombers attacked two U.S. embassies in Africa, killing hundreds: “The Secretary of State should personally review the security situation of Embassy Chanceries and other official premises, closing those which are highly vulnerable and threatened.” Roby noted that memos Clinton received from August 2012 showed the security in Libya deteriorating and the country in chaos. One would think the secretary would have initiated the personal review urged by the Accountability Review Boards. Instead, she left the responsibility entirely to lower-level officials.
It is striking to juxtapose her hands-off approach to security with her voluminous correspondence with Blumenthal. According to committee chairman Trey Gowdy, Blumenthal was her “most prolific emailer that we have found on the subjects of Libya and Benghazi.” Whereas none of the requests for additional security got through to her, Blumenthal passed along whatever he liked.
There were, in effect, two different processes at the State Department regarding Libya: the official process, where the security needs of the facility were not met and Clinton never got involved, even as security became precarious; and a back channel for an old pal. Gowdy noted that Stevens was even asked to “read and respond to Sidney Blumenthal’s drivel .??.??. in some instances on the very same day [Stevens] was asking for security.”
Together, these two points undermined Clinton’s insistence that she did not have a personal role to play in reviewing security arrangements.As Gowdy put it: “How did you decide when to invoke ‘a people and process’ and who just got to come straight to you? Because it looked like certain things got straight to your inbox, and the request for more security did not.” Clinton had no persuasive answer.
All told, the Republicans’ argument that Clinton badly mishandled Libya is strong. They produced compelling evidence that she spearheaded U.S. military involvement, but then lost interest, outsourcing decision-making to State Department staffers, even while attending to a crony who was not an expert on Libya but interested in the situation there.
Even the claim that Clinton won on style requires overlooking the callous note she struck in the middle of the hearing. At one point, Brooks queried Clinton about an email from Stevens to a reporting officer in Benghazi in December 2011 in which he asked “what you guys decided to do regarding future of the compound.” By then Libya’s temporary government, the National Transitional Council, had moved from Benghazi to Tripoli, where the American embassy had been reopened. At the time, other governments were moving their missions out of Benghazi, and there had been talk of winding down the American mission. Yet Stevens—who had served as U.S. representative to the National Transitional Council from March to November 2011 and would be sworn in as ambassador to Libya in May 2012—did not know what was planned for the Benghazi mission. Brooks asked:
[Stevens] was in Washington, D.C., or back in the States during that time, and in December Ambassador Stevens, your soon-to-be ambassador, didn’t know what was going to happen with the compound in Benghazi. How is that possible?
It is a sensible question. And given the evidence presented at the hearing, it is fair to wonder if the real answer is: Nobody at State told Stevens because nobody had made a decision, because senior officials, above all Clinton, were no longer thinking carefully about Libya.
Clinton offered a jarring response:
Well, Congresswoman, one of the great attributes that Chris Stevens had was a really good sense of humor. And I just see him smiling as he’s typing this. Because it is clearly in response to the email down below talking about picking up a few, quote, “fire-sale items” from the Brits. This comment comes out of nowhere. Why mention Stevens’s sense of humor in response to a serious question about the future of the mission? Clinton was trying to sell us on the idea that she had a certain intimacy with Stevens—even though Brooks would go on to establish there was no record of any conversation between Clinton and Stevens after he became ambassador. Seemingly taken aback, Brooks noted that the fire sale actually referred to barricades the British were selling at cut-rate prices because they and “other countries [were] pulling out” of Benghazi, and American diplomats were looking to buy “because we weren’t providing enough physical security for the compound.”
Clinton responded: “Well, I thought it showed their entrepreneurial spirit, Congresswoman. .??.??. I applaud them for doing so.” Given that over the next year Clinton’s State Department would fail to provide sufficient security for the compound, this was a cold-blooded statement. It also sidestepped Brooks’s question, a tacit admission that the Republicans have figured out that Libya policy was an unmitigated disaster in part because the secretary stopped paying attention to it.
Given the prominent coverage of Clinton’s email server in recent months, it was perhaps surprising that the House Republicans did not focus more intently on it. That line of questioning was left mostly to Gowdy, and it produced two important pieces of information, both of which undercut Clinton’s previous statements.
In March, Clinton said that 90 to 95 percent of her work-related emails were already on the State Department server. When pressed by Gowdy as to where she obtained that figure, she responded, “We learned that from the State Department and their analysis of the emails that were already on the system.” Gowdy noted that the committee had tried and failed to confirm that figure, and asked Clinton for the name of the person who had provided it. Clinton did not offer a name, and on October 23 Politico reported the reason why: The figure does not come from the State Department. According to department spokesman Mark Toner, “I’m not aware that we have given that figure.”Moreover, per Politico, Jason Baron, former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, is not sure how the State Department could have derived such a figure. “I do not believe State is in the position to give a precise percentage like that because they honestly wouldn’t know how many of the secretary’s emails did, in fact, make their way into an official record-keeping system,” he said.
Gowdy also asked Clinton how she was sure she had done a thorough job of turning over her work-related emails. After all, Blumenthal had turned over emails from Clinton that she herself did not submit. To this, Clinton gave a surprising answer: Blumenthal’s emails were not related to her work. Instead, “They were from a personal friend, not .??.??. any government official. And they were, I determined on the basis of looking at them, what I thought was work-related and what wasn’t.”
Yet in March she gave a very different account of what “work-related” meant to her:
[A]fter I left office, the State Department asked former secretaries of state for our assistance in providing copies of work-related emails from our personal accounts. I responded right away and provided all my emails that could possibly be work-related. .??.??. At the end, I chose not to keep my private personal emails—emails about planning Chelsea’s wedding or my mother’s funeral arrangements, condolence notes to friends as well as yoga routines, family vacations, the other things you typically find in inboxes. So apparently personal emails actually meant yoga routines, vacation plans .??.??. and dispatches from a political associate about a major foreign-policy hot spot?
Taken together, these contradictions demolish Clinton’s claims that she has been transparent with her emails. The truth is that she has not been nearly as forthcoming as she would like the voters to believe.
There is no doubt that Clinton was poised and cool during most of the Benghazi hearing, while Republicans occasionally lost their tempers and sometimes lost the narrative thread. Given the length of the hearing, the casual viewer could be forgiven for missing some substantive points. The media, however, have no excuse. From laziness, partisanship, or both, journalists chose to track only style. Hillary Clinton was always bound to get an A+ from them.
Yet on the merits, the hearing should damage the central claims of Clinton’s presidential candidacy. Time and again the Republicans produced evidence showing that after she declared victory in Libya, Clinton lost interest. On top of that, she manifestly contradicted her past accounts of her email disclosure.
All told, Clinton’s behavior represents some of the worst qualities of modern politicians. Her grandiose calls for regime change in Libya were not properly backed up with thorough work on the unglamorous details such as security for diplomats. She allowed cronyism to rear its ugly head, in the State Department of all places. And when called to account for this, she served up lawyerly statements designed to obfuscate rather than clarify. It is little wonder that, when so many Americans look at Clinton, they see what is wrong with our government.
Americans of all political persuasions should ponder a simple question: Does Clinton’s behavior on Libya and her emails comport with our expectations for the next commander in chief? Anyone who paid close attention to the substance of the Benghazi hearing is bound to answer with a resounding no.
Jay Cost is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard and the author of A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption. |
