‘There are many questions that are unanswered,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) clucked at Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, during Wednesday’s Foreign Relations Committee hearing into the Benghazi attacks. “And the answers, frankly, that you’ve given this morning are not satisfactory to me.”
McCain’s rebuke made the evening newscasts. But his larger imperatives — like getting to the bottom of Benghazi, or holding Clinton accountable — went unmet. And McCain himself was part of the problem.
In his allotted five minutes, he spoke 853 words — longer than this column — and posed eight questions. Clinton, an astute former lawyer with long experience as a witness, blithely ignored them. “We just have a disagreement,” she said, somewhere among her 387 words.
The encounter, like Clinton’s more voluble but equally uninformative exchange with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) — immortalized by the now-infamous line, “What difference at this point does it make?” — exemplified the enduring problem with congressional hearings as investigative enterprises.
Democrats sought only to protect Clinton, burnishing her legacy as America’s top diplomat — and her prospects for 2016. Republicans, committed to a more accurate account of Benghazi but averse to homework, sat naked in their ignorance of the episode’s critical details. They never mastered the months of prelude, where security at the consulate was almost systematically degraded; the attacks’ seven hours of hostilities, and the missed opportunities for armed intervention or rescue — nor the administration’s eight days of mischaracterization after the attacks.
Compounding things was the lawmakers’ unfamiliarity with the precepts of cross-examination, first among them: Pose one intelligible question at a time.
Such hearings are properly conducted like depositions. Only Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a graduate of the University of Miami law school, seemed to grasp this. His first question was admirably pointed: “Were you ever asked to participate in any sort of internal or interagency meeting with — before this attack — with regard to the deteriorating security situation in Libya?” “There were,” replied Clinton, the artful dodger, “a number of conversations and meetings.”
An astute and well-versed interrogator could have made Clinton squirm — and added considerably to our sum of knowledge about Benghazi. She might have been asked: Was an autopsy ever performed upon Ambassador Stevens? What was the finding as to cause of death? Did the autopsy find evidence of physical abuse, either pre- or post-mortem? And: Did you ever take any actions or give any instructions designed to withhold information about Benghazi from other US officials?
As it happened, the hearings yielded one sworn statement by Clinton that appeared, prima facie, to be false. The subject was UN Ambassador Susan Rice’s ill-fated Sept. 16 Sunday-show tour, when she maintained — on the basis of talking points prepared by the intelligence community, or “IC” — that there was no evidence the attacks were preplanned, a claim the White House soon abandoned as “self-evidently” untrue.
“I certainly did not know of any reports that contradicted the IC talking points, at the time that Ambassador Rice went on the TV shows,” Clinton told the Senate.
Yet internal State Department e-mails, published by Fox News in October, show that by 6:07 pm on Sept. 11, some 350 officials — on the National Security Council, in the Situation Room, at the Pentagon and FBI — were apprised that the terrorist group Ansar al-Sharia had claimed responsibility for the killings. Could a report so widely circulated within the national-security apparatus, five days before Rice’s media tour, have been withheld from the secretary of state?
But perjury probes are not in the offing. With GOP calls for a special investigative body quashed by November’s election results, only the FBI is left investigating Benghazi — and its focus is understandably trained solely on the perpetrators.
So America’s most-traveled secretary of state will likely be permitted to rack up more miles, and accrue more points, along any flight path she chooses.
James Rosen is chief Washington correspondent for Fox News and author of “The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate.”