23 October 2015 - Hillary Rodham Clinton at the Benghazi Hearing

At Benghazi Hearing, Shouting Match Over Hillary Clinton’s Emails
Michael D. Shear and Michael S. Schmidt (The New York Times)
Republican lawmakers spent more than eight hours aggressively questioning Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday, seeking to build a case that the former secretary of state had been derelict in her duty to secure the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, in the months before the 2012 terrorist attacks that killed four Americans.
Billed by Republican leaders of the select House committee investigating the Benghazi attacks as a critical moment in its inquiry, the long-awaited appearance by Mrs. Clinton, the leading Democratic presidential candidate, served largely as a replay of highly contested arguments from previous congressional hearings, press examinations and Sunday-morning talk shows.
“Why were there so many requests for security equipment and personnel, and why were those requests denied in Washington?” Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, the committee chairman, demanded to know as he opened the hearing on Thursday morning. “What did our leaders in Washington do or not do, and when?”
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Marathon Benghazi hearing leaves Hillary Clinton largely unscathed
Stephen Collinson (CNN)
Hillary Clinton avoided major damage to her presidential campaign during a nearly 11-hour congressional hearing Thursday dominated by Republican criticism of her response to the Benghazi attacks.
Bitter political undercurrents festered all day during a contentious showdown that turned into a political endurance test. After a day-long grilling on the details of the attack and how Clinton handled it, the former secretary of state was forced to defend her use of a private email account while in office from a flurry of late evening attacks by GOP lawmakers.
She also came under testy cross-examination over the extent to which she has taken responsibility for the deaths of the Americans in the September 11, 2012, attacks and her contact with U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, one of the victims, after sending him to the North African country.
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Hillary Clinton exposed the Benghazi boondoggle, but masked the real scandal
Trevor Timm and Megan Carpentier (The Gurdian)
The House Benghazi committee has always been of niche interest to anyone outside the Beltway and the conservative movement; that they managed to dig up anything (Hillary Clinton’s private email server) to fit into the well-worn the-Clintons-aren’t-trustworthy narrative is not surprising those of us who remember Whitewater and Travelgate. Using an ostensible investigation into some screwed-up situation to pry open the Clintons’ lives and find something only vaguely related with which to try to hurt them politically is literally part of the US history books (which is why I think that it’s so stupid for Hillary Clinton to give them anything with which to work).
The surprising thing, I think, is how effectively she’s navigating the questioning: there’s no mention of the “vast rightwing conspiracy” from the impeachment days; she seemed all but perfectly willing to let the Democrats on the committee do the work of making the case that this is a partisan fishing expedition, and she even managed to make a lot of the questioners look petty and focused on her instead of what they ought to be investigating. Her emotions only seemed to get the better of her when she was talking about the death of her friend (and trying not to smirk as committee chairman Trey Gowdy and ranking member Elijah Cummings sparred over the latter’s efforts to release transcripts of Sidney Blumenthal’s interview with the committee). Clinton treated the questioning seriously, but treated some of the questioners like benighted children ... and it worked.
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